Frank Deford

Frank Deford is a well respected journalist who has been writing for Sports Illustrated since the 1960s. He's also a correspondent for HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel and a regular, Wednesday commentator for National Public Radio's Morning Edition. Here's what he told NPR last Wednesday about LeBron James:

In basketball, the intrigue with the physical has always been devoted to the extremes of height - the very tall and the very short - say, Yao Ming at seven feet six, or Nate Robinson at five feet nine.
That makes the fascination with LeBron James's body all the more unusual. In NBA terms, James is, at 6 feet 8, an everyday size. But what he achieves with his body has made him a specimen like no other in the sport.

First of all, while he is listed at 250 pounds, nobody much believes that. The educated guess is that this coordinate of fluid, controlled muscle probably weighs in upwards of 265. He is, simply, ipso facto the ideal human confluence of agility and power, and to boot, he's virtually ambidextrous - an especially important ingredient in basketball.

I'm always reluctant to play the game of who's the best athlete, because different sports require such different physical talents. Sitting down, driving a race car at 200 miles per hour, or standing still, hitting a baseball at 100 miles per hour demands singular athleticism. But I would venture to suggest that in all sports that feature strength and motion alike, there may never have been any athlete so packaged as Number 23 on the Cleveland Cavaliers.