LeBron James’ final act is about more than basketball. It’s about time | Claire de Lune

The NBA superstar’s shock move to the Philadelphia 76ers isn’t about money or legacy.

It’s about confronting the end of a career and making the most of whatever remains The most enormous celebrities, those larger-than-life characters with immense cultural impact, occupy a kind of hard-to-quantify space in the zeitgeist.

They’re human, of course; that’s what makes them compelling. But they often come to represent something beyond themselves.

In LeBron James’ case, for me, he’s become a measure of the passing of time. An aide-mémoire of my own mortality.

Yes, his defiance of the aging process has been heartening proof that while Father Time comes for us all, the pace isn’t fixed.

But the growing number of gray hairs in his beard, the players born after he was drafted who now meet him in transition, are persistent reminders that time marches on. On the one hand, as anyone who has experienced it can attest, aging is exhausting.

Battles once worth fighting no longer seem worth the effort. An extra 30 minutes of quiet solitude starts to feel like life’s greatest luxury.

So perhaps that instinctive understanding clouded all of our assumptions about where LeBron would choose to finish his

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  LeBron James’ final act is about more than basketball. It’s about time | Claire de Lune