CURSEDCLEVELAND.COM

LeBron James’ refusal to talk about the Summer of 2010, has ironically brought back the horrors of last year’s Summer.  No, not the playoff disappointment, the overblown handshake controversy or the underblown racial obscenity-laced radio promo. Instead, he’s decided to revisit the dunk heard ’round Nike’s cutting room floors: the Xavier kid’s posterization that led to Nike staffers confiscating two tapes that dared to challenge LeBron’s royaltyhood.  Other tapes eventually surfaced, as many began questioning why LeBron or his minions cared, and why the underwhelming throw-down ever warranted so much attention in the first place.

Following the Cavaliers win over Utah on Saturday night, LeBron touched on the incident publicly for the first time while attempting to explain why John Starks’ dunk on MJ wasn’t in his all time top ten.

“No, it wasn’t because it was a dunk-by not a dunk-on. Starks didn’t dunk on Michael, he dunked by him. Go watch the tape again. Starks comes off the pick and drives baseline and Michael and Horace Grant come to help and he dunks by them. I mean that happens every night in the league. It was a great dunk but it wasn’t the best all-time. I mean, that is what happened to me with that kid over the summer, he dunked by me and you all made a big deal about it.”

Prepositional usage has always been a tenuous subject within the grammatical community. Does one wait in line or on line?  Try accidentally telling your parents that you’re heading out with Delonte West to attend a drive by, instead of a drive in.  Prepositions matter! Sure they’re lousy for starting or ending sentences , but they’re great when attempting to modify or complement nouns, verbs and adverbs.

Which brings us back to LeBron’s lexicon. He’s been a trendsetter in the past, so why would he, gulp, be any different in the language department?  Here’s hoping double negatives aren’t the new split infinitive.  So if MJ was getting dunked by,  what do we say about Wade’s dunk on Varejao? Was he dunked over?  Was Carter’s dunking through Weiss? When Eric Snow dunked on…OK well scratch that.  But you get the idea.  Either way, I think we’re all better off moving on from this.  Unless you want to be the one to tell the King his parsing of words makes him look on denial?