I was there. I was twelve years old. I"ve been waiting my whole life for another one. I"m counting on this team to do it this year. You hold on to that stub for me, Dan-for luck.
Gilbert smiles. "I"d be afraid to lose it," he says, pushing it back across the table. "But don"t worry. We"ll get you one to go with it."
I"m looking past him, out the big windows. We"re on the sixth floor, and I can see in the middle distance the crooked river winding out of the old smokestacks of the Flats-where they milled steel around the clock, once upon a time; where blue-collar guys whose wives stayed home to raise the kids put those kids through college on those wages once upon a time; once upon a time, right here in Cleveland, there lived a middle cla.s.s-and into the trees of the valley beyond.
I"m looking past him and I"m thinking about what that day might feel like, after the Cavs win the NBA crown, and how completely unprepared Cleveland fans would be to deal with that kind of joy. Yeah, it"s only sports, a.s.shole. Cleveland Heights City Hall is a car dealership, the 9th Street Pier and Captain Frank"s Lobster House is the useless motherf.u.c.king Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the old Arena-the Cavs" first home-is a rubble-filled lot, and the stadium where the Browns beat the Colts in 1964 was torn down so that a new football palace could be placed directly upon its burial ground. It"s only sports.
I"m not sure what Cleveland fans will do when their next champions are crowned, but I don"t think they"ll be setting cars on fire and breaking windows. I think they"ll walk out of their homes and head downtown, to Public Square, gather in drunken clumps, some howling, some praying, and hug it out till daybreak. I believe that Cleveland will never be the same; it will be a better, happier place. I truly believe that Cleveland"s collective soul will be redeemed on that great and glorious day. Nothing less.
I"m crying again-sitting across from Gilbert, who says, "It"s all right," when I squeeze out an apology for my lack of decorum. "It"s fine. I understand. Believe me. I get it."
A ridiculous business, sports. Pathetic, no? I couldn"t have imagined as a twelve-year-old living in my grandparents" house that someday I"d be a husband and father and writer, that I would be sitting here in this man"s office, blowing my nose and wiping my eyes because-of all the things in the world to care about deeply-I care so much about Cleveland and these doomy f.u.c.king teams.
"Let me ask you something," Gilbert says. "That banner"-Jesus James-"don"t you think it would be better if it said, "We Are All Witness" instead of "witnesses"?"
It"s Nike"s banner, not Gilbert"s, and I suppose it would work just as well with "witness," and I tell him so. Either way. But I"m thinking about how long and at what depth Gilbert must have pondered this issue while slowly going mad.
Is he going to stay?
Gilbert shrugs. "n.o.body knows. I think he will. I"m counting on the fact that out of all the guys he"s surrounded himself with, he"s the smartest one by far. I took him out to Sun Valley in July"-Sun Valley, Idaho, hosts an annual three-day retreat for the most powerful moguls in America-"and I saw guys pushing Warren Buffett and Bill Gates out of the way so they could get close to LeBron. He"s young but he"s from here, and he knows that"s a part of what makes him so special. I read about how he"s influenced by people around him, but I"ve gotten to know him and he"s going to make up his own mind."
He needs a championship, I say. Now. This year.
"And he"ll get it," Gilbert says.
I"m worried about Mike Brown. I"m tired of hearing him say how honored he is to coach LeBron.
Gilbert winces. "I don"t like hearing that either," he says.
I don"t know if any coach has ever been under more pressure to win it all. Or any GM, for that matter. You"ve got Danny Ferry in the last year of his deal. No extension. Now or never.
"We"re all in," Gilbert says. "All of us. All in."
Chapter Four.
The King"s Humanity We have no choice but to go to war with the d.i.c.k we have-to live our lives forward, despite knowing, like every Cleveland fan, how it"s all going to end. Death"s certainty is a fact, which is perhaps why humankind-even Jews-clings to the irrational: to laughter, love, and the faith that existence will end well, which is to say that it will never, ever truly end.
I never believed that Cleveland or its teams were cursed. Truth is, I came to believe that the Cavs were going to win it all-and that LeBron would re-sign with the Cavs-until the season ended. The fan"s heart holds fast to hope. And, even after hope is fled, to memory.
There may be a parallel earth in a parallel universe, a dimension of being where The Shot rims out, The Drive falls short, Jose Mesa closes out the ninth inning of Game 7 in the "97 World Series, LeBron and the Cavaliers win an NBA Championship, and I sport six-pack abs and a nine-inch c.o.c.k-but I sure as s.h.i.t can"t see it from where I"m sitting.
