By Gus Garcia-Roberts and Vince Grzegorek
It all started with four words uttered by a man named Patches: “Shit, I’ll wear anything.”
It’s mid-September and Gus Garcia-Roberts is conducting an experiment on the streets of Miami. The former Scene staffer and current Miami New Times scribe has strayed just a few hundred feet from the King’s new castle: American Airlines Arena, home of the Miami Heat. He is armed with a LeBron James Cleveland Cavaliers jersey that has never been worn.
Enter Patches, an ex-con standing in a bombed-out block strewn with groggy homeless. He’s lean and muscular, and he speaks with a strong accent from his native Cuba. He wears mesh shorts, a green bandanna folded over his dead left eye (hence the nickname), a red Pizza Hut hat, and a twig between his teeth. Patches manages to make it all look more badass than bedraggled.
Gus offers him the wine-and-gold jersey, its $59.99 price tag only recently removed. He is all but sure what will happen. Without hesitation and bearing a wide grin, Patches throws it on his bare torso and struts across filthy pavement. A buddy, slouching against a chain-link fence, eyes him enviously.
Patches is the sole test subject. The study’s conclusion: The homeless don’t mind wearing out-of-date sports gear, even if it comes with a little baggage. This may not seem like a groundbreaking epiphany — unless you’re a homeless advocate in Miami.
Two months earlier, “The Decision” left all of us up north with seven years’ worth of suddenly worthless, useless, and utterly unwanted LeBron garb, all of it tinged with the pain of another sports heartache and the nationally televised betrayal at the hands of our Chosen One.
The question, besides Why exactly does God hate us so much?, was what to do with the accumulated bounty of the LeBron years. Seconds after James revealed that he was taking his talents to South Beach, one natural option became clear: Fire. A live shot of an improvised jersey bonfire was even depicted on a split-screen during the program, alongside James’ semi-shocked face.
Thanks to the expansion-era Browns and the trade-happy Indians, we have long been a people accustomed to sporting jerseys of players long departed from our fertile shores. But this was different. These would never be worn here again. These were burning effigies before ESPN could cut to commercial.
This article appears in Oct 20-26, 2010.
hi, this is vicente parayno jr. from philippines. can you give us here also some old jersey and shoes of lebron james for the poor here in philippines. we value this kind of stuff and we also wear some old clothes here. thanks and God bless.