Normally I write about the NFL, but the NBA had a development this week that I thought would be an interesting topic pertaining to all sports. LeBron James is taking a lot of heat for walking off the court without shaking Dwight Howard's hand after his Cavaliers were eliminated by Howard's Orlando Magic in the Eastern Conference Finals. James also refused to address the media immediately following the loss.

LeBron James who is a darling among the NBA media is suddenly being thrust into a new negative light.  Some are coming to the realization that it's fair to ask if he's arrogant, selfish, and full of himself. He now has a massive ego that makes some people think less of him. Never mind that Mo Williams did the same thing James did after the loss. This is the King and the King shouldn't do that.

The biggest mistake LeBron made wasn't walking off the floor it was not having the foresight to apology for it the next day. Trying to justify it made it worse and kept the story alive.

I have news for you. Every professional athlete has a massive ego. Some are just a little better at hiding it than others. That would be your Greg Maddux types. Some such as Barry Bonds are terrible at hiding it to the point where their ego defines them almost as much as their play. Regardless of style, it is impossible to reach that level of competition without having enormous confidence in your ability to perform on the biggest stage.  With that confidence comes extreme disappointment when goals are not met.  

Playing at that level is as much mental as it is physical.  That competitive fire is essential to drive athletes to excel and reach heights that others didn't think was possible. But when players fail they don't just turn that switch off and take that failure in stride.  Often times it leads to a reaction like we saw on Saturday night.

LeBron James is just the latest example of that. It was fun for the Cavs this season to do the picture-taking skit in pre game warm-ups. It was fun to laugh it up on the sideline when they were killing the Celtics at the end of the regular season. It was fun to win the first eight games of the playoffs by more than ten points. We laughed and enjoyed it with them. But as soon as the Magic destroyed the Cavaliers and the celebration was on, it suddenly wasn't fun anymore and James had to leave the building immediately.

I think LeBron was wrong for what he did. He's the leader of that team and as the leader of the team he should have been front and center to explain why the Cavaliers came up short in the playoffs. Even though he played a phenomenal individual series he shouldn't have left that for his teammates to deal with the loss. Furthermore, it showed a lack of respect to the series Dwight Howard had. As a professional he should have congratulated Howard for a job well done.

That said; enough is enough.  James is hardly the first athlete to do that. The Piston Bad Boys of the late 1980s and early 1990s didn't show a lot of interest in congratulating the Chicago Bulls on getting over the mountaintop at their expense. Brett Favre didn't show a lot of interest in shaking Chad Pennington's hand for a job well done in the season finale at the Meadowlands in 2008.  Pennington beat the team that released him in August for Favre.  Instead of shaking hands Favre just ran off into the tunnel after the game.  Bill Belichick gives the most famous poor handshake in football, especially if he is losing to his favorite assistant at the other end of that handshake.

I think too often we want these coaches and athletes to be perfect people. We want our athletes to be soul mates. They should be funny, but always politically correct. They should have a fire to win championships, but be sportsmanlike along the way. They should represent the city in the best light. They should always give back to the community. They should be smart and have a solid career option after their sport. But they should have a personality that makes us want to have a beer with them after the game. They should be humble in victory and sad, but dignified in defeat. They should be genuine and honest. They should never play for just the money.  They should play for the love of the game. They should love the fans and play for them above anything. They should know when to fade into the spotlight as gracefully as they entered it.  They should never want to play for another team, especially the cities biggest rival.

A lot of men think women are silly for reading romance novels.  That women are looking for that perfect guy in the novel that doesn't exist in real life.  Sports is our romance novel.  As sports fans we do the same thing when it comes to finding our perfect athlete. 

Are we kidding ourselves? Even in the good old days it wasn't that good. We laugh at Babe Ruth hitting two homeruns with a hangover while eating hot dogs in the dugout. Can you imagine if our favorite player were eating hotdogs hung over during the seventh inning stretch in 2009? We'd be outraged, even before we gave that player a chance to lead the team to victory. Do we remember the Babe Ruth that bombed with the Boston Braves?  Of course not. In the 1920s and 1930s they all new when to hang it up. Ruth had a legacy to think about, he'd never do something like that.

The Chicago Black Sox scandal rocked baseball. But we act like steroids is the first time someone tried to cheat the game.  We had segregated leagues that prevented minority ball players from playing in the leagues. Yet we like to remember the old days as being nothing but the good old days. There was plenty of bad going on in professional sports in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, just as there is today. We just choose not to remember it.

For every player that you respect there is a story that makes you shake your head.  Peyton Manning has been a class act in Indy. But when his own kicker questioned Manning's ability to play well in big spots Manning had this to say, "Here we are, I'm out at my third Pro Bowl, I'm about to go in and throw a touchdown to Jerry Rice, we're honoring the Hall of Fame, and we're talking about our idiot kicker who got liquored up and ran his mouth off. The sad thing is, he's a good kicker. He's a good kicker. But he's an idiot."

