CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Does anyone care that LeBron James dropped enough "bombs" at the Cavaliers' victory parade and celebration to run through most of the explosive words immediately recognizable by references to the alphabet (F and S)?
And to the play "Oedipus Rex"?
Or is a celebrity athlete who delivered a championship to Cleveland after 52 years of waiting immune from normal judgment?
Isn't that what many critics of the Republican Party's presumptive Presidential nominee, Donald Trump, decry in his campaign, the occasional profanity, the crude tone?
Was James' locker-room kidding, with its sort of jovial profanity in describing his teammates, permissible?
For the record, in nine years of covering James, the only profanity I had ever heard him say until the parade was the "S-word," a relatively mild barnyard epithet.
James' remarks, made within earshot of hundreds of thousands of spectators, were unedited by sound delays on the television stations doing the broadcast.
The remarks came after James rebuked forward Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors for his profanity-laced remarks in the fourth-game incident that changed the NBA Finals. Green, with the Warriors leading in the best-of-seven series, 3-1, was suspended for the fifth game in Oakland, played ineffectively in the sixth, and, even with a strong seventh game, could not save the Warriors from the Cavaliers' epic comeback.
Green was turned into a martyr by Warriors' fans during the fifth game with "Free Draymond!" chants. Basically, however, he suspended himself when he punched James in the crotch, earning a flagrant foul-1. It was a lenient call, saving him from him ejection on a flagrant-2.
Green had already picked up a flagrant-1 foul and a flagrant-2 foul in the playoffs. Once a player has three flagrant foul points in the postseason, another flagrant automatically triggers a suspension.
"Draymond said something that I don't agree with," James explained after the game. "I'm all cool with the competition, I'm all fine with that, but some of the words that came out of his mouth were a little bit overboard. Being a guy with pride, a guy with three kids and a family, things of that nature, just some things go overboard, and that's where he took it."
The Federal Communications Commission has yet to act on the rally remarks, which James made with his wife and young children nearby.
It's not a big jump to imagine what Draymond Green thinks. Something along these lines:
"Seriously, dude? You were offended by what I said in the heat of battle. Really? Ever hear that little pitchers have big ears?"
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