The Wh.o.r.e of Akron.
One Man"s Search for the Soul of LeBron James.
Scott Raab.
Chapter One.
Intimations.
I no more chose to be a Clevelander and a Cleveland fan than I chose to be a Jew transfixed by leggy shiksas. It is my birthright, my legacy, my destiny. My fate was cast in 1964 on a Sunday afternoon at Cleveland Munic.i.p.al Stadium, while Canadian gusts swept across Lake Erie and through the mammoth double-decked bowl in damp, endless circles cold enough to stiffen snot. I have seen Paris at dusk; I have prayed at the Wailing Wall; I have beheld the twin scoops of Rebecca Romijn"s vanilla a.s.s: yet never have I been so transported, never so ecstatic, as on December 27, 1964, when the Cleveland Browns beat the Baltimore Colts and won the NFL World Championship.
I was twelve years old. Old enough to stand fast, amid men warmed by whiskey and their fiery love for the Browns, and drink in the sight of 80,000 of our number rising as the clock ticked toward infinity, fixing that victory forever as a fact of history, past insult or dispute. That flag still flies in my soul. The roar still echoes in my ears. The vision-of Cleveland triumphant, of Cleveland fans in communal thrall to a joy beyond all words, of a Cleveland team lifting the town"s immortal heart to heaven-still fills my eyes. I"m fifty-nine years old now, far from Cleveland in every way save one: I still live with the Browns, the Indians, the Cavaliers, and I will die with them. They were a solace and source of hope when I had no other reason to wake up, and now that I am a man-the father of a twelve-year-old, the husband of a leggy shiksa, a sober alcoholic and drug-free addict-those teams remain a psychic rock, an anchor for my wobbling, fretful soul. Unlike two entire generations of Cleveland fans who have grown up rooting for Cleveland teams and have tasted only defeat and despair, I know what it feels like to win it all. And I have waited forty-seven years to feel it one last time before I go.
Last time I spoke to LeBron James, he was wearing a towel in the Cavs locker room at Quicken Loans Arena. The nightly media scrum wedged tight around his double-wide had retreated to their laptops to file their stories. The Cavs had won without playing particularly well, but it was April 2010, the end of another long regular season; the Cavaliers were 6016 and already had secured home-court advantage through the playoffs.
They were an extraordinary team: led by LeBron, the league"s best player, in the prime of his prime. The Cavs sold out every time and everywhere they played. Led by LeBron, they were known around the globe. Led by LeBron, they were the best thing to have happened to Cleveland-all of Cleveland, black and white, young and old, East Side and West-since Jim Brown walked away from the NFL in 1965.
Led by LeBron. Who was our native son. Who had become the face not just of Cleveland, but of all Ohio. Who was about to win his second MVP award in a row. Who was shortly to become a free agent. Who palmed our collective fate in one huge hand.
In a league full of athletes whose bodies can honestly be described as beautiful-one of the aesthetic delights of an NBA locker room is watching from a distance as the pack of mainly fat, mainly white members of the press gathers and ungathers itself as each chiseled specimen emerges from the shower-LeBron James is a masterpiece. Hewn of sinew, apparently impervious as iron-muscled yet sleek, thick-shouldered yet loose of limb, James looks different from every other player in the league, especially in a damp towel.
Still, there"s nothing especially forbidding about a guy in a towel, even LeBron. He"s a kid who just took a shower, and the fact that he can do things that I can only dream of-the physical summit of my day is a decent bowel movement-doesn"t change that. Besides, I"d been following the Cavs all season, and while I wasn"t sure James knew my name, we"d spoken in pa.s.sing a few times. He had withdrawn from any media contact to avoid questions about his impending free agency-the five-minute post-game scrums were the sum total of his availability, and asking about free agency was itself off-limits-but he sometimes was willing to field a question if you sidled up after the pack departed.
