At its finest, especially when it serves as a sire to greatness, sport is usually a transformative experience. And so it was watching LeBron James this past month overcome the odds with his Cleveland Cavaliers team to defeat the much-fancied Golden State Warriors to lift his third — and the Cavs’ first — NBA title. That James is a uniquely gifted athlete has been beyond doubt ever since he entered the NBA, anointed as “The Chosen One”. But his quest for sporting immortality has been far from smooth. In lifting the Cavs though, in helping them come back from a 1-3 deficit in the best-of-seven final — the first time any team has achieved this in the sport’s history — James fulfilled not destiny, but what had for the longest time appeared anything but foreordained, creating in the process an inimitably exalted portrayal of greatness.

When James first took to the basketball court in the NBA, there was a distinct sense that we had amidst us a once-in-a-lifetime kind of athlete, a player bestowed with unfathomable talent, who could, many believed, even eclipse the great Michael Jordan’s achievements. But it was this comparison with Jordan that nagged at James, often proving his Achilles heel. Jordan was famously brilliant when his team needed him most — at the time that basketball writers describe as “clutch”. Could James coalesce his diverse talents to show a similar nerve in the defining moments of a game? It was also Jordan who provided the NBA the platform for global popularity; his six rings with the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s were each individually worthy of marking a whole epoch. Therefore, to Jordan’s fans, the mere arrival of James, as a pretender to Jordan’s crown, as a player arguably more naturally skilful than Jordan, was a cause, in and of itself, to put him down. Any challenge to Jordan’s greatness, in their eyes, was simply heretical.

James also didn’t do much to help himself. In the summer of 2010, he organised a 75-minute TV show to broadcast what was dubbed, “The Decision”. Here, he announced that he was taking his talents to Miami, to play with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, teammates infinitely more talented than those he had at Cleveland, to give himself a chance at a championship. Cleveland’s fans saw this as betrayal. Indeed the nature of James’s announcement was both silly and disrespectful. It made him Public Enemy No 1. So when an ageing yet finely-tuned Dallas Mavericks team upset Miami in the 2011 NBA Final, the victory was seen as a triumph against evil; such was the hatred that James had spawned.

The Heat would ultimately win championships in the following two years, and in each of those two years James was awarded the most valuable player award in the finals. His performances were often spectacular, but after what had transpired following his move to Miami, the wins still seemed hollow. And so it was that a year later, after losing in the final to the San Antonio Spurs, James opted out of a contract with the Heat, choosing to return to Cleveland, to help bring to the city its first ever NBA title, and its first title in any one of the major professional American sports since the Browns won the National Football League in 1964.

Meshed together in the final this year with all this messy history was the fact that the Cavs were up against a Golden State Warriors team that many were already describing as amongst the greatest the NBA has ever witnessed. The Warriors had won an unprecedented 73 games during the regular season, and in Stephen Curry they possessed a player of sublime gifts, who needed nothing like his best to help oust the Cavs in three of the first four games in the final. In games five and six, though, James shattered the odds, rising like a phoenix from the ashes, to physically will his team into motion. In attack, he drove inside to the ring on occasions, he pulled back for jump shots on others, and nailed 41 points in each of these games, while still managing more than 10 assists and 10 rebounds. In defence, he was routinely otherworldly, shuttling between players, suffocating the opposition into submission, and thereby setting us up for a drama-filled, climactic game seven in the Warriors’ home court.

Here, too, James proved peerless. In the final quarter of the game, he constantly thwarted Golden State’s attack, and in one move even launched himself from seemingly nowhere to astonishingly block Andre Iguodala’s attempt at an otherwise easy lay-up. After his teammate Kylie Irving had bettered Curry to score a three-pointer that would give the Cavs the all-important lead, James once again drove the ball to the rim, taking a hard hit to the floor, from which he dusted himself to make one of two free-throws that would seal the victory.

It’s impossible to find a suitable parallel across any sport to what James has now achieved with Cleveland. Perhaps, Diego Maradona’s two Italian Serie A titles with Napoli in the late 1980s come closest in comparison. But, within the annals of the NBA’s history, this victory is nothing like any that’s come before it. It may well herald a new beginning in James’s career, but it also marks the fulfilment of an improbable promise.

King James he now certainly is.

Suhrith Parthasarathy is a Chennai-based lawyer and writer. Tweet to Suhrith @suhrith

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