SCOTT JACOBS

What should I do?  Should I tell you why it seems silly that LeBron James is on the short list (25 deep) of people worldwide for Time’s Person of the Year?  Should I analyze the other people on this list and laugh aloud at the unbelievable (for better and worse) company that King James finds him in?

What should I do?  Should I tell you why LeBron winning an honor (is it an honor if Hitler and Stalin also won it?) of this magnitude is not only reasonable, but maybe even a little bit logical?  Should I tell you that his The Decision forever altered the way the media covers sports, bouncing his name from the front of sports pages to the front of news pages?

What should I do?  Should I explain that The Summer of LeBron and the months of hype generated so much buzz that the NBA’s free agency period became more like a rock concert than an accounting practice.

What should I do?  Should I tell you that LeBron disowning Cleveland on national TV, a place he won two MVPs and was purely and completely beloved in a way that no other city could love him, rocketed him up the relevance list to the point that he would even be considered for this list?

Should I tell you that the hatred and love for his new team, the Miami Heat, is so strong that ESPN has a Heat Wave on their site?  Should I sit there and tell you that devoting weekly segments in the offseason to LeBron’s new team outdid anything that ESPN has ever done?

Should I tell you that his commercial managed to annoy and enlighten so many more people that it brought the attention on him further into the limelight?  Or how about the 13,000 person party he was apart of introducing the Tri-Nasty to South Beach.

What should I do?  Should I convince you that an athlete who hasn’t changed the world or cured any diseases overtake the Chilean miners or our own President, Barack Obama?  Should I ask you if it’s any crazier that Lady Gaga is also on the list?  Or that  Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (Comedy Central personalities) are also on the list?

Should I tell you that, “LeBron is not a role model?” and Time would be crazy to bestow most influential man of the year to a basketball player?

Should I point out to you that Time’s Person of the year merely features and profiles a person, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that “for better or for worse, …has done the most to influence the events of the year?

Should we stop listening to the magazine?  They’re Time!

Maybe we should just act like this is a joke and maybe this story will just, disappear.

What should we do?  Should we embrace that an athlete can have so much pull just through his own self promotion?  Or should we resent a man who turned his free agency visits into a circus anywhere he goes.

And lastly, if LeBron wins Time’s Person of the Year, doesn’t he have to win SI’s Sportsman of the Year too? What should they do, what should they do?

Photo: Getty

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