NBA superstar LeBron James and leading basketball pundit Stephen A Smith are shouting over their insecurities

They are large public figures with the wealth of pharaohs, and yet LeBron James and Stephen A Smith display the egos of eggshells.

Their yah-yahing has gone on for a month now, first Stephen A. with his armchair braying and now LeChosen One on a show with an even louder rasp, Pat McAfee’s, trading what we are to understand as manly barbs in an argument over honour.

But the true, if cynical-sour, amusement lies in watching their duel of fragility. You can crack either one of them with one hand for an omelette.

These guys are meeting the American moment.

People have talked up Smith (mostly it’s been coming from him) as a legitimate future politician or even Presidential candidate, while James is one of the US’s weightiest athlete influencers - and they’re needier than middle-schoolers.

There you are, channel-scanning and looking for a break from the frightening level of political nitwittery, only to land on ESPN and hear Smith and James scrabbling to gain a little patch of ground. Yet in a way it’s a relief, because their friction is so unserious that it’s like listening to satin rub against mink.

To review, back on January 29, Stephen A. said that Bronny James would not be in the NBA without his daddy. About a week later he went to a Los Angeles Lakers game and during a break James the elder scolded him and said something to the effect of “Stop talking s--- about my son.”

Of course it sounds serious: that’s Stephen A.’s chief talent, he has the American broadcaster’s ability to give solemnity to a clown show.

As he lectures rather than listens, he can make anything sound like a grave threat to the nation, with a cadence normally only applied to state occasions. The long pauses. The sesquipedalian speech, and portentous delivery, the pronunciamentos that something is flabbergastingly blasphemous.

By the time he was done describing how James confronted him so “unexpectedly” it was akin to the murder of a king in a cathedral.

“I’ve thought … long and hard … about this … over … the last … few … hours,” Smith said.

Except with his Queens accent “thought” came out “tawt.”

Smith kept protesting that he was unwilling to address the situation publicly, and yet he went back to it again and again, baiting James. James didn’t just take the bait. He swallowed the whole rod.

During an hour-long conversation on McAfee’s show Wednesday, he swiped back at Smith, “if it’s one person that couldn’t wait until the video had dropped so you could address it, it’s your a.. Like, seriously.”

Then, of all things, James felt the need to justify himself. “He completely missed the whole point,” James said. “Never would I ever not allow people who talk about the sport to criticise players about what they do on the court. That is your job to criticise … That’s all part of the game. But when you take it and you get personal with it, it’s my job to not only protect my damn household but protect the players.”

This is a man of 6ft 9in and 113kg and if soup cans had skin, they would be his abs. He is also the greatest player in NBA history - yes, yes, he is, and more on that in a moment. What’s he doing trifling with the jackdawing Stephen A. Smith?

He knew it was undeserving of attention. “I know he’s going to be happy as hell when he hears me talking about him,” James admitted. “He’s going to get home and grab some ice cream out of the f..... freezer and sit in his chair in his tighty-whities on the couch.”

But he couldn’t help it. And that, actually, was the biggest reveal of all.

If there was one fascinating segment in James’s expansive interview with McAfee, it came when he talked about his relationship with another all-time great, Michael Jordan - and what he said was, “We don’t talk.”

And apparently the reason is that Jordan is too competitively thin-skinned about his legacy. “We all know MJ, even if you don’t know him personally, he was one of the most ruthless competitors there is,” James said. “Until I’m done and he doesn’t have to look at me run up and down, wearing number 23, and every time my name is mentioned, it’s mentioned with his, he’s like, ‘I don’t want to effin talk to you. Don’t call me, I’m on the back nine.’”

It’s the trick of modern American fame to take people who might have real majesty and reduce them to insecurity. It’s not particularly their fault: James is pixilated, applicated, vlodccasted, multiplatformed, shared, managed, and generative content-foddered. We his audience are no longer “watchers” or “listeners.” We are content “users.”

It’s not a pretty word.

It all screams what Martin Amis, borrowing from Saul Bellow, described as “The Moronic Inferno,” a culture of “mass, gross, ever-distracting human infamy,” which is becoming “a reality: the only reality.” Better to be infamous than restrained - or God forbid, so poor you have to fly commercial. You can’t help but notice the plush plenitude all these men are swathed in, Smith in his lavender custom-tailored suits, James and McAfee trying to look real in black on an artificially junky set but flashing gold wristwatches big as sundials.

The difference between Smith and James in this bonfire of vanity is that one of them is real, and one of them is not, one of them has content and the other is the user, one of them is the far emptier shell.

James is a man of monumental achievements. The NBA’s all-time leading scorer, at 40 years of age he is still putting up triple doubles. Yes, Jordan had the more unearthly leap; yes, Kobe Bryant, that grinning menace, played better speed chess with his feet and shoulder-fake fall-aways.

But no one has ever had James’s completeness, his maestro-like command of the entire floor. More than his points, his 11,522 assists - roughly twice as many as either Jordan (5633) or Bryant (6306) - bespeak the totality of his basketball, which after all is ultimately a collaborative game, at its core a self-denying one, and it’s been the worthiest thing about him.

There has always been a sense of struggle in James to remain resistant to vanity and hyperfame.

He’s controlled his own content, with interesting experiments like The Shop. He’s kept a tight circle, chosen some interesting causes, and seemed, on the whole, somehow less selfish than some of his GOAT peers.

But like most public figures these days, he seems to be prey to our collective, insecure, abhorrence of dignified silence, which we mistake for a vacuum. His back and forth with Stephen A. is a silly fear-driven subplot that chatters over real grandeur.