I’m not generally a person who gets off on someone else’s failure, I like to see people succeed, and in sports, I prefer for the battle to be hard fought, for everyone to leave everything on the floor, and the eventual winner win because of perseverance and heart. I usually have a lot of respect for both the losing and winning teams for making it to the highest stage and giving it their all to be the champion in front of millions of fans in one of the highest pressure situations that a human being can find themselves.

Sometimes however, a public figure conducts themselves in such a way that we have almost no choice but to root for them to fail. Most often this phenomenon presents itself with some off the court drama, someone cheated on their wife, got caught drunk driving or with drugs, or accidentally shot themselves in the ass. I have never before seen one man systematically try to convince America that he is a class A fucktard within the context of his own sport.

LeBron James began this whole thing by ripping out Cleveland’s fans hearts on national television, and not even letting his team know what was going on so they could plan some moves for when he was gone. Just a totally selfish, shitty move. Then the heat basically hold a championship party before the season starts to celebrate the “Big 3″ they have put together, and spend the regular season whining about losses, gloating about minor victories, and wondering why people don’t seem to like them.

This level of unabashed hubris demands punishment of biblical levels, and the fact that they lost the 2011 NBA finals on their own court almost makes me feel better about George Bush winning in 2000. Perhaps you can buy/steal the American presidency, but you can’t buy/steal the NBA trophy, and if you act like a bunch of spoiled twat monkeys, this is the kind of stuff the press will say about you:

I have very few rules in life, but this is one of them: Any time a team chokes away the NBA Finals 11 months after throwing a “Welcome Party” for itself, and it happens on the same night that Matt Stone and Trey Parker win 35 Tony Awards, I have to wake up at 5 a.m. the next morning and write a retro diary to figure out what in God’s name happened.

-Bill Simmons

Then James has this to say to all us NBA fans:

“All the people that were rooting me on to fail, at the end of the day they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life they had before,” James said. “They have the same personal problems they had to today. I’m going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want with me and my family and be happy with that.”

And another writer’s response:

…there’s nothing wrong with rooting for LeBron James to fail. It says nothing bad about you as a person to wish ill upon someone who is monstrously talented yet at the same time is also a world-class dipshit. LeBron James has never been arrested or caught with naughty drugs or done anything explicitly “immoral,” I suppose. But that doesn’t matter, because he’s still a piece of shit anyway.

There’s no such thing as going overboard when it comes to enjoying LeBron’s failure. Now, if he were the kind of person to sit at the podium after losing a game and say, “I really thought we were the better team, but we lost and we’re gonna have to go back and work on it until we get it right, and I wish I hadn’t been such a dipshit before,” all that fun would instantly go away, because LeBron would be behaving like a normal human being. It’s not fun to keep poking fun at someone once they learn to take the heat. But LeBron possesses a certain social retardation that forbids him from coming to such obvious conclusions about himself.

-Drew Magary

So I’m going to enjoy the idea that there are consequences for being an arrogant douchebag, and every team that LeBron strung along during the 2010 free agency nonsense can all be happy they didn’t waste money on a guy who has never won anything yet still calls himself King.

[update] LeBron discusses his future plans after the loss to Dallas.