It's not the crime, it's the cover-up

Despite the best efforts of LeBron James and Nike, a video of a college player dunking on the "King" was released to the public.

Video

(I removed the embedded version because it begins to play whenever the page is loaded--very annoying)

In LeBron's defense, there was a grassy knoll to the left, just outside of the camera's sight. Several eyewitnesses report a man in a hooded sweatshirt using a snare-trap to restrict BronBron's ability to jump. But the "mainstream media" will never tell you about that.

What's extraordinary about this video is how completely unimpressive it is. We see LeBron coming across the paint late to give a half-hearted challenge to a player in the midst of his leap. I fail to see how this would reflect poorly on James, but somehow it was deemed as being harmful to his carefully crafted image.

The release of the footage was so anticipated precisely because James' camp, which included Nike, went to such links to suppress the story. Had they just let the clip appear on YouTube it would have been mentioned on the endless talking-head sports shows for one day, and no one would ever think about it again. It would have slipped down the memory hole as a funny aberration, like this clip of the Greatest losing a pick-up game to a CEO that paid thousands of dollars to stand on the court next to him:



Obviously a long retired Jordan wasn't going at 100%, and when you play 200 people in a row, odds are one of them will toss up a couple of lucky shots, and everyone understands this.

But LeBron (or Nike) turned his unremarkable video into an event by sending people around the court to confiscate tapes. In this day and age, it should be obvious that complete control of such things is impossible, as the smuggled cell phone video of Saddam Hussein's execution proves. From Nixon to Clinton to Craig, the indisputable lesson of all potential scandals is to simply own it and move on.

PS-I haven't kept up on the course of events, but I was hesitant to link to the LeBron video because it appeared on an "Ebaum" site. A few years ago a rather interesting scandal involving the proprietor of the site, Eric Bauman. He would scour the Internet for videos other people had created (many on the often very funny ytmnd.com), stamp them with his brand, and place them on his site.

Here is the wikipedia summation of the story.

I am thus tentative to support such a site. In this case, the video has been placed on ESPN's homepage, Yahoo Sports, and countless other sites, so my drop in the ocean is beyond irrelevant. But it's worth knowing about shady practices, even when they occur between nerds.