Two wins away. Nobody need remind a Cleveland fan to expect the worst possible ending to this series, but here we are: Two wins away. Two stinking wins. Two wins away from heaven, two wins away from ending a drought of...enough. Hell, anyone paying any attention at all to these NBA Finals should already be sick of the Cleveland stuff, especially the incessant Cleveland whining. I myself am sick of it, and I'm getting paid to moan.
But here's the thing: For the same half-century, since 1964, when the Cleveland Browns won the NFL Championship, so long ago that the Super Bowl had not yet been born, this city has been beaten down far more brutally than its teams. Yes, Cubs fans have every right to insist upon a suffering that dates to 1908, and yes, the Golden State Warriors haven't won an NBA crown since 1975. But, as Allen Iverson never said, we're talking about Cleveland. Not Chicago. Not the Bay Area. We're talking about Cleveland.
We're talking about America's go-to punch line since the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969. As a brand, Cleveland is a 1979 Chevy Malibu with 137 bullet holes and a 12-year-old boy holding a toy gun at a city park shot dead by police. It's not that large parts of Chicago—and of Oakland and San Francisco, too—aren't suffering exactly the same human misery inflicted by institutional racism, predatory capitalism, and its wing man, the politics of scarcity; poverty and hunger have come to define America's urban core from sea to rising sea. But we're talking about Cleveland—a lumpy mash of suffering, tribalism, and the shame and guilt that no one who can afford to buy his way into an NBA arena for a Finals game ever wants to talk about.
Cleveland.
It's only sports, I know, and two more wins won't stop the bleeding, much less heal this city, which long ago internalized the city's national image as a clown town full of losers. That burden, the damage done to the spirit and soul of this place, runs deep and feels permanent. It'll be in the air again tonight. For half a century, Cleveland teams have become its face, and the players have become scapegoats for forces far more powerful than even LeBron James.
The defining and most fascinating aspect of LeBron's homecoming essay is his understanding and embrace of that burden. Even in Cleveland, the wise guys read it as the trigger of a brilliant re-branding campaign, and it was. But it was a love letter, too, from a native son who understood the pain and rage and love he left behind—who felt it in his bones.
Two more wins, and Cleveland—even if only for a little while, and even though it's only sports—will feel something else, something entirely foreign: Glory unto ecstasy. Two stinking wins and a parade. In Cleveland. A parade.
It's only sports. It's only sports. It's only sports. But ask any Cleveland fan to describe what that parade is going to feel like, and watch his eyes fill. Not with the unseen and unfelt, but with all that pain and rage and and loss.
Yeah, it's only sports.
Only redemption.
Only love.
LeBron's got this.
