ESPN"s rolling footage of young Shaq. With Penny. Then Kobe. And Dwyane Wade. Four rings.
"Remember," Stuart Scott is saying on the TV, "the city of Cleveland-not just the Cavaliers, the city of Cleveland-has not experienced a championship of any kind since 1964. It"s been a long, long time."
That was the year that Michael first joined the Jackson Brothers. That was eight years before Shaq was born. That was-f.u.c.k it. This is the year all of that s.h.i.t ends. Because Shaq is on the way. Shaq will foul Dwight Howard. Hard. He will drink deep from the fountain of youth. He will meld with young LeBron and make history. Together, they will redeem my ticket stub.
In the crowd shots from Madison Square Garden, where the draft is being held, Knicks fans are holding up LeBron jerseys in Knicks colors. Commissioner David Stern steps to the lectern.
"The thirtieth and final pick in the 2009 NBA draft, which the Cleveland Cavaliers have, and they select Christian Eyenga, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo."
The draft press guide is 200 pages thick; nowhere in it is anyone named Christian Eyenga.
"Eyenga," says Joe Gabriele, laughing. "Love that guy. That"s the guy I targeted."
He"s kidding. No one in the press room seems to have any clue who Christian Eyenga is. The Cavs media people promise a conference call with Eyenga. They bring out a DVD of Eyenga playing basketball in front of a crowd that seems to number about 18. He looks like a skinny high school kid.
Does he speak English? Yes, say the Cavs. But when the call is arranged, Eyenga speaks in French, to an interpreter.
He is pleased and proud to be drafted by the Cahv-va-yay, the translator informs us.
LeBron James is one of his idols. But whether the young man has had any mental conversations with Shaq, LeBron, or any other member of the Cavs organization is a question that goes unasked.
With their second-round pick, the Cavs choose Danny Green, from the University of North Carolina, not to be confused with Irish Danny Greene, a legendary Cleveland mobster. Green is a 6"6" shooting guard; Greene was the guy who helped Cleveland become the nation"s car bomb capital in the 1970s. Green holds the UNC record for most games played; Greene holds the Cleveland record for most a.s.sa.s.sination attempts survived-he is semiofficially given credit for personally murdering eight Cosa Nostra hit men-until the day in October 1977, when he came out of his dentist"s office and got into his car, whereupon a pair of nearby hitmen detonated the one parked next to his.
As soon as Danny Green"s name is announced, Joe Gabriele says, "Shondor Birns is the only guy who can stop him." Joe remembers: Alex "Shondor" Birns was the last of a long line of Jewish gangsters in Cleveland, and Danny Greene"s rabbi until they fell out over a loan arranged through the Gambino family, which eventually led to Shondor"s untimely demise in 1975, when his Caddy exploded with Shondor inside of it, at least until the blast blew Shondor clean through his car"s roof.
G.o.d almighty, it"s great to be back home.
Chapter Three.
Witness The day after the draft, I ate lunch with John Demjanjuk Jr., a Clevelander whose dad had been convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to die in Israel in 1988 for being Ivan the Terrible, an especially evil beast of a guard at Treblinka during the Holocaust. John Sr. had settled in Cleveland after the war, raised his family here, worked as a mechanic at a Ford plant in Brook Park, on the West Side of town, and became a local cause celebre in the mid-"70s, when the Office of Special Investigations-the n.a.z.i-hunting branch of the U.S. Department of Justice-put a bull"s-eye on him.
The old man"s deportation and prosecution took more than a decade, and it was always a huge local story in Cleveland, a city of ethnic enclaves divided into East and West by the Cuyahoga River. (Yep, that river-f.u.c.k you and Randy "Burn On" Newman very much.) East dwelt Jews, Italians, and African Americans; the West Side was foreign territory full, in my imagination, of Eastern European goyim, like the Ukrainian Demjanjuks, and toothless white trash from West Virginia. East and West Siders didn"t mix, save at ball games and at Cleveland State University, where I met Wife One. Her parents had never set foot on the East Side before the day of our wedding.