It"s a rainy Sat.u.r.day in early October, three weeks before the 200910 season starts, the day of the annual Wine and Gold scrimmage, part of the polyamorous marriage between LeBron and the Cavaliers and Akron and Cleveland.
It didn"t begin with LeBron James, that marriage. For twenty years, the Cavs" home was the Coliseum at Richfield, a 20,000-seat, $36 million precast concrete palace plunked into the nowhere of greensward halfway between Cleveland and Akron in 1974. The idea was that five million folks already lived within an hour"s drive, and that the two cities someday would form one megalopolis-and so slick Nick Mileti, who owned the Cavs plus a pro hockey team, put up the Coliseum, complete with luxury suites, unheard-of at the time, and a two-floor penthouse apartment for himself. Nick even convinced Sinatra to open the joint before all the asphalt was poured in the parking lots-and, yeah, the whole megalopolis thing turned out to be a silly vision, but it was cool at the time, and it gave all the Rubber City yokels a chance to see their teams without risking their soft a.s.ses on the hard streets of Cleveland.
The Cavs moved back downtown in 1995. The Coliseum was demolished in "99. Legend has it that the wrecking ball bounced harmlessly off its poured-concrete skin on the first pa.s.s. But after drafting James, the team began holding a preseason intrasquad game at the University of Akron"s basketball arena, known locally as the JAR, so named for one James A. Rhodes, the pinhead governor who ordered the Ohio National Guard to Kent State University-a few miles away-where they proceeded to gun down four students on May 4, 1970.
It"s barely noon and the JAR is packed already-5,500 fans here to see an intrasquad scrimmage. They know the way: this is where LeBron"s high school moved its home games when they realized how much more money than a bake sale could be siphoned from his growing fame.
I"m heading down the hall to the Cavs" locker room when Gloria James blows by-I can smell the fumes trailing in her wake. Wine. Red wine. No visible gold.
She"s a small woman clearly accustomed to a crowd parting as she barrels toward it-not unlike her boy. She looks younger than LeBron, actually; she"s wearing too-tight jeans with back pockets filigreed in shiny silver. His brow is plowed with deep furrows; hers is baby smooth.
Gloria smiles a feral, bloodshot smile at a Cavs PR person, rasps, "Tell my son I"ll be out there," and motors on down the concourse.
Her temper is lore among the local media; none of the beat guys ever come nearer to her than a nod. They say she kicked out the back window of a police cruiser once, after being pulled over for driving under the influence. During a playoff game in 2008, Gloria went after Paul Pierce when Pierce pulled LeBron out of bounds. Kevin Garnett kept her off Pierce with an arm around her shoulder. When LeBron-still tangled up with Pierce-saw her, he yelled, "Sit your a.s.s down!" Gloria didn"t blink. She just went on as she was pulled away, still "motherf.u.c.king" Pierce for messing with her boy.
Her son has Akron"s area code, 330, tattooed on his right forearm. These 5,500 people are up on their feet just because he"s out on the court; he has made his team and its fans feel like family. Before he joins the layup line, James comes over to the stands to kiss the two young boys recently adopted by teammate Zydrunas Ilgauskas and his wife from Z"s native Lithuania. Then Anderson Varejao, the Cavs power forward, walks up to press row to shake hands with the writers, smiling like a young Brazilian with a new $60 million contract. The guy is gorgeous: a valentine of a face, a head full of bobbing corkscrewed curls, 6"11", an altar boy"s sweet smile.
Seems like a happy young man, I say to one of the beat writers.
"He should be. They replace thirty percent of the dancers every off-season just to keep him fed."
Shaq, he draws the loudest cheer. He looks heavy. Looks old. Slow. Who gives a s.h.i.t? He"s Shaq. He"s here. He"ll play himself into shape.
n.o.body breaks a sweat. It"s a party, a picnic. LeBron"s squad gets whipped, Shaq"s wins: the big man scores 12 points without once lifting both feet off the floor. Everyone"s happy. h.e.l.l, even I"m happy, and I can barely walk for the pain in my back and legs. So many Cleveland fans so high on a f.u.c.king scrimmage. It was no dream: both LeBron James and Shaquille O"Neal. Who"s good enough to stop these Cavaliers-hungry, playoff-tested, and armed now not only with the best basketball player in the NBA, but with this living giant fighting by his side-who will keep them from the Grail? It may be raining in Akron, but for a Cavs fan there"s not a cloud in the sky.
