I have my definitive answer; and I get to have an answer that carries weight—thanks to belonging to a generational sweet spot. The first ever NBA spectacle that I ever laid eyes on was the Western Conference Finals between Seattle SuperSonics and Houston Rockets in 1996. I was floored that there was a team that had the same name of one of my favourite video game characters. And not just the regular name, but the name that he is referred to as when homeboy Sonic collects all the Chaos Emeralds and becomes an overpowered golden God. Team colors are petroleum green and orange? That’s much cooler than the booooooring red and white of Houston Rockets. And one team’s star is a giant human being in Olajuwon and the other’s is a small’un that keeps chewing a gum and trash talking everyone in Payton––going once, twice, thrice, I’m sold. So I did watch Jordan in the late 90’s while he was still wrecking shop. I rooted against him––because it’s so very evident to me I have this gene that unequivocally prevents me from rooting for the top dog and I veer towards the underdog within milliseconds of any exposure to any competitive phenomena––and he ultimately clutched things out every single time. No “sports hate” either, just respect.

And LeBron got drafted at the height of my teenage excitement about the league. I loved that hard nosed Detroit team that beat the juggernaut superteam that Lakers put together with Malone and Payton (coincidentally, two players I hardcore rooted for in the preceding years simply because they were challenging the Bulls). I’m clearly not a bandwagoner, at least for the frontrunner, but I might be a bandwagoner for whoever is the obvious and clear underdog––which I think is a fair thing to happen if you’re a neutral or haven’t lived in the cities these teams belong in to have established an emotional connection. After all, after 5 years in Colorado and all the playoff games I’ve been to, it’s impossible to imagine any situation where I won’t root for the Nuggets no matter who the opponent is or the situation might be.

And a mere 3 weeks after the NBA finals and Chauncey Billups winning the finals MVP, I was on my way to University of Michigan for a pre-college program and I goddamn freaking ran into Billups at the luggage claim at the Detroit Metro Airport. I noticed it when people around me started bar-whispering “M-V-P-! M-V-P-!” and I look up and Mr. Big Shot is there in all his baggy shin-high denim short and XXL white t-shirt glory grabbing a worn out gym bag from luggage claim. I (15 y/o) asked: “Mr. Billups, can I take a picture?” (I had just bought a Nokia 3650 [the one with them snazzy circular buttons] that could take pictures––very recent tech [and America had historically been awfully laggy in cellular technology until iPhones came along. People in 2003 were still using pagers and, at best, basic flip phones, and not a single person who saw my standard Nokia phone while there wasn’t flabbergasted). Billups said “Nah, man”, and then I snapped one anyways. Evidently I’m moving up in the world, rubbing elbows with finals MVP’s and whatnot. Good for me.

And I did purchase a LeBron James jersey (as well as an MJ Wizards jersey and and a retro Allen Iverson jersey) from a FootLocker in in Ann Arbor, before LeBron played even a single NBA minute. So I, essentially, was there––on day one. Of course, I was more of a Melo fan because my brain immediately deemed him as the underdog and the thought of rooting for the frontrunning top dog was deeply uncomfortable (and a gimme). Melo’s jump-shot was also just so satisfying to watch every single time it swished in, and as a young (and ignorant) basketball fan lacking technical knowledge of the game, I was literally okay with both Iverson and Carmelo shooting 30 times a game (separately, and then, unbelievably, as teammates) because the 10 times it would go it, it was such a fantastic feeling—pick-up basketball nirvana. And in between all this, a healthy respect for all the top dogs are, of course, naturally forming: Kobe, Duncan, LeBron, and more.

This is long before I became a psychologist. Yet I was anlready intuitively paying nowhere near as much attention to the results, as I did to the process. Not Joel Embiid’s curated pretentious social media clowning type of “process”, but more as to how people carry themselves, the relationships they seem to be building with the people around them as well as their organizations, and essentially “the story” of their road to glory (and sometimes coming up just short).

