The Case for Cleveland

Editor’s Note: This piece was written before the events of Sunday, but I believe it is more relevant now than ever. As someone who didn’t grow up in northeast Ohio, but adopted it as my home and chose to raise a family here, this piece resonates with me. I believe a Cleveland championship is still within this team’s grasp. I believe that, at their best, sports have the ability to elevate and unify us as citizens of this great country and this great state. That is something worth hoping for. We all could use a dose of hope today. Hope and anticipation always trump despair and worry when rolling over the potholes on the road to a goal. Thanks for writing this, Cory. -Nate

We all have to come from somewhere and have little choice in the matter. A long time ago, ambitious men drew lines on paper to divvy up soil to segregate ourselves from one another, and our minds are so powerful, or so weak, that today we believe that those boundaries are natural. As time passed those lines defined where we were from and who we are. Different sets of customs, speech and mores arose. Where you’re from is probably something simple like where your grandfather found work or where your mother forgot to take a pill. For Northeast Ohioans, that work was breaking their bodies in the mile long mills that built America. Coke ovens spitting out heat so hot that it would make the devil himself blush forged the ivory tower of the American Empire. Our lines are often described as flyover country, a place to ignore in between the flight between the coasts. It’s a time and place to be forgotten. Every passing year, the powerful marriage of iron and carbon is forgotten a little more, and the red headed bastard child slowly percolates. The rust is swallowed by the rich glacial soil that once feed our grandfathers. The rust is in our rivers and lakes. The rust is in our corn and apples. The rust is in the breast milk we feed our young.

Cleveland is treated in the sporting world as untouchables, as if our mere existence lowers the American standard for a utopian society. We are the leper from Watts of the sports world. Some of our criticism is justified. We certainly aren’t well adjusted sports fans. We over-analyze everything. We can throw together analogies and laugh that we’re the battered women of the sports world, but we’re really a generation that’s been beaten with a switch by a subterfuge for decades and we refuse to leave. Our fandom is maladaptive behavior and we know it. There were times in LA that I was legitimately jealous of my friends who could take a sabbatical from their teams until they were good again. In a strange way, I became a bigger Cavs fan after LeBron left as if my fandom was challenged. I’m not the only one. We may have been a little overzealous and celebrated our first postseason win in five years a little too hard. We might have dropped a little too much confetti, but we’ve got brooms to clean it up, and our brooms can sweep more than just confetti.

We’ve evolved so far as a society that racism and bigotry are no longer acceptable behavior, but we still have sportism. We need something to unite and divide us from one another. It’s our way to vent our hate. We’ve evolved everything in life but ourselves. We’re still savages. Cleveland is the low hanging fruit of the media monster. We’re the people the cokeheads on the coast mock to make them feel better about their own insecurities. Let them. They need to us to elevate themselves. I didn’t always handle the Cleveland mockery well, and my retorts ranged from telling New Yorkers what their great grandmothers did to Boss Tweed in a Bowery bathroom, to telling Angelenos that their ancestors were dust bowl Grapes of Wrath hillbillies who didn’t have the fortitude to wait out the drought. The drought. That’s the bullet point. The 50-year title drought has defined us, like snowballs symbolize Philly. I’ve questioned if a Cleveland team winning a title would actually change anything. Would producers shelve the Cleveland sports failure package? Would journalists have to stop dusting off <ahref=”http://www.boston.com/sports/basketball/celtics/articles/2010/05/03/no_mistaking_it_he_loves_cleveland/” target=”_blank”>old articles and actually write new content every year?

Throughout this season, the talking heads have tried to divide us and the Cavs lockeroom. In the end, the roster was united. The rust is where I see the bond between Dan Gilbert and LeBron too. They are the only members of the Cavs organization that share it. Both are self-made, and their journeys couldn’t possibly have been more different, but through time, pressure and chance, they’ve forged a diamond together. Their relationship will surely be the subject of a documentary. The bitter breakup and reunion. The Decision, The Letter, The Return and the end of the drought.

A title could change a few things though. The world would have to take notice that Cleveland is no longer the bastard from a basket of the sports world. Perhaps the self-hate that we’ve developed over games played by millionaires would be gone. If this is where the drought ends, we’ll finally feel vindication for the first time in a generation. We’ll be able to show the world that rust is beautiful and we wear it proudly. We’ll celebrate so passionately that breweries will run out of beer. The parade past the river of fire will be attended by a million fighting back tears in unison. After the celebration, we’ll return to our everyday problems. We’ll go back to breaking our bodies just to get by, and over medicating ourselves. Years from now, one by one, we’ll rejoin one another again for a reunion in the dirt and we’ll give our bones back and we’ll feed the soil the rust that feed us.