Except Delonte. A few days after the Wine and Gold scrimmage, before a preseason game, one of the beat writers mistakes a nod from Delonte for an actual greeting and asks the kid how he"s doing.
"Step the f.u.c.k off," West snarls. "Motherf.u.c.king f.a.ggot. f.u.c.k you."
The media relations folks hustle the press out of the locker room. Delonte dresses for the game but never takes the floor. The Cavs announce that he"s excused from practice for a few days-personal reasons. And n.o.body in the media says or writes a word about his locker room blowup except for one blogger, who takes down his post after a phone call from the Cavs insisting that the incident had never taken place.
Poor Delonte. There are the pending gun charges from his preseason arrest, of course, and a short-lived wreck of a marriage, but underneath all that is a sweet, funny young man from DC with severe bipolar disorder, off his meds and out of his f.u.c.king mind.
West himself had gone public about his mental illness the season before, when he took a leave of absence from the team. This time around, he"s in no shape to talk-word is, he"s holed up in his Cleveland condo, suicidal-but the men in charge of West"s professional life, Danny Ferry and Mike Brown, act like none of this is of any pressing interest, and the media seem just fine with that.
"I haven"t spoken with Delonte," Mike Brown tells the media pack after another practice without West.
This strikes me as odd. As he walks back to his office, I ask Brown why he hasn"t talked to Delonte himself.
"Danny"s handling it."
But you"re his coach. Is there a problem between you two? Aren"t you worried about him?
Brown looks pained but says nothing. Ferry says nothing. The media say nothing. LeBron says what a teammate needs to say-that West is a brother, part of the family, and that the Cavs will be there for him when he"s ready to return-and that"s that.
Fine: it"s mental illness, not as easy to discuss as a broken wrist. Fine: the focus must stay fixed upon the team"s mission. Fine: I"ll reluctantly admit that the beat writers who justify avoiding the subject may really be acting out of respect for Delonte"s privacy and concern for his well-being.
But as the season unfolds, Delonte West starts to seem like a keyhole, a way of seeing into an organization operating in extremis. He was my favorite Cav last season, the anti-Mo-a skinny 6"4" dervish, quick enough to lock down opponents on D, fluid enough on offense to create his own shots, and f.u.c.king tireless. He played more playoff minutes than James himself, and never seemed overmatched by the moment.
West finds his way back to the court during the first week of the season, but he never gets his job back as a starter-and he never speaks a word in earshot of the media. He sits alone in front of his locker before and after every game, staring into s.p.a.ce, silent. Not once do I hear his voice or see anything resembling an expression on his face. No teammate ever speaks to him during the period reporters are allowed in the locker room. Postgame music blaring, players howling with laughter, the media pack going back and forth from LeBron"s corner double-wide to Shaq"s locker next to West"s, and Delonte, oblivious to all of it, sits there, eyeless, earless, voiceless. And no one ever writes or speaks of this, as if mere mention of his shade-the shadow of Delonte West-is understood by all to be taboo.
I ask Shaq about him one day after practice.
"I don"t know what that word bipolar means," he says, "but basketball-wise, I want him in there. If I"m going to war, I"m taking him with me-two minutes left, I want him in the game with me. He"s got that dog in him."
The dog?
"He got the dog in him, definitely."
I see the dog on court once in a while: Delonte faking a pa.s.s and flashing like a blade to the basket; cutting back on defense at the very moment an opposing guard tries to push the ball through a lane suddenly owned by West. His hustle at those times bespeaks his swagger; unlike LeBron, he never beats his chest, never flexes, never howls.
More often, though, West just looks dazed out there. A few times, he goes quietly berserk, hissing profanely even as he dribbles, and Mike Brown calls time-out and pulls him from the game. Delonte walks to the end of the bench, finds an empty seat to slump into, and drapes a towel over his head.
All that truly matters, mind you, is that the Cavs win and win and win. I study Delonte because he is bipolar-I am haunted by the same ghost, and by my memory of Tony Horton, a Cleveland Indian who broke down during the 1970 season and tried to kill himself, then quit the game forever at the age of twenty-six. I had booed Horton unmercifully and at great length that same summer, when I myself was eighteen and bats.h.i.t crazy, goofy enough to have snuck inside the Stadium on Banner Day with a huge "HORTON STINKS" sign-but when the Cavs take the court, when the lights go down and 20,562 Cleveland fans, their pockets full of money, their hearts full of hope, their lungs of leather filled by l.u.s.t for victory, bellow as a single cry of hunger after a half century of famine, then the blood of communal pa.s.sion washes me clean of every fanatic sin, and leaves me trembling.