I"d wanted to write about Demjanjuk for twenty years. He had spent six yars awaiting execution in Jerusalem, until it came to the attention of Israel"s Supreme Court that in fact a different Ukrainian had been Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka-never mind that a small parade of Holocaust survivors had sworn under oath that Demjanjuk was the very devil who"d strolled among the lines of naked Jews as they shuffled off to their doom, who with his sword had sliced the b.r.e.a.s.t.s off women, and whose b.l.o.o.d.y whip had forced young men and old to b.u.g.g.e.r each other while he watched.
It turned out-thanks mainly to years of investigative work by John Demjanjuk Jr. and his brother-in-law Ed Nishnic-that the same evidence that convinced the Supreme Court of Israel to set Demjanjuk free had been withheld from the Israelis by the Office of Special Investigations.
When Israel let John Sr. walk, he returned to Cleveland, and the OSI came after him again, accusing him this time of being one of the hundred or so Ukrainians employed by the n.a.z.is as guards at another death camp, Sobibor. But they needed another nation willing to prosecute the case.
Israel? Fool me once. Ukraine? No sale. Poland, the site of Sobibor? Poland declined. But Germany was more than willing; you might even say the German agency equivalent to the OSI was eager for a show trial that would remind the world that the n.a.z.is had ample non-German help when it came to exterminating Jewry. And so this alte k.o.c.ker-John Sr., now nearing ninety-was again stripped of his American citizenship, deported to Deutschland, and charged as an accessory to the murder of precisely 27,900 Dutch Jews at Sobibor. Now I finally got a green light from Esquire to go ahead and do the story. It was an embarra.s.sment of Cleveland riches-Demjanjuk and LeBron? If I peeked under my bed at the Residence Inn, would I also find Dennis Kucinich gift-wrapped there?
John Jr. suggested we meet at a restaurant called the Boneyard, more or less a sports bar with a pirate theme, including an exterior design featuring a phony-brick turret being climbed by effigies of human skeletons clad in shreds.It turned out to be a perfect place for an East Side Jew and the West Side son of an accused n.a.z.i-death-camp guard to break bread. We talked about the Cavs, the Browns, and the Tribe. I didn"t flash my Star of David tattoo, but John Jr., embittered by twenty-five years of media coverage that had presumed his father"s guilt, was wise to me after I told him I"d grown up in Cleveland Heights-a Jewy haven.
I didn"t give a s.h.i.t about guilt or innocence-the judges in Munich would decide that-but I was looking for a measure of the truth, or as close as I could find after more than half a century. Good enough for John Jr. and Ed Nishnic, men of honor and integrity, Clevelanders. I figured when I was done reporting the Demjanjuk piece, I"d catch up with LeBron and the Cavs at training camp.
I"m packing for Munich when I catch wind of a story about a college soph.o.m.ore dunking on LeBron at a skills camp James is hosting in Akron. The dunk itself isn"t the news; the news is that some kid taped it and LeBron asked a Nike rep to grab the tape from the kid.
d.a.m.ned if the Nike rep-his name is Lynn Merritt, Nike"s director of basketball-doesn"t walk up on the kid with the videocam, a Syracuse University journalism student named Ryan Miller, and tell him that filming the scrimmage broke the rules and so he"d better hand over the tape. Miller refuses, telling Merritt he was following all the rules. Merritt then speaks with a camp official who talks Miller into handing over his tape.
Dumb. But no big deal. Except LeBron insists he didn"t tell Merritt to take the tape. Nike says Merritt wanted the tape because Miller broke the rules. But Miller, who comes off as entirely credible, says he checked with camp officials about the rules before he began taping; he says he was taping for hours prior to the dunk without anyone saying a word about it to him; he says that after he went up to LeBron to introduce himself, James then walked over to speak with Merritt, who then walked directly to Miller and told him to hand over the tape.
