LeBron James Still An Egomaniacal Narcissist
BOSTON (CBS) -- LeBron James won his third championship, and he did it in impressive fashion. He scored 41 points in Game 5, scored 41 points again in Game 6, and he posted a triple-double in Game 7, including an awe-inspiring block late in the fourth quarter that will go down in sports history as one of the best Game 7 plays of all time.
Nobody's doubting LeBron's talent. But that doesn't mean he stopped being the most insufferable athlete on the planet.
On Tuesday, Toucher & Rich took a close look at LeBron's postgame comments as well as his Instagram post, which lobbed bombs at straw men and did little to enhance LeBron's public image.
First up was the NBA's complete lack of acknowledgment of the presence of Bill Russell at the presentation of the Finals MVP trophy -- which is named after Bill Russell.
"After all of the flying back and forth of Bill Russell -- remember there was the story of him waiting in his wheelchair to get to a car when he was at Oracle Arena, and then he had to fly back to Cleveland, and then he flew back to Oracle Arena -- do you know that they did not even ... he walked on stage and Adam Silver took the MVP trophy from him and gave it to LeBron. He didn't even reference Bill Russell at all. ... Bill Russell's name was not even mentioned on stage."
LeBron himself kept his back turned to Russell for the duration of the ceremony, talking about himself when the microphone was placed in front of his mouth.
The guys then played LeBron's postgame interview with Doris Burke.
"There's some single mom out there who's working three jobs who's going, 'You know what LeBron? You really had it rough. I mean, God has put so much -- the way that you have been an athletic freak since the age of 12, that you've had people basically basing their adult careers on you since you were 12, what obstacles have been in your way,'" Fred said.
"You obviously think God has made it hard for you, the way that you put 'CHOSEN ONE' in a tattoo on your back," Rich added.
Fred played out the theoretical plan from God about the basketball games.
"God was like, 'You know what? Let's make this thing 3-1, see him get out of this one. You've done it, LeBron, my second son. You've done it again,'" Fred said. "Can you imagine thinking that God had a plan for your playoffs? Going, 'You know what, God? You've certainly invested a lot of time in this NBA Finals. I don't know why I had to put up with so much.' ... Can you imagine you're from Cleveland, it's tough to get work, the manufacturing jobs are gone, and LeBron's saying, 'I don't know why God makes everything so difficult, why Kevin Love had that stretch of bad games. God loves basketball.'"
Rich spotlighted all the times LeBron said the words "I," "me" or "myself" during the postgame press conference. The unofficial count was 38.
"Oh," Rich said, "you are such a douche-nozzle, LeBron."
With the postgame comments covered, the discussion moved to LeBron's Instagram post, which broke a self-imposed social media ban during the playoffs.
"Should we go into each one of these and say whether or not anyone actually said that?" Rich asked, noting that nobody in the world made half of those criticisms.
"How can you possibly like this guy?" Rich asked. "On the court, you can't argue -- he's one of the best. He'll go down as one of the greatest. And you know what? He might eclipse Michael Jordan one day. He's still young, he's got three championships, he's an amazing basketball player and the best guy playing right now. But he'll always be a DB off the court. And he'll always be unlikable."
Fred popped in: "At least Jordan was a horrible person off the court, but you didn't know about it."
"It would be interesting if we had Twitter and all of this stuff back then, how Jordan would play out," Jon Wallach added.
"All they said is, 'Jordan, you smile and we'll take care of the rest,'" Fred said. "'We'll come up with a catch song, 'If I Could Be Like Mike.' We'll create Mars Blackmon. We'll do anything we have to do. You just don't have to talk.'"
Jordan comparisons aside, Rich summed up LeBron like this: "After all this is done, you can debate LeBron James on the court and whether he's great and how much better he is than Larry Bird and all of that over the last 48 hours. But the one thing you still can't debate is whether or not he's a douche-nozzle off the court. Everything he's done since he won has just screamed 'douche-nozzle.'"
Listen to the full segment below:
