LeBron James holds a live prime-time press conference

LeBron James tells the world there's something more else needs.

It was ridiculous, wasn't it? He wasn't a president, a general, or a Jackson. He just sat in a Greenwich gymnasium full of children perched on bleachers. He wore lilac gingham, pressed denim, tennis boots, and an Honest Abe beard (mustache sold separately, but LeBron James is a wealthy man). He made us wait days for the news of his next team: He'll be going to the Miami Heat. James looked like the sort of guy you see on a third date or standing around at a club or holding the shopping bags of a cute, short, big-butted girl who uses two hands to talk on her Droid. He was, in other words, passive bordering on sad. He's breaking up with his birthplace (James was raised in Akron) for a sexier, sweatier, cuter new home, with a beach and spicier food.

That is what we waited for. It was an evening only a could sports editor who doesn't publish in Ohio could love, one that confirms the insidious tyranny of the sports agent, one that made you wonder what the parents of all those Boys & Girls Club kids on the bleachers surrounding James were thinking. (Who knew Greenwich tolerated so many needy youth of color.) The in-studio silence that greeted the announcement was heartbreaking. You expected to hear some "Yeuhs!" or just polite applause. Hearing nothing made you feel like there was perhaps nothing to hear. Gravitas was probably intended. It seemed grave, instead. Wasn't it, though?

Lebron James and Jim Gray play softball.

James will leave Ohio for Miami. And too much of an entire nation has pretended to care. That is the breaking news, no? Even so, the dress shirt and jeans were a shrewd choice. James has smart style. He looks good in everything. What he wears fits -- and everything he puts on is very... him. Tonight, he gave us the clothes of a man who has achieved a lot but not the ultimate success that, say, a great suit implies.

Tonight, he was dressed like a guy rather than a god (or the King), and, in that, his narrative met painfully but not hopelessly with that of many a native Ohioan compelled to chase dreams elsewhere. By both the records of the NBA history books and his own professional standards, there remains something to prove. To attain it, he had to fly to Dwayne Wade's house and essentially humble himself. (Good luck with that, but welcome to the diaspora, anyway.) As both event television and broadcast journalism (ESPN's Jim Gray excelled at not asking follow-up questions), it was an embarrassing anticlimax. But as a Rust Belt tragedy, it was almost moving. Another factory has closed.