The difficulty of accepting that even LeBron James will have to retire

After the last defeat in the Conference final against Denver, the basketball player said that “I have a lot to think about, on a personal level and about my future as a player”. The Los Angeles Lakers champion is 38 years old, a good age to say goodbye to basketball. Yet the hope is always the same: to see him again on the pitch

It shouldn’t sound so strange when a 38-year-old hints after the last race of the season that he’s not sure he’ll go on. He shouldn’t, yet with LeBron James it’s strange. Because it was the first time in his twenty-year career that we’ve heard him address the subject, and perhaps because no one in the NBA world has really prepared for his retirement. Not immediately at least.