LeBron James featured on second cover of Sports Illustrated, talks about NBA Finals loss and his dad

CLEVELAND - The former king of Cleveland is coming clean about the dealing with another NBA Finals failure, his relationship with his father and taking advice from rapper Jay-Z.

Akron native LeBron James is featured on the cover of the April 30 issue of Sports Illustrated, with the story “Meet the rejuvenated and revitalized LeBron.”

“I lost touch with who I was as a basketball player and a person,” James said. “I got caught up in everything that was going on around me, and I felt like I had to prove something to people, and I don’t know why. Everything was tight, stressed.”

James left the Cleveland Cavaliers for Miami in a live announcement on ESPN in 2010. With Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh by his side, James went to the 2011 NBA Finals, only to lose to the Dirk Nowitzki-lead Mavericks.

“I couldn’t watch TV because every channel—doesn’t matter if it was the Cartoon Channel—was talking about me and the Heat. On the Cooking Channel it was like, ‘So we’re going to make a turkey burger gourmet today, and LeBron James failed!’” James said in his interview with writer Lee Jenkins.

James told Sports Illustrated that he stayed alone in his bedroom after the loss, and was occasionally visited by his mother, Gloria, and now-fiancé Savannah Brinson. He said he didn’t shave and “looked like Tom Hanks in Castaway.”

Sports Illustrated said that James came across as a thoughtful individual during the interview. The two-time NBA MVP even spent time talking about his dad.

“My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I use to always say, ‘Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?’ But as I got older I looked deeper though, ‘I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?’” James said. “It made me grow up fast. It helped me be more responsible. Maybe I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

Despite the absence of his dad growing up, James did comment on a person he has come to turn to for advice: Jay-Z.

“He grew up in the inner city, in [Brooklyn’s] Marcy projects, hearing, ‘You’ll be a statistic, you’ll never make it out’. Now we’re sitting here in New Jersey, and he owns part of the [Nets]. He tells me, ‘Remember where you came from, what got you here and why you love this game so much.’”

This Sports Illustrated cover comes more than 10 years after James was featured during his junior year at St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in Akron. The article was called “The Chosen One.”