An outsider takes a look at Cleveland's hurt and anger at LeBron James on the eve of his return to the city he jilted.
View full sizeLeBron James' decision to bolt for Miami and the Heat was met with a hurt and anger that remains today ... and likely will not abate any time soon. It probably will hit a peak, though, when James and the Heat make their first appearance at The Q on Thursday,.
Get close to the screen. REALLY close. Eyelash-brushing close. Can't see a darn thing, can you?
That's what's happened for a lot of Clevelanders over the years.
It's not that the city, its suburbs and its remaining residents are blind to the facts. It's just that we're too busy living reality to absorb it.
A happier analogy might be a father watching his son learn to walk, then run, then catch his first baseball or run over his first tackler. Then all of a sudden, hearing his baby boy tell his mom she needs to put razor blades on the grocery list. When the heck did the kid grow up?
Wright Thompson, who writes for ESPN's "Outside the Lines," pulled away from the screen for us, so we're not seeing single pixels, but the whole picture surrounding LeBron James' ugly, nationally televised betrayal of the people who loved him and showed that love with dollars and credit cards.
Nothing in Thompson's epic piece, called "Believeland: A proud city forgets 'The Player who Left' and Remembers What It Used to Be," is new. It's all stuff you know and I know. We've heard it in the same bars Thompson visited. We've listened to the same speeches from the same neighbors and the same people he quotes. To him, they're them. But here in Cleveland, they're us.
Some parts of the story are so honest, so true, that they're painful, like his account of the late Harvey Pekar's chastisement of the city for its obsession with sports:
It starts with love.
Cleveland is a town that loves. It loves its own history, and the harsh winters, and parish bake sales, but, mostly, it loves to root. Clevelanders root for new stadiums and old teams, for shiny halls of fame, for jobs and urban gardens, for gritty, blue-collar athletes.
Rooting is their civic disease.
That's what Cleveland's greatest poet thought. His name was Harvey Pekar, and though he wrote famous comic books, he never left his day job as a file clerk at the V.A. Hospital. His stories told not of faraway adventures but of the everyday struggles of a man living in the black-and-white streets of Cleveland. He made the ordinary heroic.
One of Pekar's stories is titled, "Why I Haven't Visited the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame." The Rock Hall, as it's called here, was one of four wildly expensive public projects built in the 1990s. The Indians and Cavaliers got new homes, then the Browns left (you could write volumes about the trauma of that), then the replacement Browns got their own new stadium, too.
The town and its residents bet on sports. They bet, hoping that by building big they could again be big. They bet, scared that losing their teams might prove them small. They built, then they pulled for those projects to be successful. Pekar railed against his fellow citizens' unquenchable need to root. He writes:
Reason No. 1 is because it's supposed to exemplify Cleveland, the comeback city, the city that bounced back from the Cuyahoga River catching on fire. But Cleveland's not a comeback city. So what if there are more clubs around downtown. That's papering over the problems. Unemployment here is relatively high. There's a lot of poverty, which leads to poor school performance and more poverty. I would hope the performance of Cleveland school kids, which was the worst in Ohio, would mean more to local residents than a rock n roll show in a football stadium. But it doesn't. The connection between boosterism and the Rock Hall is nauseating.
This was published in 2000. Three years later, LeBron James was drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers. Unprecedented boosterism ensued. Seven years later, he went on live television to break up with the city.
Four days after "The Decision," Pekar died.
Thompson's lengthy story was researched during the Cavs' Opening Day week. His sources range from U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who recalls his days as a kid in Cleveland, strolling the streets and listening to Indians games blaring through open screens.
Shots and beer at the Venture Inn in Garfield Heights are the overture for the symphony of betrayal anger he hears from mill workers and union leaders. Martinis and jazz at Nighttown stoke the fires of a fellow writer -- a repatriated Clevelander -- who is trying to understand his hometown. Daniel "Boobie" Gibson, the Cavs' second-year guard who played his way onto LeBron's team, sips virgin drinks and chows down on wings as he explains just why he's fallen in love with the town that LeBron James jilted.
It's a fascinating read. Scary, but fascinating. Like realizing that the face in the mirror as you're shaving isn't your dad's. It's yours.