A lot of Jordan’s “process” was divulged, in a terminally naked fashion, to the entire world when during the COVID lockdown we finally got to see what an unadulterated pure bully Jordan was his entire life. A pathologically competitive monster that wanted to win every discrete piece of competition (as opposed to accumulating “points” [be it experience, or goodwill, or “the friends we’ve made along the way”]). In life, in general, it’s a bad strategy to try to “win”, as opposed to “accumulate points”. Actually, kinda scratch that, as there are two types of games: finite games and continuous games. For the latter, as it never ends, you need to pace yourself, focus on the process, and accumulate points. People who haven’t developed that gear, or the people who lack emotional depth and are pigeonholed into extracting positive affect from primitive concepts like “winning” (small quotidian things) frequently have difficulty on that thing we call “happiness” (subjective well-being) in life. They treat life as something to be won, and they are unhappy as they are constantly trying to “win”, and have their tongues sticking out all out of breath at all times thinking “when I finally win X, then I will be happy”. X doesn’t happen, ever, because they seem to lack the understanding that dopamine is a “future” neurotransmitter (a molecule of “more”, in a way), as in it will feel great and exciting all the way until you reach your goal, and when you actually do, the feeling is gone. (Or more correctly, you need to have the machinery to transcribe and appreciate serotonin [the molecule of “enough”] at and past that moment of stepping on and past that goal). They don’t teach this to you in school, and the way the western society is built, they actually implicitly teach you the opposite.

But, of course, some games are very explicitly designed as finite games, where humans are meant to test their mettles, and performance is judged by the specific metric of “who won this discrete competition at the end of the day”. People who have a predisposition to sucking at enjoying processes in life and instead fixating on “wins”, well, they have an advantage there. I never had that competitive gene. I struggle to see things as personal slights (when Jordan perceived everything as a slight and as he kept saying he “took it personally” four-hundred and seventy-eight times over the ten episodes of ‘The Last Dance’); instead, at the end of a competitive experience, all that would be left with me are the moments where things came together and something shone brightly for a while. Somehow, the process and the result was always completely disjointed in my head: a tough loss didn’t ruin great things that may have happened in a game I played, and a win wasn’t all that memorable if no growth happened. I guess I cared about the “story” so overwhelmingly that the beginning or the end got overpowered by it and were rendered largely irrelevant. Zero interest in the bread, just the meat, and of course, the cheese, and lettuce and tomato, and mustard––anyways, just not the bread.

Jordan’s type of “taking it personally” never strikes me as being thin-skinned or easily offended to me though. At least not in the traditional way (maybe that’s what made him unique). Thin-skinned people’s behavior consequent of their fragile ego’s come from deep-seeded insecurities. Everything hurts them, because it activates some sort of self-hatred, self-disgust, or feeling of worthlessness––and they resort to all sorts of insanity to shoo that feeling away. MJ’s absurdly enhanced ability to get offended by anything and everything didn’t seem to activate an insecurity though, not at all. His hard-work and performance did not seem to have come from a desire to overcome a sense of worthlessness. It seems, more than anything, a fixation with “identifying the next discrete game, and winning to check-mark it off towards a sense of satisfaction, that was maybe more and more addicting as you racked up a larger streak of continuous winning and the sample size got freaking absurd (hence a chance for greatness to be remembered). The satisfaction of dominating a domain, in a relatively controlled and healthy way, it must be such a gigantic feeling reserved for so very few in life. Basketball is a beautifully-constructed and well-defined game. People with such competitive temperates, well, they frequently go into finance and politics and a lot of other not-as-tightly-defined games and people get hurt. There is nothing to legitimately curb that unending appetite, and these people take more and more and are never satisfied while people they don’t know from leagues away might be suffering the outcomes of these people’s pathological passions.

While Jordan’s teammates were wired and on edge and were worn out and exhausted by the end of the process of playing the game with him, due to psychological reasons, I believe that any exhaustion LeBron’s teammates may have felt would come from the physical reasons consequent of the long seasons they had to play year after year. Well, mostly.

