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The young man is not the problem. Grown-ups are the problem. Zealots among us have created a culture in which celebrity athletes believe they're entitled to pretty much anything they want.

So LeBron James walks into a store. Sees a football jersey, a Gale Sayers model, price $395. Sees a basketball jersey, Wes Unseld's, $450. He wants them both. It's $845.

Does he slap down plastic? Write a check? Peel off Benjamins?

Hah.

Here's what he does. He smiles. He smiles because the sales person gives him the jerseys.

The story winds up in The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, with the store manager quoted: "We get celebrities in here all the time. They spend a lot of money, and sometimes you've just got to give them some love."

Here's what sales people give me.

A look.

Like, "You can take that to the farthest cash register at the other end of Siberia and maybe somebody down there will care."

But it's different for big-time athletes.

At Florida State, remember, football players walked into a store and walked out in new shoes, leaving behind no cash. Not long after, an FSU Heisman Trophy candidate picked up shirts at another store for maybe a dime on the dollar.

While at Michigan, Chris Webber believed he was entitled to money. Whether or not booster/gambler Ed Martin gave Webber nearly $300,000, a trial may decide. But we know from Webber's whinings that he believed he was entitled.

Now, LeBron James.

The basketball prodigy is 18 years old, a 6-8 high school senior likely to be the first player taken in June's NBA draft. He's the one driving a 2003 Hummer H2.

My life is so humdrum that I have seen only one Hummer. The thing looked like a tank in drag. It was big, boxy, razor-edged, intimidating, gussied up with chrome and painted a yellow best described as Velveeta.

LeBron James' Hummer H2 is a platinum color. Some people might feel ostentatious driving a platinum tank with three TVs inside. Not everyone would ask a seamstress to embroider into the seat cushions the words "King James." Some teenagers would feel uncomfortable paying for a ride that costs $100,000.

But not everyone is LeBron James.

He didn't pay for one thing.

They gave him the Hummer H2.

Well, "they" didn't give him the Hummer H2.

Officially, his mother did.

She took out a loan, the Ohio High School Athletic Association has said. All the paperwork is there. The athletic association says so. Gloria James may be the only single parent in public housing who ever got a $100,000 loan.

There, my friends, is a bank. You walk in, the loan officer says, "No job, no credit, no collateral? Nooooo problem. You're entitled. Here's 100K--get your son a platinum tank."

Possibly, Gloria James studied Hummer H2 specs for years as she hid money under a mattress in preparation for her son's 18th birthday. All things are possible, just as it's possible that parasitic agents looking for a live host attached themselves to LeBron and Gloria James in a way that caused Benjamins to fall from the sky into the bank making the Hummer H2 loan.

Of course, this summer, LeBron James will have millions of his own NBA dollars burning holes in his pockets. It's possible the bank's loan officer arranged the loan based on Gloria James' future earnings as, say, president of I'm LeBron's Mom Enterprises.

Let's ask this: What's the big deal? Britney Spears is 21, and she has been teasing us for five years now. So why pick on James? If it's OK for teenage girl singers to get rich while making parasites rich, why isn't it OK for teenage boy basketball players?

An answer: Because sports is competition made possible by rules.

Britney Spears can be a pro and sing with amateurs. Nobody cares.

LeBron James can be a pro, but he can't play with amateurs because everyone agrees that money corrupts a system designed to encourage fair play and education.

In fact, there's a better question to ask: LeBron James is being punished, ruled ineligible by OHSAA for the remainder of the season, but who, exactly, is being corruptive?

Sports Illustrated's editors put James on the magazine's cover. St. Vincent-St. Mary High School made the schedule that took the team on national road trips to 15,000-seat arenas. ESPN decided to televise two of his games nationally (and local cable offered some on pay-per-view). His school signed a shoe/apparel deal with an international company. Somebody gave him a Hummer H2. A store clerk gave him two jerseys.

None of this LeBron James did. The grown-ups did it. And no matter how much we decry the prostitution and exploitation of high school and college athletics, that tawdry genie is out of the bottle, dancing half-nekkid, and we'll never get her back in clothes.

A great old basketball coach, Jim Phelan, has announced he is retiring after 49 years at Mount St. Mary's College. He in part was nudged toward the decision by a sheet of paper he saw on an assistant coach's desk. He told John Feinstein, writing for The Washington Post, that he asked about the names on the paper.

"It was the top 200 seventh-graders in the country" Phelan said. "Seventhgraders!"

Three or four, no doubt, thinking they are entitled to their very own Hummer H2.

DAVE KINDRED

dkindred@sportingnews.com