LeBron is in good company when it comes to being 'posterized'

Now that we've seen the tape of LeBron James getting "posterized," or at least dunked on by Xavier's Jordan Crawford at his summer camp, we have the context to gauge James' and others' reaction.

Permitting (if not instructing) Nike reps in the gym in Akron, Ohio, to confiscate video evidence of the play, sure, that's one way of handling it. Then there's this way, by what would be known as The Jordan Rules of Posterization.

"[Michael Jordan] would have probably cleared the gym out and said, 'It's me and you here, 1-on-1, for about the next half hour,' " former Bulls coach Doug Collins said recently on the Dan Patrick Show.

Jordan, of course, had the luxury of playing the bulk of his career in the relative Jurassic period of the Internet, when an NBA defender who got posterized truly wound up on a poster, taped to a kid's bedroom wall, the shelf life of the public indignity short. Times have changed. Everything is, or swiftly winds up, in the public domain. Behind closed doors in a summer-camp gym? Not a chance now, not with YouTube and TMZ and all the other forms of viral transmissions.

"You have to understand," Collins also said, "these NBA players today, they'll be in a game and a guy will be going to the basket ... and a guy goes up, sometimes guys will get out of the way. I've said to guys before, 'C'mon, you've got to go up and challenge that.' [They say] 'I don't want to be on SportsCenter.' "

Makes the notion of winding up on a poster seem quaint. Do kids even buy posters of their favorite players anymore? Now the great fear is getting shown up globally and in perpetuity. You've been wallpapered, baby. Bitmapped, JPGed and YouTubed. Getting dunked on now is like getting an electronic tattoo ... chosen by a rival ... smack in the middle of your forehead ... that never, ever can be burned or grafted off.

From the moment man first dunked -- literally a giant leap for mankind and, legend has it, first executed regularly by Oklahoma A&M 7-footer Bob Kurland in 1945 -- other men have been in position to get posterized. It's a long, storied tradition that seems only recently to have turned ignoble.

For years, dunkers and dunkees have switched roles easily, giving as good as they got. Kurland dunks on George Mikan, Mikan dunks on Kurland. You think Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain didn't suffer the supposed humiliation of being posterized by the other on many, many occasions? No one held it against anybody -- one man slammed, the other maybe checked for blood or a pebble-grain impression between his eyes, then took the ball and passed it in. Play on.

(Or not. An early and still-famous case of official posterization came courtesy of Darryl Dawkins in Kansas City in a November 1979 game halted by the moment. Philadelphia's man-child center slammed the ball with such ferocity that he smashed the glass backboard and had Kings forward Bill Robinzine ducking from the shards. Dawkins immortalized the play and his dunkee by naming it -- "Chocolate Thunder Flying, Robinzine Crying, Teeth Shaking, Glass Breaking, Rump Roasting, Bun Toasting, Wham, Bam, Glass Breaker, I Am Jam'' -- but arena workers were the ones scrambling for a new basket.)

Good for Robinzine, by the way. "I've seen more guys who won't even contest dunks because they're afraid of 'ending up on a poster,' '' one NBA big man said this week, requesting anonymity lest he be, I dunno, targeted for a few fresh ones. "I think every single thing should be contested, whether it's a dunk or a three-pointer. If a young player is worried about getting dunked on, he's not doing everything to help his team win."