World mocks Chris Bosh’s crying, but the caring is what counts

• Reprints

Chris Bosh’s emotional state after the Heat’s loss in the NBA Finals — something of an oddity for a pro athlete — has brought him ridicule. | Wilfredo Lee~AP

Updated: October 16, 2011 12:17AM

When the finality of what had just happened hit Chris Bosh, he doubled over in a corridor inside the Miami Heat’s arena and sobbed.

The Dallas Mavericks had just won the NBA title over his Heat, and Bosh cried for all the pain, emotion and hard work that had gone into the chase for a championship. A TV camera captured the scene.

You can guess what happened after that.

Abuse. Ridicule. Full-blown cackling.

We bash pro athletes all the time for seeming to care only about money and stats. We wish they’d care as much about their sport as they do about their possessions.

But now someone comes along who apparently cares — a lot — and what does he get? He gets mocked for being a crybaby. It’s all over the Internet, so it must be true: Bosh is a wimp!

After that series-ending loss, LeBron James seemed to want everyone to know that he’d wake up rich and famous the next morning, unlike the rest of us, who would wake up to our torturously mundane lives. He sounded like a jerk of the highest order. Later, he said his comments were misconstrued, but, well, too late, LeBron.

When Bosh cried after a bitter defeat, he was on his way to becoming a blubbering pantywaist. That’s how it goes. If you don’t win the title, you can’t win. Let that be a lesson to you, Chris Bosh.

When he broke down, it was a reminder of how few, if any, events in our professional lives are worthy of tears. Aren’t you a tiny bit envious that there is something in Bosh’s day job that is so important to him that he would sob over it? For some of us, the fact that the soft-drink dispenser is out of Diet Coke is the only thing that can move the needle of our emotions, and then not very much.

But Bosh cared.

Reintroduced to pain

‘‘I haven’t experienced that pain in a very long time,’’ he told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. ‘‘Basketball hasn’t given me that for a while. To be so close and to work so hard and get to that point, just to come up short, it kind of just got to me.

‘‘I gave it everything I had. Sometimes when you give it everything you have emotionally — I’m not an emotional guy — it just took over. I really just couldn’t help it, but I got it out of me, and I feel a lot better for it, and I can move on.’’

A lot of us laughed at Heat coach Erik Spoelstra when he said ‘‘a couple of guys’’ cried after the Bulls beat the Heat in a game at the United Center in early March. It made his team seem soft mentally and very much vulnerable. If it couldn’t handle a loss during the regular season, how could it possibly expect to handle the pressure of the playoffs?

But this incident was different. This was a moment of profound disappointment for a player who, along with his team, had felt the hate of a large percentage of the country. He wanted to win badly. His team played badly. He cried.

Many of us have an image of the typical NBA star as being more concerned with himself than with his team. Maybe that’s because most of them are. They react with histrionics when they make a good play but don’t react at all when a teammate does something positive.

I can’t interpret Bosh’s tears with 100 percent confidence, but we should take them at face value: The game matters to him. His team matters to him.

Crying shows what’s inside

I wasn’t a big Bosh fan this season. I thought he had hitched his wagon to a pretty sweet ride. He wasn’t on the same plane as James and Dwyane Wade, even if he traveled on the same airplane with them. I thought he was, yes, soft. But I’d take my chances with 12 guys who reacted the way he did to a season-ending loss in the NBA Finals.

Bosh had a very nice series against the Mavs while James went missing. I’ll say this about LeBron, as contradictory as it might sound in a column where the bigger point is about passion, caring and teamwork: He’s unselfish to a fault. When your team is losing late in the fourth quarter, even if a pass to an open Eddie House is the right pass, you shouldn’t make it, not if you’re LeBron James. You should shoot the ball.

But that’s something he and the Heat have to figure out.

They don’t have to figure out whether Bosh takes winning and losing seriously. They saw it.

There are a lot of guys out there who believe manliness is next to godliness. But a few tears shouldn’t lead to expulsion from the clan.