LeBron is passive aggressive. He communicates indirectly, in secret messages he expects people to decipher, and probably gets some kind of satisfaction from people breaking down his behavior and tone and extracting what he might really be thinking. That, is its own type of exhausting. If Jordan felt a certain way about you, he told you that. He would call you every word in the book, and that would be how he truly sees you, so you would never be unsure as to where you stand with him. Even if you come to blows with him (like Steve Kerr did, that one time, for example), you punch it out with him, and then it’s done. Likely, he respects you for standing up for yourself, and it’s quashed. I mean, poking and bullying people to see if they are pushovers or if they have the guts to uppercut you—that’s obviously not very nice. But despite my personal disdain towards bullies, I have next to no problems with this due to what Jordan does with the information he receives: he doesn’t seem interested in testing for weakness, identifying the weaklings, so that he can abuse them. He doesn’t get satisfaction from picking on people smaller than him in size. Those people are irrelevant to him. He doesn’t want them as teammates, and he is probably not as motivated to beat them either. He wants to identify the dawgs with bite so he can go to war with them, or chase after the satisfaction of winning against a worthwhile adversary. Abusive narcissists want weaklings that they simultaneously love (because they adore them) and hate (because they are gullible enough to worship them) around them. That’s what sentences them to perpetual dissatisfaction for themselves and to toxicity for those around them. They are stuck loving and hating the same exact thing, hence they are confused all the time and volatile to everyone’s detriment. That’s not MJ. He tests people, not because it gives him personal satisfaction to feel superior to people he deems inferior, but because it serves a goal. The goal of identifying the right teammates––as well as the right adversaries––towards chasing that feeling of dominance. The dominance of winning a well-crafted game in a controlled environment in a fairly healthy fashion.

LeBron is ambidextrous (he is left handed for everything [I believe including in throwing a football], but shoots the basketball with his right). He has eidetic memory (it seems more eidetic than photographic––though I might be wrong). LBJ is deeply empathetic, in the same way that Kevin De Bruyne’s wife says that Kevin can sense when she needs the salt shaker at the dinner table and passes it to her before she can even make a move. The best playmakers in all sports have that type of brain “what do my teammates need? What are they doing right now? Where might they be in 1-to-3 seconds?” And empathetic people who are good at the mentally effortful process of perspective taking have the thoughts, wants, hopes, and desires of many people being simulated inside their heads constantly. This is involuntary and automatic. Strikers in football shouldn’t have that. You want unempathetic people with the irrational confidence of “I can score from here” in that position (e.g. think Zlatan). The particular type of team sport that basketball is, I don’t there is much room for that type of brain in high level basketball. There is constant ball movement, everyone touches the ball on every trip on offense, and if you’re ballstopper (I’m looking at you Melo [and, ummm….Iverson––ouch]), then you are not playing winning basketball. You’ll make the conference finals once or twice and retire without a chip. Jordan wasn’t exactly selfish though, he understood the nature of basketball as a team sport (at least Phil Jackson convinced him of it sometime after he averaged 38-8-8 for a season [seriously 8 assists a game and it still wasn’t unselfish enough] but that still wasn’t yielding winning team basketball). Or at least, he was so overpowering as an offensive force, that his degree of selfishness helped more than it hurt. Partly due to some intangibles like his performance improving in the crunch time while all the other butt-cheeks would clench and his would be loose in a sea of confidence. LeBron also had that (not at the outset, but developed it about a decade into his career). Team ball for 45 mins and winning ball for 3 mins. His teammates lived in his head all the time and he wanted to lift people up, get them stats, get them contracts, take care of his people. Across some of his unique mental traits, I definitely had more in common with him, irrespective of how I literally have absolutely zilch nada nothing in common with MJ as a human being in psychological make up. He may as well be a different species to me, while I believe I understand LeBron as a human being in how he thinks, feels, and operates.

