Price of Jersey Uproar Won’t Be Paid by LeBron

The charlatans won.

The children lost.

The gold-braceleted guys with their limousine rides and first-class tickets and brand-new Hummers and throwback jerseys won.

The remaining shreds of high school sports innocence lost.

One of the best prep basketball players in this country’s history was officially spit out of high school sports Friday, and it makes you want to throw up.

LeBron James was bartered by his mother, sold by his school, primped by ESPN and embraced by every gel-reeking basketball sleaze in America.

Is it any wonder that when some sporting goods clerk recently offered him a couple of free old-fashioned jerseys, he took them? Considering the sense of entitlement that had been taught him, the only surprise is that James didn’t also demand pants, socks and a jockstrap.

He was nailed, of course, by an Ohio High School Athletic Assn. that had finally seen enough.

He was officially ruled ineligible for the rest of the season for accepting free clothes valued at $845, although the expulsion was less about old jerseys than old values.

It was a message to all those wishing to purchase a top prep athlete.

This, Ohio officials said, is the price.

And they were right, even if the folks at James’ misguided St. Vincent-St. Mary school think they were wrong.

“He took two free jerseys; it’s not like he fixed a game or something,” said Tim Ochsenhirt, the father of freshman forward Matthew, in a phone interview. “It’s like somebody was out to get him. It’s a one-strike-and-you’re-out penalty, and it’s wrong.”

The Akron school’s anger, however, is as misplaced as its priorities.

Don’t feel sorry for James, who long ago began treating high school with the same patronizing disinterest of a teenager treating a toddler.

Don’t feel sorry for his mother, or his manager, or any of the blank stares and empty suits who make up his entourage. As his high school career disappears across the horizon, their ship is coming in.

With James’ plate now clear for endorsements, by the time you read this, the kid is probably already a millionaire and his gravy train is living the good life.

Feel sorry for everyone else.

Feel sorry for his teammates, regular students whom St. Vincent-St. Mary sold down the river along with their star.

The thousands of dollars collected by the administration for appearance fees will not be enough to buy them a state championship.

The thousands of miles traveled by the team to make more money off James won’t get them as far as Cleveland.

All that missed homework time for nothing!

“We’re going to have to do it without LeBron, and that’s going to be very tough,” Tim Ochsenhirt said. “The whole school is very mad.”

Feel sorry for other students at that school, the regular kids who still pound their feet on the bleachers and repeat the silly cheers.

Today they are suffering the embarrassment without the first-class airline tickets or postgame parties.

“The school is very supportive of LeBron,” Ochsenhirt said. “But it’s very difficult.”

Feel sorry for anyone who believed that, for all its problems, high school sports was still a place for pure sport.

Not anymore, not when the best player in the country can be ruled too crooked to play anymore.

They couldn’t have just left James alone, could they?

This country’s basketball gurus and opinion makers couldn’t have just talked about this nice little player in northern Ohio and let him finish his high school career like a kid, could they?

Oh, no. Not in this era of the buzz, the hype, the next big thing.

In a time when society equates aging with worthlessness and decay, childhood has something too precocious to waste on children. We all want a piece of it for ourselves.

So a national magazine had to put James on the cover at a time when he had to dig through his mom’s purse to buy the book.

And a national cable network had to show his games at times when some high school kids are going to bed.

And shoe companies had to scratch his neck, and agents had to woo his mom, and promoters had to laugh at his jokes.

Michael Jordan hung out with him, Phil Knight held meetings with him, and so when one day he showed up with a car worth more than $50,000 that was supposedly a gift from his economically struggling mother, who was to question him?

When James made his only Los Angeles appearance last month at Pauley Pavilion, it was a blessing that John Wooden didn’t show up to watch the circus sully his floor.

James played selfishly, his entourage behaved arrogantly, and his coach, Dru Joyce, answered questions as if he thought he was Bobby Knight.

“That coach thinks he’s big stuff,” said Mike Rangel, one of the organizers, at the time. “But next year James is gone, and that guy will just be another high school coach.”

Sooner than that, it turns out.

Everyone just had to turn LeBron James into an adult.

Well, on Friday, they got their wish.

Shame on all of them.

Oh, and about those free throwback jerseys? The ones honoring Gale Sayers and Wes Unseld? Guys who struggled and fought and attained nothing that they did not earn?

LeBron James can give them back now.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.