I"m reading Hannah Arendt and Gitta Sereny and Primo Levi, and now I"m thinking about LeBron James, the Chosen One-could he possibly be so insecure, so dumb, so egomaniacal, that he winds up making himself into a total d.i.c.kweed over a few seconds of video shot during an off-season scrimmage?
Yep.
I hurt my back. I was Demjanjuk"s son-in-law following Ed Nishnic up the stairs to his apartment in Cleveland and I stepped wrong, felt the twinge in my lower back, and knew that within a couple of hours I"d be locked into a week of constant spasm. It"s part of getting old, and part of being a fat f.u.c.k-and I do mean fat: I"ve been a yo-yo for forty years, and at the high end I"ll bloat up past three bills easy-and normally I"d just take to bed for a few days, then resume sitting and typing. This time, though, I fly to Munich, drive around Germany with the lawyers and investigators, fly to Warsaw and drive to Sobibor-near the Ukraine border-then I drive back to Warsaw and fly to Kiev, where I"d still be stuck in the mob at Pa.s.sport Control if a Polish pharmaceutical company executive I met on that flight doesn"t bribe my way past the lone guard. Then I ride to John Sr."s boyhood home, Dubovi Makharyntsi, an off-the-map farming village of three hundred or so Jew haters.
By this time, bouncing in the back of a Soviet-vintage Lada s.h.i.tbox over the rutted roads, I"m grunting with each jolt, sciatic pain bolting down both legs. It"s good, I tell myself. I"m an addict living on a day-to-day reprieve. I don"t use pain pills. I don"t want to wake up two years later with another marriage destroyed and my son visiting me every other weekend or in jail. It"s good, this pain. I"m here. I"m sober. I"m alive. Don"t think about the pain. Think about the Jews.
Sobibor is a deeper, darker pain-an abyss of tribal h.e.l.l carved into the dark woods, drenched in death. The disused train tracks ending just across from what had been the camp"s front gate, the small wood house serving now as a rickety museum, the various memorials dotting the grounds. On a planet ruled by a species whose one universal language is suffering, some ghosts groan louder than others.
Still, you needn"t be an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew to be wary of the cheap and easy ways the Holocaust is used to remind all of the non-Jewish world of that which they"re tired of being reminded of-especially by American Jews, especially when genocide has become unforgettably present long after HaShoah. I myself have come to resent-also to reject-all the endless, shrill insisting: that Jews be defined as victims; that Jewish history is but a parade of calamities; that Jews are G.o.d"s chosen, which seems to me to underlie not only the Holocaust itself, but the very notion of it as a unique event to which humankind must pay eternal homage.
Good enough for me that my tribe itself survived. The fact that morons by the million cling to the belief that Jews have special, even demonic, power? h.e.l.l, that"s just gravy.
Or maybe that"s just me. I was moved profoundly as I visited the Wailing Wall in 1968, but when I wrote down my prayers on a sc.r.a.p of paper and wadded and wedged it into a crack between the stones-as countless of pilgrims have done-I asked Yahweh to deliver unto my Browns a Super Bowl win, and unto my Indians a victorious World Series, and unto my harridan of a mother another husband, any husband, to get her off my back and get us the f.u.c.k out of the asylum that was her parents" house.
What I"m saying is that being a Jew and being a Cleveland fan are inextricably entwined to me. What I"m saying is that the saddest I feel on the Demjanjuk trip isn"t at Sobibor; it"s in my hotel room at the Warsaw Airport Marriott, when I go online and see that the Cleveland Indians have traded Victor Martinez to the Red Sox. I"m raising my son to be both a Jew and a Cleveland fan because my sense of duty-practical and spiritual-trumps my fear that in so doing I am inflicting needless suffering upon the innocent whose soul I treasure most in all the world. Martinez, who signed with the Tribe when he was sixteen and wept in the clubhouse when he met with the media after the trade was announced, is my son"s favorite player, and my own-and now he"s one more name to add to the list of our favorites who"d left the team and its fans behind. Victor is a wonderful ballplayer, a switch-hitting catcher, a rare talent; now he is gone. One more T-shirt that my son, kinehora, will soon outgrow, another bobblehead over the fireplace, gathering dust.
