NBA Finals: 5 things to know before Game 5
By Stu White
4. Lynn Merritt will hunt you down if you harm LeBron’s brand
Speaking of that gruesome play, do you remember that angry man who screamed at the poor cameraperson, blaming him for how LeBron’s crown was cracked, saying that he, the cameraperson, should thank his lucky stars that the Cleveland training staff was able to replace all those king’s horses and men with a single centaur, able to glue the the wound closed?
Yeah, it turns out that guy wasn’t just some random dude with a suit and a poor understanding of the “Humpy Dumpty” rhyme’s plot. He’s actually Nike’s Lynn Merritt, and his job is to protect LeBron’s #brand at all costs.
If his name rings a bell, it’s because Merritt was the corporate goon who confiscated the footage of King James getting jammed on by Jordan Crawford back in 2009. It was a PR move so astoundingly wrong-footed that it’ll be probably be used to induce nightmares in first-term marketing majors for years to come. In an effort to shield LeBron from embarrassment, Merritt and Nike instead exposed their valuable #asset to an onslaught of mockery, making him seem not far removed from that bureau in 1984 that was responsible for deleting newspaper headlines or whatever (didn’t finish the book; does it end happily?). Of course, LeBron and his camp learned from that disaster and never made a poor PR move again.
Heed this warning: If you do even the smallest thing to threaten the cash cow that is the LeBron James brand, you better watch your back, because there’s a chance that Merritt and some of Nike’s off-the-books contractors will have you disappeared. Or you’ll be yelled in front of a national audience. One of the two, anyway.
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