LeBron's Hairline: The Final Stage of a Hero's Journey

By Zack Boehm on June 23, 2016

LeBron James has been fighting battles under the panoptic leer of public scrutiny for his entire career, and for the better part of his life.

As a precocious high school phenom, he battled against the kind of oppressively unfair expectations under which any other mortal would understandably buckle. As a young superstar he battled against blowhards and bloviaters who gleefully condemned him to a career full of failure and unfulfilled potential. As a proven generational talent, he has waged intemporal battles against the looming, formless specter of “legacy”. Each of these battles he has met with an intrepid resilience that has seen him win championships, etch his visage into the pantheon of great American athletes, and clinch an unprecedented, billion dollar, lifetime, all-of-my-posterity-will-be-living-in-mansions level endorsement deal.

With the Cavaliers’ game seven victory against the Warriors last Sunday, we saw the poetic resolution of what has been perhaps the central battle of LeBron’s career. When he was drafted first overall by the Cavs in 2003, LeBron James, a young world-beater with the icarusian hubris that seems ingrained in all great competitors, vowed to deliver a championship to his home state of Ohio, and particularly to the success-deprived city of Cleveland.

via NBA.com

This vow was not easily kept.

While he enjoyed a staggering amount of success early in his career, the ultimate prize eluded him. His Cavalier teams, which were never quite constructed properly and which were always desperately reliant on LeBron’s dazzling brilliance, always seemed outmatched by stout opponents like the Celtics and the Spurs. Years of failure compelled him to abscond to Miami, where he won two championships and played on, arguably, one of the greatest teams of all time. It was an experience he likened to going to college, and it was always clear that his time in South Beach was temporary. He went to Miami to learn how to be a champion, what that meant individually and organizationally, and then to take that knowledge back to Cleveland and fulfill the covenant that he had made with the Cavs, to win the battle that had defined his career.

LeBron has always been more myth than man, and the arc of his life as a professional basketball player reads Homeric. The rise, the fall, the ignominious shame, the training, the rebirth, the triumph. If Joseph Campbell were writing about the Hero’s Journey today, he would point to LeBron James as a perfectly illustrative exemplar.

But although LeBron has reclaimed glory and delivered on his oath, I contend that there is still one final battle that demands resolution. A battle that peak LeBron has been quietly, assiduously fighting for that last couple of years. A battle of little real, but deep figurative, significance. That is, the battle for his hairline.

via deadspin.com

Is it fair that LeBron, a real human person, has had his identity so irrecoverably abstracted over the years that he now exists to the world as a kind of depersonalized collection of symbols? Probably not. Is it fair that one of those symbols is the visibly receding hairline that he has been struggling (with varying degrees of success) to conceal for at least two years? Almost certainly not. But my literary reading of LeBron as a titanic athlete means that I’ve always read his balding literarily.

LeBron’s bald denying has, to me, always seemed symptomatic of deeper struggles, namely the struggle that has functioned as the driving thrust of his career’s narrative. Going bald did not only signal the inexorable reality of aging, it was also a manifest reminder that the time remaining to deliver a championship for Cleveland was…thinning. LeBron’s artificially disguising his baldness was a defiant rejection of this notion. He refused to accept a reality where he failed this singular, eminently important goal. And so he kept working. He kept putting up utterly bonkers statistics. He kept producing historically peerless performances when his team needed him most. And he kept filling in that hairline.

LeBron in 2015′s Trainwreck, successfully veiling is receding hairline. via wtae.com

But the battle has been won. The oath honored. He has delivered the long promised championship and thus cemented himself as the royalty that he has always claimed to be, silencing his implacably strident skeptics. Even his most ardent detractors must now recognize his transcendent genius. The war is over, and there is only one thing left to do. Be at peace LeBron. Shave your head.

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