I had no question to ask. I was heading back home to New Jersey from the arena, but I knew that the next time I saw him would be during the playoffs-crazy time-and I felt I had to speak my piece. I had seen him come into the NBA at age eighteen and, from his first game forward, outplay all the absurd hype around him. I had watched grown men, league stalwarts, shuffle out of his way as he drove to the rim. I had laughed as teammates were hit in the head by bullet pa.s.ses they hadn"t dreamed James could thread through a web of defenders. And I had sat in a hotel room in Hollywood on May 31, 2007, alone, awestruck, and weeping as he scored the Cavs" last 25 points and destroyed the Detroit Pistons in a double-overtime playoff victory, the single most astonishing performance by any Cleveland athlete I"ve ever seen. I had studied him closely and been dazzled a thousand times and more. No other way to put it: it is an honor and privilege just to watch this motherf.u.c.ker play.
"I saw Oscar in his prime." I told him. "Michael. Magic. All of them. And you"re the best basketball player I"ve ever seen. Thank you."
I did and do not intend to degrade Oscar Robertson or Michael Jordan or anyone else. Nor am I claiming any kind of objectivity: I"m a native Clevelander and a Cavs fan since 1970, the year of their birth. Yeah, I know: count the rings. But I"m not talking about rings; I"m talking about pure game. All I"m saying is LeBron James is the best f.u.c.king basketball player I"ve ever seen.
He savored my little speech for a second or two, smiling ear to ear, eyes bright.
"That means a lot to me," he said, utterly sincere. "Thanks."
That was it. I didn"t urge him to stick around, to stay with the Cavs and become the Moses every Cleveland fan felt he"d be. It didn"t occur to me. Everyone-even the most cynical out-of-town beat reporter-a.s.sumed that LeBron was going to re-sign with the Cavs for at least three more years. Northeast Ohio was his home; Dan Gilbert, the Cavs owner, spent freely to get players to complement his game; adoring fans filled the Q every night, thousands of them clad in replicas of his jersey like it was the Shroud of Turin.
Trust me: I"m not sorry I didn"t say any of that, and I"m certainly not silly enough to believe that anything I could"ve said would"ve meant diddly. Which isn"t to say that I have no regrets about that conversation. I feel, in fact, a deep and abiding sense of regret-I say this as a man who has known the pain of divorce, not to mention as a Jew who bought a hundred shares of Apple at seventeen and sold them all at twenty-two-I feel remorse unto grief about that night in the locker room with LeBron.
I"m sorry, truly sorry, that I didn"t haul off and kick him square in the nuts.
Every man has a mission, a calling, a higher purpose, and if he lives long enough, life itself will thrust that mission upon him. Not in a moment of blinding insight-literature aside, the sole epiphany in life is that life offers no epiphanies-but rather as erosion. Surfaces wear away; the center crumbles; the things that once seemed vital prove their essential meaninglessness as the years go by, and what"s left-what is finally revealed-turns out to be the reason G.o.d breathed life into our very soul.
My mission is to bear witness. I"ve done that for many years now, most of them writing for Esquire magazine. I"ve borne witness to all kinds of stuff, dumb and otherwise. I"ve shared c.u.n.n.i.l.i.n.g.u.s tips with Robert Downey Jr.; I got tattoos with Dennis Rodman; I once smoked a bone with Tupac, twice did nothing with Larry David, and visited with Phil Spector in his castle in Alhambra three times, all without gunplay. I"ve written about drug-addled anesthesiologists, AIDS-stricken pedophiles, and Holocaust death-camp guards. h.e.l.l, I even went to Bill Murray"s house once for an Oscar party.
None of that felt anything like a mission; it felt like the sweetest job in journalism, the best gig any writer could ever have. I spent years selling shoes, tending bar, dealing drugs, and worse; my last time card was punched in 1983 at a nursing home where part of my job was to clean and dress old men in the morning; if one died in the middle of the night, I helped the funeral-home driver load the corpse. I"ve kept the time card; I was thirty-one years old when I left that job, and I"ve taken nothing for granted since.