I had this friend recently, in the last few years. And through him I partly became part of a friend group that extended to the east coast, NYC to be precise. A member of this NYC crew was this guy who had one of those classic and boring names, and was always referred to with an alliterative but stupid sounding nickname (e.g. think something like “Jalapeño John”, but more overtly pejorative). Eventually I met this guy when he was in town. He immediately told me he has heard so much about me and he’s been looking forward to meeting me for so long after all the stories he had heard, and then proceeded to ask me nothing about myself (or the supposedly amazing things about me) and gave me a barrage of stories about himself because apparently I “have never heard stories as crazy as some of the stuff that has happened to [him]”. Then he asked me for my contact information because he wanted to work with me as his coach because “[his] life is so crazy that only someone brilliant like me could solve it, and that I’d be floored by his life story”. While I could hardly get a word edgeways, he’d also make references to getting cheated on, being bullied by his stepfather, and getting screwed over by his current boss. He seemed proud of all of this. He almost reveled in it. The reaction of all the people within earshot (most of whom knew him) wasn’t even pity, it was more like “look at what Jalapeño John is saying, isn’t he crazy?”. I knew he was never gonna call me and he wasn’t gonna become a client, which saved me the trouble of having to come up with an excuse to get out of having to deal with him. Apparently, “you don’t want to tell all your secrets to someone who knows and regularly sees your closest friends; a therapist needs to be a perfect stranger with whom you have no other relationships” wasn’t enough to deter him.

And soon after this gathering, either later that evening when we were alone together or the next day—can’t remember exactly––my original friend that I know Jalapeño John from told me about their summer trip biking across the Alps where one member of the crew viciously made fun of JJ the entire two week trip. Savagely, hard, with increasing intensity. He gave me details of the content of the vitriol, and its incessant nature, laughing all the way while he relayed all this, just like he apparently did while it was happening. Apparently it kept getting worse and worse until my friend sort of intervened and said “hey, it’s been funny and all but it’s getting a bit too much, so, maybe, [he] should dial it down a bit” (about a week in to the bullying).

Now as I’m listening to this story, I’m getting fucking indignant. I am increasingly bewildered and keep interrupting and asking how that’s appropriate and how dare this guy be so vicious and I’m getting retroactively protective of this idiot who was an unadulterated nimrod towards me just earlier. My brain is automatically concocting scenarios where I stand up for him and cut that nonsense in the bud on day one, while getting upset that my friend didn’t do such a thing, and even when he eventually did, he was laughing his ass off all the way to the bank.

That is my instinctual, involuntary, natural reaction to hearing about someone I don’t know bullying someone I vaguely know. And at this point it’s clearly to me that Jalapeño is basically Roman Roy who gets off on getting embarrassed and made fun of because ultimately it means people pay attention to him, and that is better than the alternative of feeling awful, and alone, and uncared for the entire time he is not distracting himself with things like work, food, sex, socializing, and the bullying he engineers upon himself. Likely, in his developmental years of understanding what love and care is supposed to be, he received ridicule and mocking (as he implied about his step dad), and he consequently identified being mocked as affection. Embarrassment was his body’s signal for being cared about. And while acknowledging that this is a typical trauma response and a naturally developing behavioral strategy that calms the nervous systems of such people helps me be less indignant, my gut still registers bullies as my “natural enemies” and makes me want to confront them and call them out for their repugnant behavior.

But, somehow, Michael Jordan does not trigger me this way. I suppose it might be because it is confined to the safe sandbox of basketball, with a glorious result that is impossible not to admire, where the recipients of the bullying overall being grateful that Michael brought the best out of them and delivered them to the promised land, and it never crossed the boundaries of needlessly cruel behavior. It wasn’t mean or cruel for no reason, or selfish emotional reasons. It served a purpose. And it stayed on the court. We have interviews that show how the Jordan family was full of people who were pathologically competitive and absurdly hard working and, maybe, in a way, it was their love language amongst themselves. And maybe luckily, they all had the personality traits and the comportment to withstand it and not be broken down by it. Trial by fire. Whoever remains, remains.

On the other side of the aisle LeBron grew up in a different kind of family. Raised by a single mom and never knew his dad who seems to have been a petty criminal. Now, I’m not gonna make too many comments about the psychology of a black man who grew up fatherless and read into it things I have no business relating to. I’m not George Karl. But odds are, it was necessary to share and take care of each other in his small family of just him and his mother. I think he did that in his career too.

