The Ego Whisperer
Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski is the real villain in the LeBron James betrayal
If you play for Mike Krzyzewski, you learn to look out for your self interestsfirst.
LeBron James is the one gone, but he's not all too blame.
Coach K convinced Dwyane Wade, LeBron and Chris Bosh that they needed each otherto succeed.
The LeBron James jerseys have been burned in a virtual YouTube contest and the 10-story "We Are All Witnesses" Nike mural of LeBron is slowly being dismantled (because downtown Cleveland needs another blighted building side).
When will Cleveland get around to smashing bobbleheads of Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski and tossing his motivational tomes into the flames though?
Yes, Krzyzewski. He's the real villain of LeBron's betrayal and he's skating by with a free pass. If it wasn't for Coach K's work with the U.S. Olympic Basketball Team, LeBron, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh never would have even thought of getting together in South Beach.
Using his typical five fingers can't do anything by themselves, but if they come together they form a powerful fist mumbo-jumbo, Krzyzewski convinced LeBron, DWade and Bosh that they needed each other to succeed. What's wrong with this you ask? It helped the U.S. roll to a gold medal in men's basketball after all.
The problem is it doesn't stop there with Coach K. It never does.
For if you spend anytime around the fakest man in sports you cannot help but get drawn into his vortex of personal selfishness. The coach who preaches teamwork has always used other job offers to increase his power at Duke to the point where he now runs a personal fiefdom on the cloistered Durham campus. Krzyzewski's shown time and time again that he considers himself more powerful and more important than any university president.
So why shouldn't one of his still relatively new eager pupils suddenly consider himself more important than his home state, his hometown and his home fans.
Crazy Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert got it wrong. LeBron James didn't pull a Benedict Arnold. He went Mike Krzyzewski.
And Gilbert should know better than anyone.
After all, another Krzyzewski disciple (former Blue Devil) Carlos Boozer gave the town of Cleveland its first crushing free-agency blow (call it the pre-LeBron death shot) several years ago. Remember, Boozer reneged on the handshake deal with the Cavs that allowed him to become a free agent in the first place and jumped on a more lucrative offer from the Utah Jazz instead, giving Cleveland and a then-rookie LeBron their first hard business kick to the head.
Many Cavs fans and the team's ownership derided Boozer as a Benedict Arnold then too. Now, years later, after getting together with Coach K himself, LeBron humiliates Cleveland in a national TV special. That's no coincidence, that's a pattern of well-taught, cold-blooded self interest.
If LeBron had never been coached by Krzyzewski in the Olympics, if he'd never fallen underneath the spell of the selfish sorcerer, he'd still be a Cav today.
Those looking for a villain in "The Decision" should focus on the right man. He can be found in North Carolina's Triangle, locked behind his high-tech fortress of a basketball center.