This is different; this is no mere job. Like all worthy missions, mine is far simpler to state than to accomplish.
Bearing witness. To Cleveland. To the faith, hope, and hunger that bind the soul of a people to their home. To the transcendental glory of sport and its spirit, fierce and pure, beyond corruption, that drives grown men to whisper to their sons, "I saw it with my own eyes. I was there." To LeBron, who once seemed to embody that soul, and then betrayed it. And, above all, to the Cleveland fans, the veritable nation of Job, whose love burns yet through all the heartache and scorn.
King James. The Chosen One. The Wh.o.r.e of Akron. I dropped that last one on him myself, after he left to join the Miami Heat. For seven years, LeBron did the same thing as any trollop worth her taxi fare: he made the right noises, told us how good it felt, how big we were, how he loved us, how special we were. He never even told us not to touch his hair.
Oh, we knew-some of us knew better than others, of course-that he was only a child, and a child born unto a hapless mother more or less a child herself. His vast sense of childish ent.i.tlement seemed to speak louder every season. But, lord, the s.e.x was fine. And there was very little he wouldn"t or couldn"t do; he"d even play in the low post once in a while. Good as he was from the get-go, he got better each time around. LeBron James put out like no one else.
"WE ARE ALL WITNESSES" is what the 10-story Nike banner in downtown Cleveland said, but that was just slick copywriting. The fans" relationship was deeper, more complex; the hard part of bearing witness to LeBron James has little to do with him as an athlete, and everything to do with what it means to be a Cleveland fan. When he wore a Yankees cap to Jacobs Field for the opener of a playoff series between the Tribe and the Yankees in 2007-and was interviewed during the game on national television, still wearing the cap-I wrote him off as worthless sc.u.m.
"The sooner this son of a b.i.t.c.h hauls his a.s.s out of Ohio, the better," to be exact.
I caught a ton of nasty s.h.i.t for that, all from Clevelanders too young ever to have seen any Cleveland team win a t.i.tle in any pro sport. I tried to explain to a few of them that the issue wasn"t that James had grown up a f.u.c.king Yankees fan; the problem was how indifferent he appeared while insulting Cleveland and the fans who worshipped him-and who paid to watch him play.
Take Larry Bird, I"d say. If young Larry had worn a f.u.c.king Yankees cap to the opener of a playoff series between the Red Sox and the f.u.c.king Yankees, it"s no stretch to say that it would"ve had a severe and lasting impact on his career as a Celtic. Red Auerbach would"ve had Bird in hand at a press conference the next day to apologize to all of New England, but Bird still would"ve been mistrusted for the rest of his days in Boston. And rightly so.
This meant absolutely nothing to any Cleveland fans. Not because they didn"t love Cleveland and the Cavaliers and Browns and Indians, but because they weren"t old enough to have known Cleveland when Cleveland felt any collective pride and dignity. Having lived their whole lives in a punch line, having watched their favorite ballplayers leave as free agents or in lopsided trades, having seen each local franchise build a team seemingly good enough to win it all but doomed to fail in the end, often under circ.u.mstances so absurdly painful that some of them came to believe the town was actually cursed: Pride and dignity were foreign to a fan base whose daily bread had forever tasted of ash.
LeBron was their hero, their sole hope for a redemption they had yearned for all their lives but dimly understood. Traumatized by the Browns" departure in 1995 and frustrated by the ongoing inept.i.tude of the neo-Browns; haunted by the ultimate failures of the Indians" great mid- and late 1990s teams; condemned forever to viewing pre-game montages of past disasters-The Catch, The Shot, The Drive, The Fumble-each time a Cleveland team made it to a playoff game: little wonder they were King James"s happily abject serfs.
