that his life is better than yours and while all of you are celebrating his failure, he will return to his mansion and millions of dollars, while all of you return to your insignificant problems....

LeBron James gave his detractors a whole new reason to hate him in his post-game press conference last night, essentially telling them that he’d rather have his life than theirs. “At the end of the day, all the people that was rooting on me to fail … they gotta wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today,” he said. “They got the same personal problems that they had today. And I’m gonna continue to live the way I wanna live.”

One of those people rooting for LeBron to fail? Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, of course. Roughly 15 minutes after the game, the AP spotted this tweet from Gilbert: "Congrats to Mark C.& entire Mavs org. Mavs NEVER stopped & now entire franchise gets rings. Old Lesson for all: There are NO SHORTCUTS. NONE." Former teammate Mo Williams was of the same mind. "Dallas just healed my HEART," he tweeted.

http://www.newser.com/story/120873/lebron-to-former-fans-your-lives-still-suck.html?utm_medium=fark&utm_campaign=pop

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/easel/images/galleries/115344_playoffs_lebron2_slide.jpg

:violin: + :crybaby: =

Even when he loses he's still arrogant!! :rolleyes:

This song is dedicated, from the bottom of my heart, to The Choken One, The Lord of No Rings...

Not only did he start a joke...he IS one!!!!

Dq6YmSVAOG8

http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news?slug=dw-wetzel_cleveland_laughs_at_lebron_james_061211

LeBron’s failure warms Cleveland’s heart

By Dan Wetzel, Yahoo! Sports

Jun 13, 2:28 am EDT

CLEVELAND – From the old wooden bar at Flannery’s Pub you can look out the big front window, across Prospect Street and the East 4th parking lot, and see Quicken Loans Arena, former home office of LeBron Raymone James.

Late Sunday night, a crowd of Clevelanders gathered here to watch their onetime hero turned all-time traitor, and with each disinterested LeBron offensive possession, each failed LeBron chase down of Jason Terry, each embarrassing LeBron crunch-time turnover, the prevailing emotion was simple.

Laughter.

They weren’t hating LeBron here. They were laughing at him.

LeBron started it, of course, laughing at Cleveland nearly a year ago when he took himself to a Boys and Girls Club in Connecticut of all places to announce on national television that he was taking his talents to South Beach. That South Beach has about a million nightclubs and technically no basketball arena said it all.

So on Sunday, Cleveland laughed right back.

All over Flannery’s and places like it across Ohio, they cracked oft-told jokes. (“I asked LeBron for a dollar, he gave me 75 cents back. He doesn’t have a fourth quarter.”) They showed pictures on their cell phones mocking LeBron as a quitter. Bartenders rang bells and shouted things like, “Last call for LeBron.”

They mostly reveled in the beauty of a night right out of their wildest dreams, LeBron coming up small on the biggest of stages, standing around as lesser talents on the Dallas Mavericks blocked his shortcut to a NBA title, winning the game 105-95, the series 4-2.

This was the girlfriend that dumped you getting dumped herself – only live in HD while an entire city toasted her comeuppance.

“He can’t blame the supporting cast,” Cavs fan Keith Clapacs said. “He can’t blame Mike Brown. There’s no excuses. Ball’s in your hand and you didn’t do it. It’s your elimination game, and Jason Kidd is diving on the floor for loose balls? You’re losing the hustle plays, committing turnovers?

“It’s the whole too-cool-to-care thing. He was too cool to care.”

From Miami, LeBron would later send his message to them, to the folks enjoying his failure.

“At the end of the day, all the people that was rooting on me to fail – at the end of the day they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today,” James said. “They have the same personal problems they had today…

“They can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal, but they have to get back to the real world at some point.”

A sentiment to which Ryan Smith, an insulation installer from Mentor, Ohio, with a Jameson on the rocks in front of him, offered this simple response:

“[Expletive] LeBron James."

Perhaps there’s no greater example of the life of a Cleveland sports fan than watching a series not involving your team so you can root for someone to lose.

No city has lost like this one, not a single major professional sports championship since 1964, when the Browns won a pre-Super Bowl NFL title. You’d have to be in your mid-50s to remember it. Cleveland’s modern sports memories are defined in short terms, as if elaborating is just too painful: The Drive, The Fumble, The Shot, The Move and, of course, The Decision.

You want collapses? The 1997 World Series is as bad as anything the Cubs or Red Sox ever dealt with. It’s just this city doesn’t have the media poets to chronicle it like Chicago or Boston. You want the true gut punch? Their beloved Browns moved to Baltimore only to finally get their act together and win a Super Bowl.

And then there was this, LeBron James, the local kid from Akron, the one who claimed he understood your heartache, the one you defended for years, the one that was finally going to deliver sporting glory. He bails for some fair-weather sports town and an arena full of white-covered chairs with pretty people who can’t even be bothered to watch the game while it’s going on.

So, yeah, when LeBron James’ dream gets delayed, you bet you’re going to get regional schadenfreude like nothing we’ve ever seen.

Yet LeBron’s take, the same one that too often has been bandied about nationally, doesn’t begin to understand the emotions in Cleveland.

It’s too trite and small to view Cleveland as some bottomed-out, post-industrial postcard to the past. These aren’t all people trapped in awful times or terrible circumstances or living small lives in jealousy of LeBron’s big one.

There’s money here. There is success in Cleveland. There is contentment. As sure as there are poor in Miami, as sure as the VIP area of the Mansion Nightclub isn’t the full reality of South Florida, neither is some boarded-up East Cleveland warehouse the story here.