It could not be so without LeBron James. Alpha dog. Omega Man. Moses. Christ. Our f.u.c.king savior. He sits unmoving as the other starters are introduced-his right leg crossed upon his left knee-and the flames belch from the JumboTron and the spotlights swing toward him, and finally he rises, and as he does, the voice of Cleveland rises with him, until the unblinking Cyclopean eye of the sports cosmos-otherwise known as ESPN-turns to fix itself at last upon Cleveland, Ohio.
Not once a season: the world watches every time he takes the floor. Across the universe, he is belovedly LeBron-and has my poor hometown ever before boasted a one-namer, a star of such magnitude as to be known by all of sentient humankind merely by his or her first name?
Harvey? Who? Pekar. Who?
Drew? Who? Carey. Get the f.u.c.k outa here.
a.r.s.enio? What? Hall. What?
Maybe Satchel, for a brief moment, in the United States of Baseball. But Satch was no native son.
Jesse Owens, greatest of all homegrown Cleveland athletes, ran Hitler"s faith in Aryan supremacy into the ground at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, winning four Golds. "Cleveland" was Jesse"s middle name, for f.u.c.k"s sake, but he was born in Oakville, Alabama, and didn"t move to Cleveland till he was nine. Besides, even in Cleveland, Paige and Owens had long ago vanished into history. LeBron James was making history, game by game, unfurling it across the firmament.
The Cavs sat me in the upper reaches of press row, between two young men typing stories about LeBron James in Chinese. We look at each other sometimes after a LeBron slam or chase-down block, and let our mouths fall open and widen our eyes in tribute to his force. We never speak a word, nor need to-we have found an international way of saying What. The. f.u.c.k.
The Lakers come to town in late January and the Cavs whup them up and down the floor-LeBron has 37 points while Kobe shoots 1231, and Shaq and Varejao reduce Gasol and Bynum to a stiff pudding-and after the game I waddle through winter"s mist across to East 4th Street, an alley when I was young, now a half block of upscale food joints. I limp into Lola, order the beef-cheek pierogi and a hanger steak, and feel better about Cleveland than I have since boyhood. People living in suburbs flung far from downtown-on both sides of the Cuyahoga River-now drive into the city to see the Cavs and get a bite to eat. They are loud, happy, proud to be part of a city many of them left behind decades ago.
They are no longer from Rocky River or Solon or Avon Lake or Chagrin Falls; every last mother"s son of them is proud to be from Cleveland, motherf.u.c.ker. Cleveland.
On the court, the Cavs flow, or don"t, through James. There are games, and lengthy stretches almost every game, where the offense boils down to LeBron, possession after possession, pounding the ball at the top of the key, looking for a cutter or an opening to drive, while the rest of the team stands in place, watching the shot-clock wind down, all of them-Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo, and Shaq-waiting for LeBron.
Off the court, LeBron also leads a team. The Cavs employ his cousin and personal a.s.sistant, Randy Mims, officially in some security capacity; in reality, Mims is James"s Minister of Ritual Handshakes. Maverick Carter, LeBron"s cousin, friend, and longtime business manager-like Mims, Carter"s an Akron guy-is a fixture at the Q and comes to practice when he feels like it. Lynn Merritt, LeBron"s Nike guy, is omnipresent. Gloria, Queen Mother, strides the bowels of the Q before and after games like she owns the joint.
What I never see is Mike Brown or Danny Ferry speaking to LeBron. Just before the All Star break, one beat writer asks Brown if he has any problem with LeBron entering the dunk contest; LeBron"s doing his annual will-I/won"t-I dance about taking part.
"I don"t get a vote," Brown says. "I don"t get a vote in anything."
If he means it as a joke, someone needs to tell his face.
"My game won"t let me score a lot of points," LeBron says one night in November after another Cavs win. He"s at his locker, facing a larger crowd of media people than usual; the Knicks are visiting, and the New York City papers all have at least one writer in Cleveland for the game, including a Times freelancer who"s been hanging out trying to do a story about James"s obsessive pregame rituals. Day after day after day he awaits his brief audience with the King, and day after day after day the Cavs" media relations folks shrug and shake their heads.