The Yankees cap was too much. I gave up-gave up trying to explain, trying to convince them that they didn"t know what they didn"t know; gave up, too, on James and the Cavs. My eight-year-old son, G.o.d bless him, tossed his LeBron jersey into the trash can, and I boycotted the entire 2008 season. I couldn"t bring myself to care about a team led by a player who cared nothing for the fans and the town. I had left Cleveland in 1984-I was not some schmuck doomed to failure and disgrace. Not me-no f.u.c.king way.
But I hadn"t yet grasped the mission. I didn"t understand my debt to Cleveland and to the teams who formed and inspired me, who gave me a place in the world and a purpose for being when nothing was all I had.
I still have my ticket stub from 12/27/64. Section 7, Row Z, Seat 19, one of my uncle Manny"s season tickets, lower deck, on the 50-yard line, last row. The upper deck cut off the top of punts, but the view of all the drunks listing as they staggered up and down the narrow walkways to void their bladders at the men"s room trough was compensation enough.
"Let"s go, Brownies," they"d chant, and the black-eyed pea of my heart sang along with them. I was stuck at the bottom of my young life. I came from what they once called a "broken" home. We"d moved from Cleveland to Los Angeles in 1960; my parents split up in 1963 and my mom-a thirty-three-year-old waif with three sons, no marketable skills, no college degree, and no love for the goyische San Fernando Valley-moved us back to Cleveland and into her parents" house.
We weren"t the Waltons. There were seven of us at first, including my great-grandmother, who was wise enough to die a week after we moved in. That left my mother, her three sons, and my grandparents-Orthodox Jewish immigrants who spoke Yiddish and often went at each other like gut-shot bears until the cops came to settle things down. My grandfather no doubt was holding back-a laborer retired from the New York Central Railroad, he was a miserably failed writer and painter, bats.h.i.t crazy to boot, who long ago had built himself a cell of his own in the bas.e.m.e.nt and rarely emerged. Gram, with a pipe fitter"s arms and hands so thickly calloused she could grab a tray of kugel hot from the oven without any mitt or dish towel, never called him by any name but Ipish-"stench"-and she"d hack at him with a big kitchen broom like Teddy f.u.c.king Williams taking BP.
I went a little nuts, too. My philandering father was thousands of miles away, and my mother was more focused on her martyrdom than motherhood. She never tired of telling me what a b.a.s.t.a.r.d my father was and how little he cared about us, and I was p.i.s.sed off about the whole deal. As the oldest, I beat my brothers as often as possible.
Once, my brother David and I tried to kill the old man. While he was at shul, we wedged the front and side doors tight, waited on the upstairs back porch until he came around to the back door, and then fired every knife in the house down at him in hope of poleaxing his yarmulked skull with one of them.
Month after month and year after year this went on, and n.o.body did anything about any of it. People felt sorry for us, which enraged me. I can imagine no firmer basis for shame and anger than to be a mere object of pity. My mother would come home from the only job she could find, as a doctor"s receptionist, and scream at her mother for having fed us. "We"re going to eat like a family," my mother would shriek, and so we"d eat a second dinner. My grades were awful. I was getting fatter and fatter; the only bathroom was upstairs, and so my grandmother would put an empty coffee can at the base of the stairs for us to p.i.s.s in, to spare us the hike. It never occurred to these numbskulls that maybe I needed something more than four meals a day.
Ah, well. There were neither boundaries nor consequences, perfect training for a writer. I read, wrote, and ate compulsively, still several years away from staggering up the long walkway of my own alcoholism and addiction. I was sullen and alone in the world, my hopelessness matched only by my waistline and my rage.