So Martinez cries while cleaning out his locker in Cleveland, headed for the Red Sox; I cry in my hotel room in Warsaw when I see the clip. My fists are clenched. If my back wasn"t locked into one elephantine knot I would throw myself onto the bed. Or order a huge room service meal. Or both.
No doubt, I"m insane. If the crux of ardent fanhood holds a touch or more of madness, then Cleveland fanhood is a bug-eyed, s.h.i.t-smeared lunatic, howling for a G.o.d who"s never going to come.
But I saw Him once, I swear. I even saved my stub.
Anyone with any experience around alcoholics and other drug addicts will tell you that when it comes to long-term sobriety, bet on the substance, not the addict. Because when you stop using the drug, you"re the same scared, sorry-a.s.s b.a.s.t.a.r.d who hid for so long-who threw life away rather than face living without being baked beyond sentience all day every day. Some folks can abuse any kind of drug and stop when the pain grows too great to bear; alcoholics and addicts never stop, because they"re too numb or frightened to feel the pain. They get stopped-by the law, by the intervention of friends or family, by the hand of fate or the angel of death.
How"s that sound? It sounds to me like a f.u.c.king addict, which is what I am, talking s.h.i.t with another f.u.c.king addict, which is exactly what I"m doing. Because I have one last job to do before the Cavs a.s.semble at training camp: a cover story starring my favorite former crackhead, Robert Downey Jr.
We"re in Pacific Palisades at his rented house, just after Labor Day. Cavs Media Day is three weeks off, the Demjanjuk story"s done and I"m only home for two days-just long enough to pry open Downey"s febrile brain and think about visiting my old man.
The cook serves lunch. Microbrewed root beer. Steak salad. Gluten-free cake. My back is killing me-I rode to the gate at Newark airport in a wheelchair-but I"m here and it"s all good, brother. Hanging here now, listening to Downey"s patter, and the birdsong, feeling the breeze-call me a hack, call me a starf.u.c.ker, but today, the only voice in my head is the gruff yet tender farmer"s: This will do, pig.
Downey"s about to release Sherlock Holmes-the first one-hence the cover. I"m trying to pry something out of him about Mel Gibson, who"s in trouble again.
"He"ll be okay," Downey says. That"s all Downey"s going to say. I know that. I respect that. I met Downey in 2005, just before he started shooting Iron Man, and we got to know each other a little bit. But Mel Gibson"s his friend. And I"m a magazine writer.
His father sure didn"t do him any favors, I say, speaking of Mel"s Holocaust-denying lunatic of a sire.
"Whose has?" says Downey.
Not mine.
"You"re not even going to drop by this time."
Nope. He"s banging a Gypsy. She"s into him for three grand so far.
"What"s his name?"
Sanford. Sandy. Long story.
"No, no. No!" Downey shouts. "I want it. Dude, I"m not f.u.c.king around."
His own father, a filmmaker, was getting Downey high before he turned ten. Out in the distance, a few miles past the Getty Center, Sanford Raab is mourning his recently deceased second wife in the same way he honored her in life, by having s.e.x with some floozy-in this case, a Romani bimbo who hit on him in a supermarket parking lot-who"ll steal every cent she can.
The key here, the through line for these fathers and their sons, is simple but hard to accept, especially for a star of the silver screen: being an alcoholic and an addict-trying and failing repeatedly to stay sober, going off to rehab or to jail-bespeaks a certain panache and offers a showcase for drama, especially out here. Being mentally ill, though, is nothing but a buzzkill. It"s uns.e.xy. And it"s not conducive to steady employment, in or out of the performing arts. Yet if you scratch most high-functioning addicts, you"ll find a self-medicating soul tortured by an exquisite pain your standard-issue street-sleeping drunk can"t afford to indulge.
