So last night's game, from a basketball standpoint, was frankly a debacle. The Cavs are clearly just a shell of their former selves. I could only stomach the first half of the game, really--I watched a bit of the third quarter and it was pretty clear that the Cavs as a team had just given up and decided to let D-Wade's Little Brother have his way with them. Sigh.
But the result of the game doesn't really matter much, nor was it that unexpected since obviously Miami is a more talented team than Cleveland. The whole reason that last night's game was the subject of such an outsized amount of media attention--more even than the Brett Favre Returns To Green Bay As A Viking Circus--was the walking hate show. From what national coverage I heard and read, I think people were expecting thousands of angry Clevelanders to storm the floor at the Q, burn LeBron in effigy, and then put out the fire by urinating on it. I can't imagine any national sportswriters or reporters thinking that Los Angeles would burn to the ground if Kobe Bryant were to return to the Staples Center in a Denver Nuggets uniform, but clearly half the reason all eyes were on Cleveland last night was to see whether there would be any riots before or after the game.
Sorry to disappoint. There was a large amount of hostility and some top-quality booing for the first half. It was entertaining and people needed to do it. At the end of the night, it appears that most people decided they actually didn't need to get arrested in the process, and people went home with the city intact, if extremely disheartened by the lack of effort by their team. And now some of the fever-pitch vitriol I referenced in my pregame post last night will be directed elsewhere, or will simply dissipate.
It won't go completely away, though. Never. As a sports town this is not a place that forgives and forgets. Ask Art Modell. LBJ just did too many things wrong: summoning all those team owners to his lair to kiss his ring while they were courting him this summer; not telling ownership his plans so they could make other ones; and that Worst TV Special Of All Time, "The Decision." People might have gotten over him deciding to leave, because after all, people leave. It happens. People will never get over how badly he handled it. And possibly the main reason people will never get over LBJ was that he didn't do the one thing he was supposed to do: win a championship. In a city that on some level believes its sports teams to be cursed by God, that was the worst sin of all. If he'd have just ended the drought, this might have gone down easier. Now, Clevelanders have to watch from the sidelines as LeBron in all likelihood wins a couple of titles for a city that's never in one million years going to care about it as deeply as his former city would. To continue with the jilted girlfriend analogy that's been played to death, he decided to get engaged to the girl who will never love him one-tenth as much as his ex.
But in the end, maybe the intensity with which his ex loved him was a little too much for him. Maybe he was afraid we'd become the Stalker Ex, and he couldn't handle it. I lived in Northern Ohio for a few years in the 80's when I went to college, the years the Browns were good. After I moved to Wisconsin and lived there for some years, I used to tell people that Packer fans were intensely devoted, and Browns fans were kind of mentally ill. I was joking, but I kind of wasn't.
Not too long ago, I was organizing some papers in a junk drawer and ran across some things--I guess you could call them fake letters--I'd held onto from a rough period in my life. Without getting into detail, let's just say they were nasty nasty lies. Laughable ones but expressed in a very ugly way. For a couple of years I had a legitimate reason to hang onto them, but the time during which I might actually have had some use for them had passed some time ago. But I kept them--why? I don't really know. Maybe to remind myself that even while I worked hard to get to where I no longer hated the writer, I could never afford to show him any compassion if I ever had to deal with him again. I had to convince myself I needed to hold a grudge, I guess. But as I looked through them again, I thought that it could not possibly be good karma to keep such tangibly ugly things in my personal belongings simply to remind me that I once had to deal with someone who lacked a conscience. So, I let out a deep breath, ripped the papers into pieces, and then threw them into the trash at a shopping center several miles away. That was probably overkill, but hey. So was hanging onto them in the first place.
So, Clevelanders are never going to forgive LeBron ever, but with any luck last night's hatefest will at least go some way towards putting some distance between him and the city. And after all, as I said last night, the Browns are playing Sunday--and tickets go on sale soon for Indians spring training.
There is, as always, next year.
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