By the time you read this I will be gone. Do not fear, I’m not gone forever, just gone on vacation. By the time this reaches your eyes I will be enjoying a few much-needed days off in Louisiana as I try and recharge my batteries for another sports year.

I briefly considered leaving you all with a greatest hits column. I think I won an award for this column once, maybe I could have dropped that on you again. I used to work with a guy who would do that. I always wondered what he was doing. I suppose he thought his writing was so good that people wouldn’t mind reading it more than once. Or maybe he just wasn’t very good at producing a weekly piece. Never fear dear reader, I certainly don’t have either one of those problems so I’ll go ahead and leave you with a little bit of treasure that will, hopefully, hold you over until next week with plenty of great stories to tell from the state that bills itself as a sportsman’s paradise (and really, that’s why I’m going on vacation there. I’m kind of a sportsman, at the very least, I’m a sports writer. Maybe I’ll come back with a new pair of gator boots!)

On paper I don’t see how the Miami Heat can’t win the NBA title next year (and probably for a few more years after that). LeBron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh form a pretty formidable nucleus around which to build. That said, I’ll not be surprised one bit if they don’t win a title next year. Teams of all-stars put together for the sole purpose of winning a championship often fail. If you don’t believe me, think back to some of those New York Yankees teams of the 1980s.

Those teams, of course, were built by George Steinbrenner who passed away last week. Since I’m a Red Sox fan a lot of folks asked me what I thought of the passing of the Boss. I told them all that if I was a fan of any sports team I would want my team’s owner to be just like Steinbrenner. The man did everything in his power to make sure his teams won titles. Who could ask for anything more? There was no player he deemed too expensive for his club if he thought that player could help them win a World Series. And it worked. The Yankees of today are a much better ballclub than the one he purchased in the 1970s.

Finally, from the grumpy old superstar files, it seems Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley aren’t all that impressed by LeBron’s Miami move. Both of them seem to think that the supposed heir apparent to Jordan should have stayed in Cleveland and tried to beat the Heat (and everyone else) rather than teaming up with his super-friends Wade and Bosh. I hate to do it, but I have to disagree with His Airness and the Round Mound of Rebound on this one. Lebron was simply incapable on winning a title in Cleveland and, if that’s what he wanted to do, he had to leave. This may well speak to how good LeBron is or how good the team they put around him was, I’m not sure, but I think he made the right move and I’ll be interested to see how it all plays out.