by Barbara Berkeley, MD
But really, how can you not be interested in a story that reads like fiction playing out in real life? Should Cleveland win an NBA title in the next year or two, the screen writer for the movie that surely will be made will have to do embarrassingly little...not a bit of padding or re-invention needed.
For those of you who have somehow managed to avoid the LeBron story, here are the basic elements: Poor but preternaturally and athletically gifted boy from a Cleveland suburb is raised with struggle and pain by his young, single mother.
Many truly good people reach out to him along the way and the friends he makes he keeps, relentlessly bringing them along and including them in his growing success. The boy is drafted into the NBA at number one--directly from high school--- and by a miraculous quirk of fate winds up playing for his hometown team, the Cleveland Cavaliers.
The city of Cleveland is floundering economically and Le Bron vows to "light it up like Las Vegas" and to bring it a championship. The city, full of devout sports fans, has won not a single sports championship in 50 years. The boy gets older playing for the Cavaliers for seven long years (note the Biblical number!). The team reaches the NBA finals but loses in four games. Le Bron becomes restive.
In 2011, after a monster season full of great success, Le Bron appears to lose focus in the playoffs. He complains about a bad elbow despite the fact that he is built like one of the Transformers and has never had a visible injury. Cleveland loses ignominiously in the playoffs and LeBron becomes a free agent.
Perhaps after a discussion with Beelzebub (promising future rings), LeBron is persuaded to announce the plans for his future on television in a much hyped TV extravaganza called "The Decision". The sorest spots in Cleveland's psyche are held by a series of sports collapses that cost the city championships just as they were at hand. All of these debacles have names which start with "The". They are called things like, "The Shot" and "The Fumble". Despite knowing this, LeBron proceeds with "The Decision", goes on national TV, and breaks up with Cleveland. "The Decision" instantly becomes the most painful in Cleveland's string of heartbreaks. The city has a collective fit which includes much wailing and gnashing of teeth. It loses all faith in sports figures and vows that it now hates its own son forever.
Four years pass and Le Bron lives the dream in glitzy Miami Beach. He grows bigger, older, and wiser. He marries and has children. He works for the unctuous and manipulative Pat Riley (who in the movie simply must be played by Willem DaFoe--Riley looks just like his Spider Man character). He misses home. He keeps quiet. He wins two championships.
And then, one day, he writes a letter to Cleveland and the letter is all about home and how much it means. And the city is that home and the fans are his family. And, despite being the most powerful athlete in the world, he gives up the star-filled life in Miami and the house in Coconut Grove, and the year-long summers and comes back to the grit and snow and reality of northeast Ohio. And the city welcomes back it's prodigal son.
Wow.
All of us know how life ultimately ends, but until that day, each of us has the opportunity to write our own story. If that story is about success, and redemption and love it's the best story; the story that no one can resist. And that's why we love people who succeed at great challenges, who re-make themselves, see the light, and create their own realities.
We just love a good yarn.
When people are trying to lose weight, that effort is really only one part of a larger story arc and that's why I believe that dieting has so many failures. When I talk to people who are starting our program, they really want the following: to be fitter, to be more attractive, to have more control, to feel younger, to be less depressed, to have the energy and the body to try new things, to become something new. None of these goals can be achieved with weight loss! They can only be achieved through changing the arc of your story---by learning, by being open to the fact that permanent change is what moves the story foreward, and by understanding that a new person cannot grow out of old behaviors.
People who have lost weight and changed their lives by forever changing their story line have tales that follow the fiction-like path of a good novel. They are Le Bron tales. They reach a low. They struggle. They learn. They get help. They succeed. They fail. They figure it out. They begin to rise, run, fly. It's a story that someone wants to listen to because it's so good in the telling---maybe to a seatmate on your next flight, maybe to a person who is struggling at the beginning of the same path. Re-invention makes for a good yarn. But this story, however good in the telling, is even better in the living.
So pick up your mental pen, trot out a clean page, and begin to write. There's still time for the movie version.
Earlier Le Bron posts can be found here:
LeBron, Grass and Why You Can't Go Home Again