But I had an uncle-Manny Dolin, G.o.d rest his soul-an electrical contractor who spent more time in Las Vegas and bankruptcy court than he did working. But Manny owned season tickets, and so I had the Browns. And the Browns had Jimmy Brown, the best football player in the NFL; and a brilliant mathematician at quarterback, Frank Ryan; and the smartest owner in the whole world, Arthur B. Modell, an adman from Brooklyn, a Jew so shrewd that he"d managed to buy the best franchise in football with a mere $250,000 of his own loot. Even after he s.h.i.tcanned Paul Brown, gridiron genius and the man for whom the team was named, Modell rode a wave of popularity-at least on the East Side, where all of Cleveland"s Jews lived-until his slow metamorphosis turned him into a cross between Shylock and Bernie Madoff, a vile creature whose insatiable greed and want of anything like integrity led him to steal the team away from Cleveland. May he suffer another decade of strokes and spend eternity tonguing Satan"s flaming a.n.u.s.
On December 27, 1964, Manny was in Miami Beach where he spent two weeks late each winter, so Uncle Lorry picked me up and we headed downtown. Lorry drove a Country Squire, a Ford station wagon, and drove it steady-like a pharmacist, which is exactly what he was. Manny drove a Buick Electra 225 the yellow of banana cream pie, screaming from stop light to stop light a hundred blocks down Chester Avenue while butchering Sinatra in a voice grated by two packs of Pall Malls a day; Lorry didn"t smoke or sing, but he hit each light the instant it turned green. It felt like an omen, and it was. We parked and walked down West 3rd Street, into the teeth of the wind. The day was dark gray at one p.m., the lake and sky one seamless horizon that seemed to start just above our heads, the sidewalk a sea of men in topcoats and dress hats and earm.u.f.fs, an army fueled by the flasks in their coats" inside pockets, shuffling toward Gate A, toward triumph and glory eternal.
I know: I understand how lame, how hollow, how bathetic all that may seem. It didn"t feel that way to me then; it doesn"t now. When I Google "W. 3rd St., Cleveland" and see those men frozen forever, mostly dead now but younger that Sunday than I am today, my throat aches and my eyes fill with tears.
I know: it"s only a game. But what a game. The Colts were 7-point favorites, on the road. Coached by thirty-four-year-old Don Shula-drafted by the Browns after going to college in Cleveland-they boasted the league"s best offense, with six future Hall of Famers, led by Johnny U at quarterback-and the NFL"s best defense. But Unitas threw two picks into the wind, Dr. Ryan tossed three TDs, and Jim Brown gained 114 yards. The Browns won, 270.
The official attendance that day was 79,544, and not one of them would"ve believed that he"d never live to see another Cleveland team win a championship.
The Cuyahoga River catching fire?
Maybe.
Fish by the thousands washing up dead on Lake Erie"s sh.o.r.e?
Possible.
Cleveland a national joke?
Not b.l.o.o.d.y likely.
But the notion that generation after generation of Cleveland fans could be born and grow old and die without celebrating a t.i.tle?
Get the f.u.c.k outa here.
I was there. I saw it happen. It gave me an abiding sense of faith-in my town and its teams-that will never fade, that no amount of hurt and heartbreak can destroy. All those f.u.c.king Yankees fans are absolutely right. Flags fly forever. Forever.
Spake the Wh.o.r.e of Akron in his first major print interview after The Decision: "Maybe the ones burning my jersey were never LeBron fans anyway."
Exactamente, you megalomaniacal s.h.i.theel. Those were-they are-Cleveland fans. They burned their jerseys right after your hour-long ESPN smarm fest, when the whole world saw you for the stunted, soul-dead b.u.mpkin you are. Those Cleveland fans knew for the first time what utter fools they had been to believe that LeBron James ever gave a d.a.m.n about anything but LeBron James.
And because they were born and grew up and will die Cleveland fans, those fans also instantly grasped your legacy as a Cavalier: You will forever be the player who choked and quit against the Celtics in the 20092010 playoffs. You surrendered. You gave up. You and your team-while the clock still ran, with the coach urging you on-quit trying, laid down and died.
