The man-bites-dog story of yesterday’s terrific Heat win over the Bulls on ABC — by the way, boy howdy do those teams just look light years better than the Knicks can even fathom — was that LeBron James had ridden his bike to the game. (Traffic was gnarled because of the Miami Marathon.) This led to the first positive publicity LeBron’s had in about a year, because people who ride bikes are always so smugly proud of themselves that they’d praise Kim Jong Il if they saw a picture of him riding a Schwinn. (Well, if he weren’t dead.) As an innocent pedestrian who has noticed how aggressive and dangerous the average cyclist has become in this city over the last few years, we couldn’t help but get into it on Twitter yesterday with The Wall Street Journal’s excellent writer Jason Gay, who said James riding a bike was “very, very cool” and that the “best part” was that he was “stopped at a red light.” We took umbrage, pointing out, “Cyclists shouldn’t get CONGRATULATED for stopping at light. They should just, you know, do it” and that bikes are more annoying to pedestrians than cars because “it’s pretty rare that a car: a) runs a red light; b) goes wrong way down street; c) gets on the sidewalk.” We bring all this up as a reminder that it’s okay to still hate LeBron and, in fact, this is just another reason. We’ll think of him every time we remember how miserable it is to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge now.
LeBron Less Rude Than Most Bikers
Cross-trainer!