After last night’s heroics from Mario Chalmers (and The Leg Cramps Heard ‘Round The World), LeBron James is now 48 minutes away from his first NBA Championship. So is Eddy Curry, but no one is gonna to publish a book length-hatchet job about the former Knicks/Bulls C, unlike the polarizing James who inspired Scott Raab’s “The Whore Of Akron”. The book has been commercially available for some time, but it seems the Philadelphia Daily News’ Stan Hochman just got around to finishing it, calling the self-obsessed Raab, “a narcissistic fraud”. Dubbing the Esquire scribe’s LBJ evisceration, “a nasty, vulgar little book about the sorry life and hard times of Raab”, Hochman isn’t quite willing to buy into the author’s thematic conceit (ie. the person holding the grudge might make for a better life story)
Raab never gets to sit down with James to poke around inside that sculpted body, searching for his elusive soul. The so-called new journalism doesn’t require direct quotes. If you are so smart, so smug that you know what the guy is going to say, you need not be there to take notes when he does talk.
Raab viciously twitters his way out of Miami credentials, so he pays scalper’s prices to sit in the stands and sneer at James. There is nothing duller in sports journalism than the diary of a writer tracking his target from a distance. And Raab, for all his writing skills, can be wicked boring at times.
Who gives a rat’s ascot for details about his sex life with his shiksa wife? Who has a twitch of sympathy for a guy so morbidly obese he needs to beg a stewardess for a seat-belt extension?
I also never had much interest in Raab’s book. But I’m not sure that’d change if the author had gotten to “poke around inside that sculpted body.” Might’ve had an easier time selling the movie rights to Vivid, though.