In the summer of 2010, LeBron James announced that he would be leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers and, as he put it during an ESPN special, taking his talents to the Miami Heat. Cavs fans burned their LeBron jerseys in the street, and team owner Dan Gilbert, the billionaire founder of Quicken Loans, wrote an open letter to Clevelanders condemning the two-time NBA MVP. “You simply don’t deserve this kind of cowardly betrayal,” he wrote. “You have given so much and deserve so much more.” What had fans given LeBron? And what did he owe them? The introduction outlines a theory of the relation between athletic talent and social debt, observing how the assignment of giftedness has reflected and created racial ideas about advantage and deservedness since the civil rights era. It is a theory not of elite athletes but of how the way we imagine elite athletes affects the rest of us. From Bernard Malamud’s classic baseball novel The Natural to the career of the fastest woman of all time to Gilbert’s open letter, the image of the gifted athlete has changed while the assumed debt has grown and resurfaced in other domains of American life.