Jeff Roberson / AP

LeBron James has it all: personality, talent, vision, values, work ethic and a healthy dose of athletic arrogance unspoiled by attitude, writes columnist Mike Celizic.

The goal is to have them all click into place, but when you look at all the possible combinations, you see how hard that is. Add in the influences of environment and parental example and the wonder isn’t that there aren’t more LeBrons in the world, but that there is even one.

So many things can go wrong. You look at the wreckage of promising careers through the history of sports and you see so many people who had all the talent in the world but didn’t make it to the very top. That’s because talent is just one of the factors involved. To be the very, very best, it also takes a work ethic, a sharp mind that can work in the three dimensions of space and even in the fourth of time.

Great basketball players, like great running backs and quarterbacks, simply see more of the field of play at a time than their lesser colleagues, and for them it moves more slowly than for the common press of humanity.

Vision and that special sense of space is separate from talent. There have been plenty of players who could create their own shots, but very few who could create shots for others as well.

And even that isn’t enough. We’ve seen no end of players who have the vision and the skills and the size and the speed and the quickness but lack a work ethic. Or they fall into the bottle or form too close a relationship with drugs.

Some great talents were so warped by traumatic childhoods that they can’t cope with success. Others assume an unwarranted sense of entitlement, as if the fact that they can do anything they want on a court or field means they can do anything they want anywhere.

Some are too timid to take a game by the throat, too frightened to take the shots that really matter. Others are so arrogant, they forget that they are a part of team and assume the game exists only for them.

LeBron James has the whole package — personality, talent, vision, values, work ethic and a healthy dose of athletic arrogance unspoiled by attitude.

He’s already done more for charity than most people do in a lifetime, and he takes public stands on real issues in a way that Jordan and Tiger Woods never did. He’s a great player, and, at least so far, a great human being.

And now he’s officially a man.

Happy birthday, LeBron.

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