The last thing Robert Downey Jr. or Mel Gibson or my father-with no savings and no income beyond his Social Security check to pay for his cigars and v.i.a.g.r.a-is going to publicly admit to is suffering from a bipolar disorder. Me, I"ll confess to anything short of killing Tupac.
He"s in love, I tell Downey. Told me that he hasn"t been this happy in years and years.
"Everyone"s happier after they get worked by a Gypsy," Downey says.
Who doesn"t love a Gypsy? Besides. .h.i.tler, I mean.
"It would be fascistic to hate Gypsies."
After lunch, we"re going to Venice, where Downey and his wife have just bought a place. I can barely walk; yesterday, I tell Downey, a gate agent saw me crooked with sciatica, and called in a wheelchair. Pushed past all the glaring a.s.sholes in the security lines, I couldn"t help smiling.
"I"m so sorry your back is f.u.c.ked up," Downey says. "But can I say-and I mean this in the most nonfascistic way-that"s a true Gypsy move, dude, the wheelchair thing."
Downey tells me his chiropractor is stopping by the new place in Venice-an entire building, four floors of mahogany and metal topped with a rooftop pool-at eight p.m. If I hang out, he"ll ask the chiro to do whatever it takes to get me upright for my flight back home in the morning.
Which is how I wind up on the phone-the chiropractor"s cell-with Shaq. Hollywood magic: The chiropractor, Dennis Colinello, works on Shaq"s back, too, and so when I tell him I"m writing a book about the Cavs, he phones Shaq"s service, leaves his name and number, and a few minutes later-I"m on a ma.s.sage table at Downey"s, and Colinello, a big, beefy fellow who brings tremendous gusto to his job, has fingers of steel clamped upon a bulging disk low on the left side of my back, squeezing it away from the nerve-Shaq calls back and Colinello hands me the phone.
Couldn"t be more psyched, I tell Shaq, trying not to yelp as Colinello works me over. Lifelong fan. Ticket stub. LeBron. 1964.
"All right," Shaq says. His voice is deep and quiet, a cavern of repose. I"m squeaking like Mickey Mouse. LeBron. Starved fans. Orlando. Kid holds down the fort. Now, you. Four rings. f.u.c.king cavalry.
"All right."
Seriously, man. The missing piece. You.
"All right."
See you at camp, Shaq. Look forward to shaking your hand.
"All right."
Every word I squeak at him I believe. He"s old, yes; in NBA terms, he"s ancient. But he rolled into Cleveland for a press conference the week after the draft, and unfolded a photo of Danny Ferry and O"Neal himself, an inelegant action shot showing Ferry bending over to grab a loose ball with Shaq"s groin pressed hard to Ferry"s a.s.s. Shaq referred to Ferry as "the great Danny Ferry" a couple of times, and informed the Cavs head coach, Mike Brown-sitting on Shaq"s other side-that the team would not be double-teaming the opposing center anymore. He proclaimed himself the dun dada of NBA centers, vowed to win a ring for the king, all that s.h.i.t-and every boast was music to me. Four rings. Four f.u.c.king rings.
Three weeks later, on September 28, I"m back at the Residence Inn for Media Day. They put a nice board under the bed for me and my back. There"s a Chipotle nearby, and a Zoup!, and a Bob Evans. I"m not sure what food group sausage gravy belongs to. I am sure that I don"t give a f.u.c.k.
The first and last words Shaq says to me when I get to the practice facility and shake his hand are "Santa Claus." The belly and long white beard and hair. My hand grasped by his disappears completely, like my son"s in mine.
LeBron is leaning against a wall, behind a semicircle of reporters and cameramen four and five deep. He says he looks forward to playing with Shaq. It"s humbling, he says, to play with an all-time great. Says his free agency options are open, but his sole focus is on winning a t.i.tle. Says he"s still not sorry he didn"t shake hands with the Magic. No, he"s not worried that Shaq will clog the lane and make it tougher for him to slash to the basket.