For that disgrace alone, those fans were right to burn the stinking jerseys they themselves had paid for. Add the disdain and the disrespect you showed for Cleveland as Jim Gray and Michael Wilbon f.e.l.l.a.t.ed you on national TV-not a single question about your playoff tank job or the phantom elbow injury that floated in the same ether as the rumors of your mother"s s.e.xual dalliance with one of your teammates-h.e.l.l, those fans should have torched those jerseys with you and your sycophant posse wearing them.
When the Cavaliers were born in October 1970, I was a college freshman, a 275-pound bulvan, and a blackout drunk. I never drank in high school. I never went out on a date or to a party or dance. I ate and I slept and I tried not to murder my mother, who never stopped screaming at me, or my brother Dave, who was much quieter. I punched him instead of my mother because I knew that if I ever punched my mother, I wouldn"t stop until she was dead.
A C+ high school student with good SAT scores, I went to Case Western Reserve University because they gave me financial aid, a work-study job, and room and board in a dorm where I"d never have to hear Lucille"s voice again. The dorm was eight floors of freshmen, many of them Jewboys from New York City and North Jersey who"d missed the cut at the Ivies and whose folks could afford to send them to CWRU, which had more cachet than a state college. They came with treasure-marijuana, pills, and tabs of acid; Zappa, Dylan, and the Velvet Underground; Zap Comix, the National Lampoon, and Bukowski.
It didn"t matter that I was scared to talk to a girl or that I felt imprisoned by fat or that I stole because I had no money. All of that stuff went away. I washed down reds with Mad Dog, dropped acid, smoked weed around the clock, and made friends.
By the end of my first semester, I stopped doing anything but drugs, and my closest buddy was Big George, a huge young black man I met at breakfast one morning at Leutner Commons, where I"d line up at six a.m. and eat plate after plate of hash browns. Like me, he was a local kid, but from the Glenville ghetto. I don"t even know if he was a student.
George took a shine to me because I didn"t give a s.h.i.t about anything but getting f.u.c.ked up and eating. There was nowhere I wouldn"t go, nothing I wouldn"t do. I"d ride with him into Glenville off East 105th to deliver tinfoil packets of heroin to men who"d scarcely look up from their card games at the hulking white boy who barely came up to George"s shoulder.
I never shot heroin, not that anyone offered. Never saw George shoot up, either. I didn"t handle the cash or carry a piece. I was there to learn to play Tonk and listen to them "aw-c"mon-baby" their women on the phone. I was there to ogle their orange s.h.a.g carpet and breathe in their musk. I was there because I had nowhere else to be until three or four a.m., when George and I would head back to Case and start cracking the dorm vending machines. I was there because I came from a paternal line of Jews who weren"t doctors or lawyers.
There was one doctor, actually. My father"s uncle Julius performed abortions on Jewish girls and then served hard federal time and lost his medical license after pleading to income-tax evasion. Papa Juicy adopted my old man during the Great Depression, after my real grandfather-a trumbenik named Willie, a b.u.m out of Belz, Ukraine, a bigamist and a bagman and bomb-roller for the Cleveland Syndicate during the Laundry Wars-left his wife and five kids to starve. It was Julius, Russian-born, who changed Rabinowitz to Raab.
My father grew up believing that his own mother, Julius"s sister, had sold him to Julius. Sold him. Why not believe it? Where my father grew up, off Kinsman Road, the Jews were dirt-poor, hard as nails. There were no scholars, only junkmen. Two of my father"s sisters turned tricks for small change, food, and clothes, while his mother, Gussie, sat on her bed all day, weeping. Julius was a p.r.i.c.k-I got to know him well-but Julius had money.
My father, who years later studied law and pa.s.sed the California bar in his forties, then sank for the first time into a depression so crippling that he never again attempted to practice. He got a call one day from a sister who told him that Willie was dying in New York and wanted to see him.
f.u.c.k him, my father said. f.u.c.k him.
