by Mike Bako
I guess Lebron James was too busy deciding which mansion to buy in Miami to have paid much attention to the news over the last few months. If he had, he would have  seen the steady stream of bad sound bites coming from the mouth of former BP CEO Tony Hayward and he would have known not to say something so inflammatory as “We hated Cleveland…” in the September issue of GQ magazine.

By now we all remember that Hayward wanted the oil spill to end because he “wanted his life back”. He was vilified for being callous and selfish in the face of so much devastation. That quote was played over and over again on TV and radio to the point that no one remembers the first part of his statement was “We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives. There’s no one who wants this over more than I do.” It is a prime example of someone who could not stay on message, got himself in trouble for it and provided more reasons for his critics to be angry with him.

The same can be said for Lebron James. First he left the Cavaliers to go to play for the Miami Heat and now he is being quoted as saying that he “hates Cleveland.”  That is the part of his quote that will blaze in headlines and be the soundbite in plenty of stories but upon further inspection the full quote relates to his time growing up in neighboring Akron and not his true current feelings about the city of Cleveland.
James proved that he is tone deaf to the media circus that surrounds him whenever he says about the city and team he abandoned. First it was the exclusion of Cleveland in a thank you advertisement he took out earlier in the month and now this. He is not managing his message very well and is inflaming the ill will that Clevelanders already feel towards him.