He took care of his friends. Employed his childhood friends in his company for his personal brand. One of his oldest friends became a high powered agent. He kept pressuring the ownership of his teams to overpay for average players who were represented by his buddy, Rich Paul, hurting his own team’s salary cap, and hampering his ability to win due to personnel deficiencies that he caused just because he wanted to be nice to people, and maybe wanted to be seen as a provider who takes care of his people, doesn’t abandon family, and be perceived to be that kind of a man. He definitely preferred to be seen in certain specific ways.

He wanted to be recognized as someone whop reads books. So he keeps walking into arenas with a book in hand, and he is reading it as the press is coming into the dressing rooms pregame to interview him. Somehow, he is almost always at the beginning of the book; and when he is asked about it, he naturally doesn’t have much to say as he “just started it”.

When asked about stuff he doesn’t know about, his automatic instinct is to pretend to know the answer and give a vague political response in the affirmative. When in reality, the true answer is a resounding “no”. No, LeBron: you’ve never seen a Liverpool game in your life. It’s awesome that you invested in one of the most storied football teams in Europe. It’s fantastic that you had the foresight and was a listener of good advice that you diversified your portfolio in such a manner. Fenway Sports Group is an extremely well managed company and you should feel good about having gotten your money in with them. But the actual answer is “No, actually. I don’t know much about Liverpool FC. But I’m excited to learn more about the club, the English Premier League, and the state of soccer––ehem, sorry, football––in Europe in general. It’s a good opportunity for me to learn more about the rest of the world, and broaden my horizons. And my investment is my way of motivating myself to do so”. But he doesn’t, and wants to be seen as more than he is (outside of basketball), something he isn’t.

More power to him. He’s won enough. He became a legitimate killer later in his career. His peaks are true peak human achievement. And most people have insecurities. As one of the most famous people in the world for two decades, who has opened himself up to public consumption and is visible in his family life, he had a few silly gaffes to cover some small insecurities––big woop. But that’s exactly what they were talking about when they would say he didn’t have the killer instinct like MJ did. He started as someone who wanted to belong, and get along. He wanted to share. Then he had to become something else that wasn’t exactly natural to him. He did that decently too. The villain arc wasn’t comfortable for him. He made monumental mistakes, like ‘The Decision’. Couldn’t quite kill indiscriminately and dominantly as an selfish assassin in his quests to become truly great. Of course, there are so many other variables around. The times were different. Social media, the way the game was covered, how individuals ended up with more power than franchises. Hell, LeBron became a franchise himself. And sure, it was such a beautiful happenstance that he got drafted by his hometown team. But the owner of his team in Cleveland was an out-of-touch rich man who thought he was the real reason behind the team’s success. If I were a rags-to-riches black man fighting my way towards GOAT’ness and some privileged white man wanted to take the credit, I’d have a problem with it too. But across all these switching of the teams, he insisted on creating his own comfort zone, with players he wanted (instead of embracing discomfort), constantly meddling in management affairs, forcing the ownerships into making the wrong decisions, and then moonwalking back out of there saying “Oh, I never wanted this coach/player/strategy in the first place”. The lack of accountability and the disingenuous political style wishy washiness was just weak. You push for a Kevin Love trade, the best rebounder in the game at the time, then stick him to the corner to wait for spot-up 3’s, then start writing passive aggressive tweets about him? That’s just an awful look. I wish you were more of a bully LeBron. I wish you could take more accountability when things didn’t go well, independent of whether you caused it in the first place or not, and just used sheer force of personality and your ungodly amounts of talent and physical gifts to get it done regardless. Anyone who wants to achieve GOAT status needs to not be an excuse maker. They need to be someone who never complains. MJ would never ever, by principle, show weakness. So naturally he never made excuses. Just talked more brashly and with more bravado (probably to a fault when he was younger), but no whining regardless––ever. Messi doesn’t complain. Ronaldo doesn’t complain. Maradona deals drugs on the sidelines and lives life like a mob boss––he doesn’t complain. Jokic actually has a better chance to become GOAT over MJ if he can garner 3 more championships. You know why? Wanna take a guess. I’m waiting. C’mon, you know the answer, Just give it to me. Yes, because HE DOESN’T COMPLAIN. You can’t be the GOAT if you’re a complainer. You can’t do stuff and shift blame after it doesn’t work and expect people to reward you with GOAT’ness. You can’t chase random statistical accolades like Wilt did (Wilt wanted to never foul out of a game so frequently he became a ghost in 4th quarters and gave up championships to keep his never-fouling-out streak alive), and demand to be in the same conversation with people who unquestionably dominated their domains. You can do other things, but not that.

