When Cleveland Cavaliers’ guard Kyrie Irving hobbled off the court late in game one of the NBA finals – and then was shown thrown spiking his jersey angrily to the floor in the bowels of Oracle Arena in Oakland – you could almost hear a collective “Oh no, why us?” from the sports fans on the shores of Lake Erie.
And when the Cavs then lost that game to the Golden State Warriors in overtime, it was almost a “Here, we go again” refrain. For in Cleveland, which hasn’t won a title in a major sport since the Cleveland Browns won the NFL championship in 1964, losing big games and in melodramatic ways is just par for the course. Most dedicated sports fans here (and, quite frankly, almost everyone is emotionally attached to their teams) fans figured this series was over almost before it began, and the “waiting for next year” mantra started.
But sports is a fickle business for good and for ill, so Sunday night’s overtime game two win has brought the Cleveland fans off the ledge and back into celebratory mode. The win over the Warriors on Sunday night was the first NBA finals game win in Cavs history, and gunshots were heard in some Cleveland neighborhoods after the game two victory as if the Cavs had actually won the series. Such is life when most fans haven’t experienced a championship in their lifetime.
That’s how bad Cleveland wants this one. LeBron James and his cohorts – especially gritty Aussie guard Matthew Dellavedova, Irving’s replacement – have a chance to break the Cleveland curse, and it comes at a time when the city is at the precipice of turning things around after a long slide of Rust Belt economic decay. So important is this series for the city, that many are wondering how the city will react if the Cavs lose and the curse remains.
Or for that matter, how to celebrate a championship for the first time in 51 years. No one knows how to do that, because the only Clevelanders who have experience in celebrating championships are on the back nine of life, and the memory of what it was like way back when is very fuzzy.
“You have to have a certain makeup to survive in Cleveland,” said noted comic and TV host Steve Harvey during a radio interview last week. Harvey, who grew up in Cleveland, remembers listening to the 1964 championship with his father on the radio (it wasn’t on TV locally back then) when he was seven, says that if Cleveland win “we’ll finally sit around and have our punk-ass moment that we’ve been waiting for forever. The whole world will be watching us, and wondering why are these people so crazy.”
“There is a toughness in the people of Cleveland to survive what we have had to – the horrible winters and the steel mills closing, and the jokes about the city for all these years,” Harvey continued. “And a big part of that was sports. It was very much our reason for living, but at the same time it was our heartache too.”
There are far too many moments in the Cleveland Curse to list them all. Whether it was Michael Jordan shooting the city into darkness in 1989, or Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway driving his team down the field in 1987, to the Cleveland Indians baseball club being just two outs away from a World Series win in 1997, a forlorn sports misery has pervaded the Cleveland sports psyche through the years. Fans can now be seen with “God Hates Cleveland” T-shirts.
Perhaps none of the miseries hurt more than LeBron’s decision to rip his talents away from his home in north-east Ohio and leave in an arrogant manner for Miami in free agency in 2010. For a city dealing with losing sports teams and economic meltdown, that move by their very own superstar, the “chosen one” who was going to lead Cleveland to the promised land, was almost impossible to comprehend.
But the prodigal son came back this year. And the new hopes bloomed before the Cavs’ season started. “I guess, occasionally, the stripper talks to you because she likes you,” longtime Cleveland sports journalist Vince Guerrieri wrote when James announced he was coming back last summer.
“We all thought it was a flight of fancy when he announced he was coming back,” Guerrieri said. “But the sports fans in this area have always seen sports as a way out, a way to get out of the factories and the grind of the blue-collar lifestyle. So we all knew why he was leaving, in a sense. Having him back and having us in the NBA finals is almost a storybook plot in this whole thing. It’s made this run in the playoffs much more important for the fans.”
And that run has ignited more than just the fan base. While the Cleveland still has a high crime rates and poverty levels – and has seen numerous protests this year over police overuse of deadly force – there is a sense that things are turning around. The downtown area is going through a reformation, with The Quicken Loans Arena (“The Q’) – site of Tuesday night’s game three – at the center of a vibrant restaurant and nightclub scene.
The basketball team’s success is about real money. Some studies have estimated LeBron’s impact on the community to be about $500m a year, and the consulting group Convention, Sports & Leisure says the city will get about $3.6m per game for each of the playoff games held at The Q. “We feel privileged and honored to be a part of Cleveland’s rising story,” said Len Komoroski, the CEO of the Cleveland Cavaliers, said in a recent interview with CNBC.
But there are still three more victories to go to break the curse. And in the Cleveland sports fan kingdom, where the teams are so much a part of the city’s cultural fabric, people are wary that they will get hurt again. Folks in their 60s and 70s often deride those younger than them that they shouldn’t complain about losing, because they haven’t suffered as long as they have. For the younger generations, this chance at a championship is new territory, for they have now grown up without knowing what winning a sports championship even feels like.
Cleveland comedian Mike Polk has even renamed the Cleveland Browns’ football stadium to correspond with the losing culture and the city’s industrial history. He calls it “The Factory of Sadness.”
But the sadness might end this time around. “There has been a buildup in emotion this year with James coming back, and I don’t think people from outside of Cleveland can understand the reality that people are going through here that we might really get a championship,” said Peter Pattakos, a Cleveland attorney and founder and publisher of the website ClevelandFrowns.com.
“If we lose to the Warriors, the sports fan will just blame the injuries [to Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love] as an excuse for their heartache,” Pattakos said. “But if they win, it will be one of the most joyful celebrations in the history of sports. People here have invested so much in their teams. It will connect different generations and ethnicities in ways we have never seen here. [It] could be part of the new start for the city.”
.jpg?w=600)
