The announcement of LeBron James choosing to play for the Philadelphia 76ers for the next two years hit our fair city like a lightning bolt into an otherwise sleepy Friday summer day. But shock soon gave way to giddy excitement. James has a lot left in the tank and immediately makes the home team championship contenders. If he can do what he did in Cleveland, Miami, and Los Angeles and bring home that Larry O'Brien trophy, boy will that parade slap.
Beyond just elevating the 76ers on the court, James' arrival in Philadelphia portends many more positives for our city. Media coverage, jersey sales, and social media eyeballs follow James literally everywhere he goes. The extended James clan will soon learn how to navigate our transportation, schools, and social scene, and his global fan base will learn all about Philly in the process. As for the games themselves, national telecasts disproportionately feature whatever team LeBron is playing for, meaning a lot of shots of our arena and city will be broadcast around the world.
I'm brought back 35+ years ago to the second half of my senior year in high school, when I was deciding to go to Penn and then getting ready to enroll. Being a nerd of that area and serious about my career aspirations, the opportunity to go to the best undergrad business program in the land in the Wharton School of Business was too hard to pass up, and honestly if campus was on Mars I would've built a rocket ship to get me there.
Nowadays, youth are much more aware of the location in which they'll be spending four formative years of their lives, and they think about how that setting is part of the educational process they are buying into. But back then, I picked Wharton first and foremost, and the fact that it was in an old East Coast city that I knew very little about was truly an afterthought.
That said, by the second half of my senior year in high school, I was beginning to imagine myself living in Philly for the next four years (not knowing, of course, that I would fall in love with the city AND meet a girl, and consequently spend the rest of my life to date there). And, into that moment, a new group called Boyz II Men burst onto the scene with their mega-hit, "Motownphilly."
The song was immediately and insanely popular all over the country, and, while I had other reference points for Philly (Liberty Bell, Dr. J), that song essentially served as a proxy for this new place I would be going to. And so I could not help but equate Philly as a place that was unspeakably cool, somehow brash and refined at the same time, and unmistakably something that everyone couldn't get enough of.
"Motownphilly" was released in April 1991, the very month I submitted my decision to enroll at Penn. It's no exaggeration to say that that song helped cinch my decision to go to school 2,500 miles from home and put forth effort in getting to know the city that school was located in, which in turn has set the course for the entirety of my life since then. I'm not sure there's a song that's had a bigger impact on my life.
Fast forward to the present, and maybe there are shy teenagers all over the world whose decision to come to Philly is influenced in part by the fact that if it is a good enough place for LeBron James to pick for the sunset of his career and to serve as the 2026-2028 home for the extended James family and professional unit, then maybe it holds some promise for them as well. Whatever circumstances came together in the world and in my head in April 1991 to make me decide to come to Penn, I am profoundly grateful for the good life they have led to for me. It's exciting to think that maybe there are others in 2026 who are about to embark on the start of a similar journey.
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