Adena Andrews.com

Just a cool article I saw on ESPN’s TrueHoop blog about how folks take sports way too seriously at times. LeBron James didn’t kill anyone and the city of Cleveland hasn’t experienced a mass outbreak of Cancer. Everyone will live. But from the way fans are reacting, it seems like the exact opposite.

Here’s a very normal video of an NBA player hooping it up with some little kids at some summer camp last week. There’s a regular mix of letting the kids do their thing, and then also wowing them with some dunks and showy moves — the things everyone in the building came to see.

Only … because it’s 2010, and the player in the video is LeBron James, this video comes to us in a blog post where every little thing he does is interpreted as further evidence of his poor character. Check out the commentary, with second-by-second breakdowns of his flaws, as if he only dunked in that game to show the five-year-olds he was so much better than them. I hope it’s a joke, but I’m just sure it’s not.

Writer Chuck Klosterman was fascinating on this topic in part one of his appearance on the B.S. Report. At one point he just says: “I feel kind of weird about being mad at LeBron for having a good life.”

At another point, Bill Simmons says that James clearly doesn’t understand “the life and death part” of sports.

Klosterman’s reply is: “There is no life or death part, Bill. If you believe a sporting event is life or death, you might as well believe in unicorns.”

And when Simmons points out some people believe in sports that way, Klosterman replies that some people believe in unicorns.

It’s a fun exchange, but it’s also a point that cuts very deeply into how we think about sports.

So, do you believe in unicorns?