OK, not really. But one aspect of the narrative of his NBA championship did bring Zhuangzi to mind (I'm reading Zhuangzi and the Daodejing closely just now, so many things bring Daoism to mind...).
Last year, when he failed, James says that he was distracted by criticism of others, looking to get back at his detractors:
"I was playing to prove people wrong last year, and people would say I was selfish, and that got to me,'' said James. "That got to me a lot because I know that this is a team game. All last year I tried to prove people wrong, prove you guys wrong, and it wasn't me. At the end of the day, I was basically fighting against myself.
"The best thing that happened to me last year was us losing the Finals, and me playing the way I played -- it was the best thing to ever happen in my career because I got back to the basics. It humbled me. I knew what it was going to have to take, and I was going to have to change as a basketball player, and I was going to have to change as a person to get what I wanted. It happened, just one year later.''
And those are clearly bad motives that, in the end, kept him from playing his best when it mattered most. This year, he cleared his mind:
I trusted my instincts, I trusted my habits that I built over the years and I just got back to being myself. And I didn’t care too much about what anyone said about me. I just kind of made my own path, but did it the right way.”
"Getting back to basics" - which in this case might mean focusing on the small immediate tasks and letting the larger issues unfold as they may - "being myself," "trusted my instincts,""made my own path:" all of these themes can be found in Zhuangzi. The story of the butcher, which begins chapter 3, is always a good starting place for thinking about how athletes develop an inward-focused practice that allows them to move through and master the flow of circumstance (and it helps explain the phenonenon of the Daoist Yankee Fan). But let me add a few lines from chapter 4, where Zhuangzi is putting words into the mouth of Confucius. In giving advice to a minister on how to carry out a mission from the king:
If you serve your own mind, joy and sorrow rarely appear. If you know what's beyond your control, if you know it follows its own inevitable nature and you live at peace - that is integrity perfected. Children and ministers inevitably find much that is beyond them. But if you forget about yourself and always do what circumstances require of you, there's no time to cherish life and despise death. Then you do what you can, and whatever happens is fine.
That notion of "integrity perfected" - 德之至也 - also has the connotation of a higher degree of "power." De - 德 - suggests a power, an efficacy in the world, emanating from the particular quality of a thing in context. To realize that power, one has to be true to oneself, integral in and of oneself. We should not try to be something we are not or act in ways that others might expect, if those lead us away from our innate qualities.
And that seems to be what James has come around to. Last year, he lost track of himself; this year, in trusting his instincts, he brought his de - 德 - power to its fullest potential.
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