"My game won"t let me score a lot of points": it sounds odd in and of itself. Plenty of athletes refer to themselves by their first names, including James, but LeBron alone has ascribed a separate existence, complete with volition, to his array of skills.
Odd, too: tonight LeBron has scored 31 points by early in the second quarter, and finishes with 47. What he seems to be explaining is why he didn"t go off for 80 or 100 points, which, in view of the Knicks" lack of ability and interest on defense, might have been well within his reach.
"If I"m doubled, I pa.s.s," says King James.
The writers stand, impa.s.sive. LeBron weeks ago stopped taking questions about free agency, after Dwyane Wade was quoted as saying he talked to LeBron about joining forces and reporters begin pressing James about it. But the New York guys, their audience back home certain that James and his Yankees cap will never spurn a chance to play in New York City, still come, hoping to squeeze blood from a stone as their editors hope to squeeze blood out of them.
"LeBron, how much do you know about Walt Wesley?" one of the writers asks.
"Who?"
"He"s the guy whose record you broke for points in a half?"
"What"s his name?"
"Walt Wesley."
"Not a lot. When he play at?"
In my mind"s eye, Wesley"s still playing. He was the best player on the first Cavs team, a 6"11" center. I see him even now, another ghost; from my $1 student seat in the old Cleveland Arena on Euclid Avenue, I can hear him, too-"Hee-yur, hee-yur," he cries out to his guards from the low post, begging them to find some way to pa.s.s the ball to him. Forty years and a sea of Stroh"s ago, and Walt Wesley is still planted in the lane-his a.s.s thrust back into the other team"s big, his gangly arms reaching forward to catch a bounce pa.s.s that never comes.
"Thanks, guys," LeBron says, his nightly sign-off.
"I"m bored past the point of caring," says one of the New York writers. "I don"t think anybody gives a s.h.i.t anymore. Get the f.u.c.k to July 1. I"ve got nothing left to say about LeBron and 2010 and the Knicks and the Nets and the whole f.u.c.king thing. I"m done."
I don"t think much about LeBron leaving. All they have to do is win, and everything else will take care of itself. I stand with Joe Gabriele watching practice the day before the Magic visit in February, and I point at the few sad banners hung high on the wall-a conference championship, a couple of division t.i.tles-and shake my head.
Nothing to write home about, I say.
"That"s about to change," Joe says. "You can feel it."
I feel it. Orlando comes and the Cavs whip them good. LeBron has 32 points with 13 a.s.sists, Delonte has one of his best games of the season, and Shaq bangs Dwight Howard to a draw. The next day for lunch I take my cousin Jeff to Slyman"s, and we fall upon corned beef sandwiches moist and fat, mounds of salt meat stacked on soft rye, the single greatest deli sandwich in all creation. I order two more for the seven-hour ride back home, and scarf them both by the time I get to Niles-sixty miles-where I have to find a bed, and sleep away my Cleveland gluttony.
My plan to break through the wall between LeBron and the media is simple: I"ll profile Shaq for Esquire. I can"t pitch a LeBron profile, because Esquire just ran a story about him a couple of years ago. I didn"t write it-a woman did, and Maverick Carter tried to f.u.c.k her. But Shaq hasn"t been profiled by anyone for years, and surely LeBron will give me five minutes.
No dice.
"LeBron likes to do things in volume," the media relations chief tells me after two weeks of waiting. "In other words, he"ll take several pending things that he"s got to do, and instead of spreading them out to keep it light on any particular day, he"ll do nothing on several days, and all of a sudden he"ll say, "I"m going to do all of this to-morrow." "
Jesus. Now I know I"m f.u.c.ked: I"m not going to get a single second with LeBron. I"m facing a tall wall of bulls.h.i.t without anything resembling a gate.
So I wait until the media scrum breaks up after the next Cavs game and I sidle over and ask him what Shaq has brought to the Cavs.
"What"s he brought to me?" LeBron says. He looks shocked, even a bit resentful, as if I am implying that King James somehow may have been missing something. Or maybe he"s only surprised to see Santa still hanging out at his locker.
"You know," I stammer. "The four rings, the big personality."
"Ahhh, I"m the same," says LeBron. "No matter what teammate come upon this team, I"m going to be the same guy."
I stand there, staring at him, waiting.