Brett Favre was thought of as a man playing the game of football with a kid like enthusiasm. Someone that would show up to play for free.  But as soon as Ted Thompson dare question his ability to play at an NFL level in Favre's advanced years all hell broke loose.  It has set Favre on a three-year mission of retiring and unretiring to prove Ted Thompson wrong and shaft Ted Thompson in the process. Like him or hate him, Favre is always going to be looked at in a different light. No one can deny he was a great quarterback. He might still be. But the fun loving little boy on the NFL field image has not been helped by the last few years of outright distain for Ted Thompson and Packer Management.

Michael Jordan. He was probably the worst. When Dikembe Mutombo had the audacity to say Jordan had never dunked on him not only did Jordan throw down the very next game, but also he waived his finger in Motombo's eye. How about when he closed his eyes to take a free throw in a game the Bulls had a huge lead in. How humble was that? When winning six titles wasn't enough he had to comeback well past his prime to still prove to the basketball world that he still had it at 40-years old. Jordan was a great player. But nobody loved himself or the spotlight that came with that more than Michael Jordan and nobody thrived on proving critics wrong more than Michael Jordan. Nobody reminded the critics they were wrong better than Jordan did either.

What about someone quieter, more humble. Someone like Greg Maddux surely doesn't have an ego. In 2004 Maddux was closing in on his 300th win. Sportswriter Bob Nightengale asked him what was his most memorable confrontation. According to Nighengale Maddux said without hesitation that it was striking out Dave Martinez to end a game a few years earlier.

You would wonder why striking out Dave Martinez in a regular season game would mean that much. Here was Maddux's explanation. "I remember that one because he got a hit off me in the same situation (full count, bases loaded, two out in the 9th inning) seven years earlier. I told myself if I ever got in the same situation again, I'll pitch him differently. It took me seven years but I got him."

You don't think that's a guy with a competitive drive. It took him seven years to get over a guy getting a hit off him.  He never forgot it.  If you don't think Maddux thought he was the best and smartest pitcher in baseball all those years you're kidding yourself. If you don't think he thought he was better than every hitter he faced you don't understand competitive sports.

Even someone like Tiger Woods is not immune to that. Sure he is a nice guy that always has the thoughtful intelligent Stanford graduate answer at a press conference. Try taking a picture of him while he's swinging and see what reaction you get out of him.

The point is that most great athletes will be humble under two conditions.  1) They will be humble as long as no one questions there ability to perform on the biggest stage and, 2) They will be humble as long people still view them as one of the best.  The moment someone questions their ability to play in big spots or their ability to play at all they come out swinging every time.  

Let's bring this back to LeBron James.  That's where this whole article started.  He's the latest one in the spotlight for not acting saintly. Frankly, I'm tired of the criticism. I don't agree with what he did, but I'm not outraged by it either. We want our athletes to not only win, but also dominate the game.  But they should share the ball with teammates too.  They should dominate the regular season, and raise their play to another level in the postseason to close it off with a championship.

We set the bar so high that only a select few athletes have the mental and physical ability to reach that mountaintop.  When they reach that mountaintop everyone sings their praises.  But when the competitive side of their personality that allows them to reach those goals spills out in a weak moment we can't believe what we see.  We're shocked.  We helped create that and are just as much to blame for that as the athletes themselves.

If I would have been LeBron James I would have shook Dwight Howard's hand. But I don't have the competitive fire he has. I can't imagine working as hard at something as he has worked at basketball. I can't imagine the disappointment that comes with losing a series like that and letting an entire city down after a 65-win season. I can't imagine the world expecting me to lead a team to the NBA title only to be blown out. I can't imagine being proclaimed "The King" at age 18 years old in a sport where Bill Russell and Michael Jordan already set the bar.  So I can't say that in the same situation I wouldn't have done the same thing.

I don't feel sorry for athletes that they have the bar set that high. I certainly don't feel sorry for LeBron James or the criticism people are lying at his feet. James is making a lot of money to play that game. If the bar weren't set that high he wouldn't be making that type of money, because there wouldn't be anyone watching.  Play jump rope if you don't want expectations.  If you want the financial success and security of playing professional sports than you have to deal with the criticism and expectations that comes from playing in that profession.

But I'm certainly not going to get mad at LeBron James for not shaking Howard's hand, Brett Favre for wanting to stick it to Ted Thompson so bad that he's considering unretiring for a second time to play for the Vikings, or Kobe Bryant for wearing number 24 instead of Eight so that the video record will be able to differentiate the titles he won with Shaq vs. the titles he won without Shaq.

Because if those guys didn't possess that insane drive and dedication we wouldn't have been able to see all the amazing things they did in their career either.  There would never have been the 25 consecutive points in the playoff game against Detroit, the game for Irv Favre, or 81 points against the Raptors.  

A few years ago I was na