A-Rod tells LeBron James critics to lay off
Another sports superstar who left the team that drafted him and had criticism heaped upon him for subsequent postseason pitfalls has got LeBron James' back.
New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez told Fox Sports in an article published Wednesday that basketball fans should lay off the Miami Heat star.
"Winning a championship is not an easy thing to do regardless of talent," Rodriguez told Fox. "LeBron is a once in a lifetime player, especially the last year."
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Rodriguez added: "We need to remember this kid is 26 years old, and celebrate his talent."
The cross-sport support comes three days after James acknowledged that fans irked by his public rejection of the Cleveland Cavaliers last year now reveled in his failure to perform during crucial times of the NBA championship.
"At the end of the day, all the people that were rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day, they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today," James told reporters Sunday after the Dallas Mavericks won the title James sought. "They have the same personal problems they had today. I'm going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that.
"They can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal. But they have to get back to the real world at some point."
A-Rod's backing isn't that much of a surprise. Many Seattle Mariners fans never forgave him for chasing in 2000 what was then called the highest salary of any U.S. athlete, the $252 million paycheck the Texas Rangers signed to lure him south.
When A-Rod arrived at Yankee Stadium in 2004, jilted Mariners fans enjoyed watching him repeatedly fail to perform in the postseason for the same team that defeated Seattle in the 2000 and 2001 American League Championship Series.
Of course, Rodriguez finally got his championship ring in 2009. But if James takes the same nine years A-Rod needed to go from being reviled in Seattle to being rewarded in New York, chances are the 26-year-old will continue to have plenty of critics between now and 2019.