He looks bored. Every answer is rote. He gives the appearance of human engagement-his eyes widen, his brow knits-but never does he come close to cracking a genuine smile-or nod h.e.l.lo to one of the handful of beat reporters who"ve covered him for six years and more. Vacant.
I don"t know what I was expecting, but I"ve profiled pro athletes for twenty years and more without ever sensing disengagement so profound. The kid is twenty-four; he seems twice that age today.
"LeBron does what LeBron wants to do," Joe Gabriele tells me when I sidle over to ask him about it.
What does he want to do?
"Nothing."
Gabriele writes a column for the Cavs website. "The Optimist," a t.i.tle drenched in an irony enriched by those decades of defeat, but also a tribute to how utterly James has transformed the franchise.
You ever get a sit-down with LeBron, Joe?
"Nope."
Never?
"Nope."
How come?
All Joe does is shrug.
Everyone but LeBron seems to be in a pretty good mood.
Mike Brown, the Cavs head coach, young, pear-shaped, and sunny, is fairly glowing with good cheer.
"LeBron has accepted me with open arms," he says. "Every time I"ve asked him to do something, he"s done it."
Lordy. You"d never guess from this kind of mealy-mouthed, aw-shucks stuff-"LeBron allows me to coach him," he says in answer to another question-that Brown is now in his fifth season as head coach of the team; he talks like the video a.s.sistant he once was. I know the NBA is a player"s league; maybe Phil Jackson once said the same thing about Michael Jordan, but it"s hard to imagine Jackson sounding so earnest and grateful about it. Brown sounds like he"s still on probation, maybe because he is.
Delonte West, too, seems to be in fine spirits, particularly for a young man with bipolar disorder who was pinched by police not long ago while riding his three-wheeler armed with three loaded guns, including a shotgun stashed in a guitar case strapped across his back. Not such a big deal, he tells reporters. He"s taking his meds now. Feeling good. I want to believe him-West is a yellow-skinned, ginger-haired slyboots with darting eyes, a scruffy goatee, and neck tattoos, half gangster, half stoner-but he literally can"t stand still.
Mo Williams seems lost in the shuffle, a small man among t.i.tans, dapper even in sweats, with a trim mustache. No one asks him about his shooting against the Magic. Mo has tweeted over the summer that he"ll do better next time-and after all, this isn"t New York City, where the Daily News or Post surely would have run a back-page headline during the Orlando debacle screaming "SCHMO WILLIAMS" in 96-point block capital letters. Here in Cleveland, especially on Media Day, n.o.body wants to rock this boat, this team, this last best hope-this year-for a championship.
Including me. The first time I go to meet with Dan Gilbert, owner of the Cavs, he"s at the team"s executive offices on the sixth floor of the Q. The LeBron Christ banner rules the view from the floor-to-ceiling windows, high above the Cuyahoga. If he can get a statewide issue pa.s.sed, Gilbert wants to put a casino on the sh.o.r.e. A house afire, Dan Gilbert. Intense is far too mild a word: this Yid once got into a fistfight at a friend"s son"s bar mitzvah. My kind of guy.
I tell Dan flat out: I can"t score a bucket, shoot a free throw, grab a rebound, or set a pick; I can"t help the Cavaliers win a single game in any way that doesn"t involve a sniper rifle and a life sentence; I"m going to write a book about the upcoming Cavs season come what may, but I"ve rooted for Cleveland teams with all my heart for all my life, and I"d rather see the Cavaliers win the NBA Championship than write a bestseller.
We"re in a big conference room, just me and Dan and my ticket stub, which I now remove from the Ziploc bag and slide across the table to him. He picks it up and studies it for minute, turning it over in his hands. Gilbert is not a large man, but he"s a power lifter, a no-necked, thick-chested, thin-lipped brick of a billionaire, a Detroit guy who builds business after business after business, beginning when he was an undergrad at Michigan State, running football pools.
"This is great," Gilbert says, looking at the ticket. "You were there?"