I knew none of this when I was running with Big George. I didn"t know that I was embracing my heritage. I didn"t grow up with my father around, didn"t know Willie ever walked the earth, didn"t know why I couldn"t wait to kill somebody. Anybody. If some student or janitor had ever walked into the bas.e.m.e.nt of a dorm where George and I were prying open a candy or cigarette machine, I would"ve skulled him with a crowbar, smiling.
I was happy then. I was building something. A bridge connecting me to the world. A fortress where I could stay untouched and untouchable. A battering ram I"d use to crash through my fear of being a lousy writer, which is what I was.
Whatever else I was building, though, mainly I was digging a tunnel. For twenty-five years I dug like a motherf.u.c.ker; facing a life sentence as me without parole, I dug and dug and dug. I was strong as an ox, and, in my way, innocent, a big lout who"d rather steal than work, a fat virgin during a time of free love who was afraid of women and couldn"t imagine why any female would want anything to do with him.
And there was nothing in the world I loved more than grabbing the Windermere bus west from University Circle down Euclid Avenue to 37th Street and watch those infant Cavs trying to imitate an NBA team.
Obviously, I myself don"t know or care how or where to draw a line between fan and fanatic. Hooligan, shmooligan: I"m not talking about thuggery or booze-fueled violence in the grandstand; I mean the sort of ardor and pa.s.sion that soccer fans around the globe bring to the World Cup. You don"t get to decide if you"re born in Uruguay and you turn out to be the best futbol player on the planet, and you are possessed of even a shred of sanity, that you"d rather play for Argentina in the Cup, and then lay claim to victim status when the citizens of Uruguay hang you, in effigy or not, as a traitor.
I acknowledge the validity of the view that fanhood is a matter of rooting for laundry, that the names on the back of the jersey will change as the years go by, and that loyalty-the word tattooed in cursive script running up LeBron"s left rib cage-is not integral to the business of pro sports. It"s a one-way street stretching from the fan to the franchise and its players.
Fans see their teams as quasipublic utilities and the players as hometown heroes. A major league franchise treats its fans as a vast herd of cash cows who must be milked for the money to pay for everything from ticket-service fees to the bond issues that funnel tax dollars to the billionaire owners to help build their play palaces. Any Cleveland fan who believes otherwise should"ve left for Baltimore with Art Modell, may his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es wither as his tongue swells to the girth of an eggplant.
As for the players, they function essentially as movie stars did when Hollywood was run by a handful of studios. In exchange for fame and fortune, their services are owned by a small industry that functions as a monopoly and generates billions of dollars in revenue streams not only for the NBA itself, but also for related industries, such as media and apparel. They have a union, which is a poodle among pit bulls. They have a narrow window of opportunity to make stupid money-a window that starts closing as soon as they enter the NBA-and they risk career-ending injury each time they take the floor. To top it off, fans demand that players embrace forever the home team and town, forsaking all others till death, retirement, or suckitude ensues, in which case they essentially cease to exist.
It"s as nasty a business as any other. I get it. Cleveland fans get it. The next Cleveland sports hero who reaches free agency and opts to stay will be the first of his kind. Likewise the next free-agent superstar from elsewhere who signs with a Cleveland team . . . it never, ever shakes out that way, because the young, glamorous, and gifted don"t want to come to Cleveland. The weather is rugged. The economy is rugged. The women are rugged. For a young millionaire not named Bruce Wayne, the art museum and symphony don"t matter. The Cleveland Clinic doesn"t matter. The grit and guts that are supposed to make the underdog beloved don"t matter, either.
What made LeBron James matter so much-what made his coming to the Cavs seem like a miraculous twist of fate-was that he understood all of this and more. His pride in being a son of this soil was our own pride; his history, too, was ours. He hungered, like all of us, for affirmation and respect. He could rewrite our history and restore our pride and finally, after half a century, make us matter.