And that can include being a good father and a family man, and continuing to display your one-of-a-kind talents to the world while spending quality time with your family. Chris Paul’s family has been living in LA the entire time since he got to the Clippers. He lived in Houston, Oklahoma, Phoenix, San Francisco, and now in San Antonio away from his family. He has made it evident that it wasn’t ideal, but he’s made it work. More power to him for making sacrifices while being a consummate professional. And LeBron wanted to use his status and clout to create for himself a situation where he gets to live in the biggest city in his native land with the best weather, watch his kids play high school (and then college) ball while getting a great education, be there for his wife and his entire family while having continued access to the business opportunities that he owes to his status to maintain being in Hollywood.

The NBA is so competitive that there are no guaranteed paths to championships, so it’s always risky to chase rings by going wherever you need to regardless. He could’ve, but did not do that. Instead, he wanted to keep doing his job for as long as he could, while being a present husband and a father. I suppose he cared more about not missing the precious years of his children rather than to increase his odds of more titles or potential GOAT status by some percentage points. There is nothing to not respect here. It’s a better fit for him, for who he is as a person. He isn’t a killer, he isn’t a villain, he isn’t a dominating force of nature that takes no prisoners. He is a family man. Maybe even a bit too much as we saw how he was overprotective of Bronny and turned him into a nepo baby who achieved status he didn’t have what it actually takes for. Sure, big whoop; he used his status to give his progeny a boost. No one will put him on trial for trying to help his kid. It is what most of us do.

He started out as a boy who wanted to share, and belong; he had to become a villain to achieve what the entire world put so much pressure on him to achieve; then once he did, he relaxed, and reverted back his nature, and became a daddy. He still did stupid attention seeking nonsense like trying to make the conversation about himself by insinuating retirement when the Nuggets swept them. But then he got to go home and spend the rest of the summer with his kids.

I’ll never identify with the attention seeking nonsense and passive aggressive communication style. As a matter of fact, it just gives me such an ick every time I witness it. But the rest, I get it. I get it more than I get bullying behavior. I’d rather be comfortable and content around people I love instead of chasing further greatness by sacrificing my relationships. I identify with it, significantly, but I have to acknowledge that it doesn’t amount to being the Greatest of All Time. I will never personally identify with any amount of bullying for any reason, but I have to acknowledge that it might be a useful (if not mandatory) component of that path. And it is very evident to me that it would never be in the cards for me to become GOAT in a domain that requires competition among other alpha dogs, some of whom might be inherently competitive, vicious, born killers. If LBJ wasn’t such a complainer and passive aggressive responsibility dodger, I would’ve gone as far as to say I personally like him more as a person and appreciate who he is, while acknowledging his not being the GOAT basketball player. The second part stands, but the first part unfortunately lags.

And I would add that I do not like MJ as a person, at all, not even a bit, but he, within the confounds of what is relevant to basketball, is the GOAT. He just is. He was rewarded it, as he earned it, one season at a time. And he has set the bar, which LBJ was not able to reach. It’s a beautifully constructed bar for the newer generations to aspire towards, and has been bringing the best out of athletes, and not just basketballers, for years. One day, he might be surpassed. Maybe if Nikola rips 3 rings in a row he could, or a more evolved human with more sports science behind him who is not even born yet. Likely, another controlled bully who puts pressure on teammates and his fellow soldiers without breaking them, and more importantly, without crossing the line into cruelty or true harm.

Until then: long live the king. His highness took it so very personally.