The Cavs amazing triumph reflects a "never-surrender" spirit that defines the soul of Cleveland and the team from the very beginning.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Shot, The Fumble, The Drive.
Cleveland's sports futility is always distilled to such cliches.
Oh yeah, there's also The Curse. It's as if the 52 years since the Cleveland Browns' 1964 championship has been a continuous run of bad luck. (Thank God that's over.)
But the the Cavaliers' unlikely, come-from-behind, against-all-odds triumph is much more than merely the ending of the drought. It is the culmination of a scrappy, never-surrender spirit that defines the soul of Cleveland -- not to mention the credo of the Cavaliers franchise from the very beginning.
Of course, the Cavs' addition to the myth of The Curse comes with, yes, The Shot -- that series-winning basket by Michael Jordan to defeat the team in the NBA playoffs, May 7, 1989, at the old Richfield Coliseum.
"That's the one time I thought there might be something to this curse thing," says Burt Graeff, who covered the game for The Plain Dealer. "But then you realize that the Cavs had a tremendous team, but they were going up against Michael Jordan - and it's not like the Cavs were the only team to lose to him."
As Chuck D. of Public Enemy once told me in an interview with The Plain Dealer: "Cavs fans suffered while Jordan was in the league, so did Utah fans and Knicks fans and everyone except Bulls fans."
The Cavs swept the Bulls 6-0 in the regular season and had won 10 more games than the Bulls in the regular season, 57 to 47.
Sounds familiar?
Golden State, which swept the Cavs 2-0 during this season, won 16 more games this season. The biggest difference, however, was LeBron James.
"Like Jordan, LeBron is a once-in-a-generation player, and the deeper the Cavs went into the series, the better their chances to win," says Graeff, who now resides in Tucson, Arizona. "But I gotta say, even after they did win, I couldn't believe it. It's amazing."
Amazing to all, but especially to longtime fans. The Cavs, you see, have come a long, long, long (repeat "long" about 30 more times) way since its inaugural 1970 NBA season.
"We finished 15 and 67 that first year," said Bill Fitch, the team's first coach, in an interview with The Plain Dealer.
The team consisted of bench players from other teams that the Cavs received in an expansion draft. How did they pick the players? It was about as low-rent as you can get: To prepare, the Cavs spent $20 on NBA bubble-gum trading cards so they could study the player bios on the back.
They played in a dump, the old Cleveland Arena on Euclid Avenue. The circa-1937 building - renowned for hosting the first rock 'n' roll concert -- was more hospitable for circuses than professional basketball.
Call Cavaliers founder Nick Mileti the grand master.
The John Adams High School grad was once a cheerleader. It became his greatest asset.
He noticed that the Arena, at 3717 Euclid Ave., had only one tenant: the Cleveland Barons hockey team. So he bought the team and the venue and started putting on ice shows and spectacles with dancing elephants.
"There was an NBA team called the Cincinnati Royals that would play some of its games at the arena as far back as 1966," says Graeff. "They always drew really here, and it showed that Cleveland was a real basketball town."
That fan enthusiasm and Mileti's resourcefulness led to his landing of an NBA franchise -- for $3.7 million, little of it his own money.
"Cleveland deserved a basketball team,'" said Mileti, in an interview with The Plain Dealer. "That I was able to buy one on terms, meaning I didn't have to come up with all the money up front, made it even better."
After conducting a contest in The Plain Dealer to name the team, Mileti narrowed 14,000 entries to a handful, from the Forest Cities to the Jays.
One name stuck out.
Clevelander Jerry Tomko wrote that the Cavaliers "represent a group of daring, fearless men, whose life's pact was never surrender, no matter what the odds."
"It was no contest -- Cleveland Cavaliers," said Mileti. "It rolls off the tongue and says it all: a fun-loving, aggressive guy with a cavalier attitude."
NEVER SURRENDER, NO MATTER WHAT THE ODDS.
It has become a credo for the franchise that has defied long odds in its history-making comeback from being down 3-1 in the NBA Finals. But it was always that way, from the very beginning.
"We were really bad our first four years, everyone said we were the worst in every category," says Fitch. "But we actually led the league in stolen cars. After every game, people would race to the pay phones to report that their cars were missing."
Things weren't much better inside the Arena.
"The showers and locker rooms were so bad that visiting teams would get dressed in the hotel across the street and come to the games in their uniforms," said former Cavs announcer Joe Tait, in an interview with The Plain Dealer. "There were some real bleak times back then."
Beyond bleak.
"At one point, the team was 2-37," said Tait. "But that didn't stop Nick. He'd be there greeting the fans, cheering on the team and yelling at the refs."
Mileti had a cavalier attitude tailor-made for the spotlight.
"He was so brash," said Austin Carr, in an interview with The Plain Dealer. "He's the guy with his head up, wearing a full-length mink coat and looking all stylish and positive."
Thing were looking up for the franchise by 1974, the year Mileti opened the Richfield Coliseum. The good news started with the showers - they worked.
"I remember the Boston Celtics coming to the old arena, and John Havlicek said he wouldn't go there because he didn't want to catch an incurable disease," says Graeff. "So the Coliseum fixed that."
By 1975, the Cavs were an up-and-coming team that had finished 40-42. They won the Central Division the following year and captured the hearts of Northeast Ohio with the Miracle of Richfield.
Cynics might wonder how winning an Eastern Conference semi-finals series qualifies as a miracle. But it was a long way from the beginning - and it was an underdog story that rivals this year's Cavs championship.
Though the Coliseum proved to be a prize, it never spurred development of the restaurants, hotels and shops Mileti had predicted. Instead, the $25 million edifice drove the empire into a ditch.
"He thought that Cleveland and Akron would eventually merge and that the Coliseum was the perfect spot," says Graeff. "But it never happened, and he ended up having to sell the team."
Egads, the Ted Stepien years.
Considered the worst owner of any sports team ever, Stepien traded draft picks away, leaving the cupboard bare for years. It resulted in the NBA imposing the "Stepien Rule," preventing teams from trading two straight No. 1 picks, and to a trade embargo.
"He was so bad that the NBA had to monitor every trade he was involved in," says Graeff. "The general manager of Dallas would often refuse to go to lunch because he was afraid he might miss a trade call from Stepien. The team was the joke of sports."
Stepien oversaw a carousel of coaches, fired Tait from his play-by-play duties and issued a bizarre series of stunts and statements that earned the team the nickname, the Cleveland Cadavers.
He also thought about naming the team the Ohio Cavaliers and having them play in area markets, with an eye toward moving the team to Toronto.
"Thankfully, he sold the team to George Gund," says Graeff. "The NBA had mercy on the Cavs and gave the team an extra draft pick, which they used to pick Ron Harper."
Harper was part of a stellar 1986 draft that also netted Brad Daugherty and Mark Price, the foundation of those great Cavs teams of the 1980s and '90s.
"Those were tremendous teams," says Graeff. "What they did is sometimes overshadowed by 'The Shot.' "
Sometimes it comes down to a shot. There's always a little luck involved.
This year's Cavs team had both, not to mention a block from a once-in-a-generation talent.
As the Warriors took a 3-1 lead, however, LeBron found himself mocked and maligned and written off as some longshot underdog. It only made him the perfect Cleveland hero and, finally, the ultimate Cavalier. Especially when teamed with longshots, cast-offs and rogues -- like Matthew Dellavedova, Iman Shumpert and J.R. Smith.
More than anything, LeBron & Co. exhibited that Cavalier spirit that goes all the way back to 1970.
Never surrender, no matter what the odds.