There are doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs and financial planners and artists and teachers and dreamers and, yes, insulation installers. (“In the column can you mention the company, Pure Seal Inc.?”)

There are happy families and neighborhoods and the American Dream in full view. There are plenty of people who don’t have any personal problems who are quite content to keep their talents in Cleveland, a place they love just the way it is.

“We get a bad rep,” said Pawel Wencel, who happily moved back from Washington, D.C., and watched the game at Flannery’s. “It’s not New York. It’s not L.A. And we don’t want it to be.”

Why New York or L.A. can never seem to get that is anyone’s guess.

The distaste for James didn’t come solely from the desperate and the depressed, and to suggest as much is to miss the entire point, to insult the entire region all over again.

The “bitter” storyline has been told so many times that fans here are as sick of it as they are LeBron. There’s been an overcorrection of late, a trend to say they are over LeBron, that they are better than to bother with him.

That’s not honest either, though. This mattered. No one should have to apologize for it.

It’s not just how LeBron left but how he operated when he was still here. He talked such a big game. He promised to end the title drought. He gave them all those endless playoff runs, all those spring nights of entertainment. He was good to them. Then he wasn’t, bailing before the proper Hollywood ending.

And for what? To stand around and watch J.J. Barea drive the lane?

Nothing angers fans like getting stood up by someone who had promised the moon. When college football coach Lane Kiffin bolted Tennessee for USC, there was a movement to name a local sewer treatment plant after him.

It’s human nature.

With LeBron, a championship felt inevitable.

That was the destination. What was also lost was the journey.

The Cavs drew people together, city and suburb, white and black, rich and poor. They also connected family and friends. They gave reason to send a text message to someone you had drifted away from. They provided a reason to share an experience with your parents or your children or both. They offered an excuse to catch a game with a high school buddy.

And it gave all those ex-Clevelanders who had to chase their professional and personal dreams elsewhere feel that pull to these old neighborhoods, those old sunsets over the lake, those old memories of days and people back home.

At its best, that’s what professional sports can do for a place. It makes a city come together in the shared pursuit of something simple and tangible, even if, in the end, it’s not all that important. It just feels that way in the moment.

And that’s what many here feel James stole when he left. In one swift Decision, it was gone.

Downtown was marked by desolate streets, empty parking garages and half-filled bars on Sunday. The place should’ve been popping. That game in Miami should’ve been that game right here at the Q. Those fans screaming in Florida should’ve been right here in Ohio.

LeBron left, and that’s what he took with him to South Beach. And maybe that’s too much of a burden to put on guy who simply chose to take a job in another town, but that’s what comes with all the millions, with all the commercials, with all the chutzpah of calling yourself “King.”

So watching his little plan blow up, watching him have to answer for the same failures he produced across the street, watching him find out that maybe it’s him, not them, yeah, that’s a good night here.

It just is.

LeBron James had the right to leave. And Cleveland has the right to laugh.

I, like other Cleveland fans out there did watch the game, and I got to say, I was pretty happy when Dallas won. I'm usually not a mean person, but him being upset over losing brought a smile to my face. When he left Cleveland, he basically gave us the finger. It wasn't the fact that he left, it was the way he did it. He goes and plays like crap in the playoffs, then tells everyone he doesn't know what he's doing so people beg him to stay and then gets a two hour special to tell us he's leaving. He's like a little kid! He never grew up! He thinks he's soooo much more than he is, and I hope that after this, somewhere along the line he realizes that he isn't. The Cavs did do good last year, but he certainly wasn't the only one on the team. He had good players liek Shaq and Z with him.

Btw, Monika, I love your user pic!

I'm thinking about getting this shirt.....

I'm thinking about getting this shirt.....

That is a beautiful shirt - and thanks for the compliment!!! :D

Mavs rhyme with Cavs.

I'm glad the Mavericks won because they were a team...The Heat had Three I's and NO Team!

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/other/article_39c4cf6c-44fa-54c8-9d2c-c01edaa037dd.html

LeBron says he is 'not superior to anyone'

Associated Press STLtoday.com | Posted: Wednesday, June 15, 2011 12:00 am

MIAMI • Everyone wanted the circus to end. That is, until the circus actually ended. Such is life for the Miami Heat now, heading into the offseason.

A season of intense scrutiny, criticism, attention and intrigue ended without a championship, and while getting out of the spotlight for a while this summer might be of some consolation to LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, nothing will completely soothe the fact that Year One of the Big Three ended with a loss in the NBA finals.

"There was really no way to prepare for a season like this," Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said Tuesday, after Miami gathered for its exit meetings.

Even at the end, James found some of his words overly dissected and, he said, misinterpreted.

His offseason began with a clarification of something said after Sunday's night's season-ending loss to Dallas, when part of his answer to a question about people being happy to see the Heat lose included the phrase "they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems."

On Tuesday, James tried to clean up the mess he inadvertently created.

"Basically, I was saying, at the end of the day, this season is over and with all the hatred not only myself, everyone else has to move on with their lives as well," James said. "They have to move on with their lives and their day-to-day, good or bad, and I do, too. At the end of the day, I've got to move on with my life. So it wasn't saying that I'm superior or better than anyone else, any man or woman on this planet. I'm not."

James offered some respect to the new champs later Tuesday. He posted a message on LeBronJames.com in which he congratulated the Mavericks, especially Dirk Nowitzki, Jason Kidd and Jason Terry. He also lauded the Miami fans, teammates, coaches, team president Pat Riley and owner Micky Arison.

James closed the message with this: "A lot to learn from this year, a lot to build on, and a lot of work to do this summer."