In the end, what truly matters is this: Cleveland fans love the city, cherish the teams more deeply, and pull for them with far more pa.s.sion than fans anywhere else. Other Rust Belt cities have been stripped of a middle cla.s.s over the past fifty years by the same socioeconomic Katrina, but only Cleveland became the armpit of a nation. Detroit is a sinkhole of permanent despair, Pittsburgh"s a human sewer, but fans in those cities know at least what victory looks, sounds, and feels like, and they limp a little taller and stink slightly less for that knowledge.
That"s why I hung on to that stub from 1964, while I smoked, snorted, drank, lost, or sold everything else that had meant anything to me. I never thought of it as a talisman or souvenir. It was evidence, not that I had been there, but that Cleveland had.
When I began to follow the Cavs, hoping to write a book about how LeBron James led them and every Cleveland fan in creation to the Promised Land at last, I dug the ticket stub out of a small box in the attic, dropped it into a Ziploc bag, and brought it with me whenever I headed to Cleveland. It was a sales tool-I wanted the Cavaliers to know that I was a lifer who had seen the franchise born, back when tickets to see them play at the old Cleveland Arena cost a buck with a student ID, a few cents less than a pint of Mad Dog-and it was an ideal conversation starter.
So it was that on Tuesday, January 19, 2010, when I spotted Jim Brown himself hobbling down the hallway deep in the bowels of the Q, I was able to pull the stub from my bag as I walked up to him.
Even at age seventy-three, bent on a cane and wrapped into a dark blue suit, Brown exudes a barely veiled ferocity. With eyes set deep into a cannonball skull, his gaze feels like a glare. He does not smile easily or often. His mustache is a coiled muscle that looks like it could lead the league in rushing.
You can debate all night about the greatest running back ever, but you"ll never find another athlete in any sport who stands as tall-both as an on-field force and as an archetype of American manhood-as Jim Brown. He stood up to Paul Brown as a young star when all his teammates warned him to tuck his tail. He spoke and wrote with insight and a cold fury about civil rights back in 1964, and retired to make movies at age twenty-nine, in response to being fined and bullied by his owner, Art Modell-may he be buried naked in a pigsty with a corncob wedged in every orifice.
"I wanted to show this to you," I said, handing him the ticket stub. "You"re the only other guy in Cleveland who I"m sure was there that day."
Brown grunted as he held it up and c.o.c.ked his head to get a closer look. "Cool," he said.
"I was twelve years old," I told him. "I"ll never forget it. But I never thought I"d have to wait another forty-six years."
Brown squinted at me, genuinely puzzled.
"Another forty-six years for what?"
It hit me with considerable force, that question. He truly didn"t know. And why should he? He won that ring, went out on top, and lives forever-and stays forever young-within the ebbing, fatty hearts of ancient Clevelanders. He never was a fan. He"s Jim f.u.c.king Brown.
LeBron James was waiting down the hall and around the corner-in sweatpants and a gray T-shirt-along with a pack of media hounds. It was the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the kickoff of the Cavs" "Black Heritage Month."
Thus did the Wh.o.r.e of Akron, showing all his gleaming teeth, greet Jim Brown: "What"s up, legend?"
They took turns signing a blown-up Sports Ill.u.s.trated cover-"Lakeside Legends"-produced for the occasion. James told the media he would have a copy framed for himself.
"I want it to be legendary," said LeBron James. "Anytime you can be mentioned with a great and be able to continue the legacy he built in Cleveland is humbling for me. Being from the younger generation and seeing everything he did for the city of Cleveland was awesome. We both know how much the fans love sports. Being a Clevelander, being from this area, I"ve had to learn to keep the momentum going after he pa.s.sed the torch."
The torch, yes. You"re going to need that f.u.c.king torch, pally. It"s going to come in handy down in Dante"s ninth circle of h.e.l.l-at the very bottom-where the worst of sinners are encased in ice for the worst of human crimes: treachery.