By the time the Golden State Warriors finished dancing with the trophy and flew back home to California, a tired, old script was being written about the city they left behind. Woe is Cleveland the narrative began once more. The city of sports misfortune sinks again. Another season gone, another year without a championship.
The story has been so easy to write it has grown stale from overuse. Cleveland’s misery was rolled out when the Cavaliers didn’t win a championship in LeBron James’s first time there. It burned through dozens of news cycles when James bolted for Miami. It has been trundled out about every third week during the Browns seasons, held up as some deeper failing of a city, as if championships should define a fan’s soul.
But although Cleveland lost the NBA finals this year, it has already won. Cleveland won when James chose to come home last summer, vowing to win the elusive professional sports title that has dangled over the city for 50 years. The Cavs came two injured players short of destiny this month, but with James still in his prime, they should get there eventually. If Cleveland came within a couple of games of the title without two of their top three scorers, why can’t they win in a postseason when they are more fortunate?
“Yes, the Cavs lost but is it the end of the world?” 63-year-old Cleveland sports fan Ken Canfield told the Guardian. “I saw they are 3-1 odds to win the title next year. You know, we were in the finals this year. Oh, boo-hoo.”
Unlike the portrayal that says Canfield must be long-suffering and filled with despair, he was thrilled with the Cavs postseason. He never figured James would win a title his first season back in Cleveland. That the Cavs withstood early-season turmoil to thunder their way into the finals was a surprise. That they fought through a series they were destined to win, playing a relentless style, diving and sprawling across the court, only filled him with hope for next season.
Canfield is a longtime Browns season ticket holder. He has seats in the vaunted Dawg Pound behind the east end zone, where fans cleverly sneaked a keg past unsuspecting security by hiding it inside a wooden dog house. He owned a prime seat to years of heartbreak. If anyone should buy into the storyline of a pitiful Cleveland, it would be him.
“I understand that there are almost 160 professional seasons between the three teams that haven’t won a championship,” he said. “But [the lament] isn’t warranted. I enjoy watching the Cavs. I enjoy watching the Indians. I enjoy watching the Browns.”
There is a sincerity to most Cleveland sports fans, a dedication that isn’t apparent in more successful sports markets. The city’s teams might not hold parades, but people there still love their sports. Through every fiasco that has engulfed the Browns, who keep cycling through coaches and quarterbacks like thrift stores suits, their stadium remains filled – a none-too-silent statement that Cleveland doesn’t need a championship to define it.
“How many sports fans would stick through their sports teams without a major championship,” said Tim Riley, a Cleveland attorney who also has season tickets in the Dawg Pound. “I think it’s something to be respected, not pitied.”
For a long time Cleveland was not mocked in the years after the Browns won the 1964 NFL Championship Game. In those days, championships weren’t the primary determiner of a fan base’s happiness. Canfield believes the change came somewhere around the advent of sports radio and ESPN. Before then, there wasn’t a national voice to parachute into town and remind everybody that Cleveland was repeatedly failing some spots litmus test. No great, encompassing network existed to run regular video montages of Earnest Byner’s fumble, Jose Mesa’s ninth-inning meltdown and the fans burning James jerseys in the hours after he announced he was taking his talents to South Beach.
“Every time they do that they are showing the worst moments of my life,” said Jesse Vincent, a 33-year old Cleveland sports fan. “It’s like showing all my ex-girlfriends all in a row.”
Vincent lives in Los Angeles now, a city with glamorous sports franchises whose teams draw massive crowds but lack the bond with their fans the Cavs, Indians and Browns share with Cleveland. As a child, Vincent was at Municipal Stadium for the last game of the first Browns franchise, before it moved to Baltimore. He remembers fans coming to the stadium with bolt-cutters, telling guards at the gate that they had paid for their seats, sat in them for years and now were taking them home. Stories like this are worth more than a trophy on a rich owner’s shelf.
Trapped in California, Vincent bought the NBA package for his television. He watched the Cavaliers rise this year and almost win. Tuesday’s loss was bitter, but his phone lit up with texts from friends from far-flung places, who had little affinity for Cleveland sports but felt for a dedicated fan whose teams had let him down too many times.
And in the sadness of another near-miss, Vincent took solace in the respect shown by those who would otherwise not care. This too was something to embrace on the week another title failed to come to the banks of Lake Erie.
“Winning a championship isn’t what defines my life any more,” Canfield said.
Someday that title will come, perhaps as soon as next year if the right players join James. Those ready to write another tired, old tale of a city that can’t win the big one are missing the point. Cleveland the sports town has been winning for years.
Cleveland wins every time Vincent tunes into his Cavs games in his California home, or heads to a sports bar to watch the Browns with the full knowledge that this won’t be season. Cleveland wins every year Canfield writes the check for another eight home games in the Dawg Pound. Cleveland wins each time Riley leaves his downtown offices and steps into the throngs gathering to go to Cavaliers games even though the team has never won a title in its existence.
Cleveland has been winning in the way most other sports cities never do.
LeBron James came home. He did this even after fans burned his jersey, cursed his name and said the worst thing they could – that he was not one of them. The elusive championship should follow. These are good sports times now. The Cleveland sports cliché no longer applies.
