BRING IT, CLEVELAND!

“I will loudly and obnoxiously root for my team EVERY week. Even when they frustrate me beyond belief, I go back every week and believe things will change. It’s an emotionally abusive way to live but fuck it – I’m still proud to be a Cleveand fan”. 

       *Stolen without permission (because I can’t remember who wrote it) off of one of my friend’s Facebook statuses  many months ago.

It’s finally here. The day that LeBron comes back to Cleveland.  I don’t know what to expect tonight but I do know that most of the country thinks Cleveland is a bunch of whining babies about this, anyway.  Regardless, I honesty don’t know why any city outside of Cleveland thinks that they would react differently if this happened to them.   New York fans boo their own team and spit on opposing players’ wives just on a normal day. Why do they think that they’d sit politely by while a guy like LeBron bitch slaps them on national television?  Please.

I stopped trying to reason with people from other cities about why Cleveland fans have reacted as they have. I am very aware that had Prince James written a nice letter like Z when he left, Cleveland fans would have still been angry and Prince James would have faced the same harassment which Jim Thome endures everytime he plays at the Jake.  Prince James is no Zydrunas Ilgauskas, for sure. But to have him announce it on national television just threw gasoline on an already raging inferno. It was wrong.  We’ve had other athletes leave before – some that we have liked (Kenny Lofton) and some that we haven’t (Derek Anderson- which great news conference, dude! ) and we always feel betrayed.  We are used to it.   Maybe, it would have helped if we had won a championship somewhere along the way. I don’t know. One thing is for sure – if you’re not a Cleveland fan, you just don’t get it and, quite frankly, you never will.  We love our sports teams – and we love to hate our sports teams. We can talk badly about them. You can’t. We love our city. We can talk badly about ourselves.  You can’t. 

You don’t get it. You never will.

There are passionate fans.  And then there are Cleveland fans. We live and die our sports teams. We are loyal and passionate to our own detrement. We believe our team will win the World Series even knowing that every player we have on the team just came out of our Triple A farm club.  We fill our football stadium every Sunday and bark our approval over a rookie quarterback that wasn’t supposed to take a snap this year. We form lines to drink the beer called “Quitness” and don five layers of clothes to attend opening day of baseball season in a blizzard – three days in a row.  We love a guy named Booby and join a group called Grady’s Ladies.

We are a city of unemployed workers who offered to pay the fine of our owner that wrote a letter one fateful night in July and don’t care that, to him, that fine was pocket change.  Dan Gilbert gets us – and we love that about him, even when outsiders did not.  

Even when our teams disappoint us, we stay faithful and continue to believe. Tonight, we will fill that Q with die hard Cleveland fans, 20,562 strong. You may think that we are terrible fans and should sit down and behave ourselves.  But I ask you:

What would you do?  (smirk)  BRING IT, CLEVELAND!

LeBron Watch 2010 – T Minus 14 Days and Counting…

So here we all are.  Waiting. Watching. Listening. Crying. Blaming. Screaming. Where’s the King going to play next season?  Is he staying? Is he going? If the entire city of Cleveland doesn’t end up on a heavy daily dose of valium after this, I will fall down dead.

But uhhhh hey? uhhhh……Cleveland?  LBJ can’t even start talking to teams before July 1, so please try to spend some time with your families and friends instead of fretting over what can’t even begin for a few more weeks.  Please.  Why are we hanging on every word of the media when they know the same as the rest of us?  Nothing.  And you know how I know that they have nothing? Because right after the news reporters spill their *stories* on the daily events of LBJ, they turn around and say that LBJ hasn’t talked to the media. He hasn’t talked to anyone. I haven’t even heard one report of a sighting except when he appeared at the House of Blues recently. I highly doubt that he got on the stage there and announced his intentions.  What I get out of all of it is that nobody knows anything more today than they did 352 days ago.  It’s all SPEC-U-LATION based on LBJ’s actions –  or lack thereof. I feel like everyone has turned into the National Enquirer with this story.

I can’t be the only one in town that thinks that this circus is crazy?  At no time in history has anyone received this type of attention when seeking out a job – with the exception of Barack Obama when he was running for President.  My God, LBJ has entire cities and states putting together huge campaigns to lure him to their city – billboards, newspaper ads, TV spots and (ugh) even songs set to “We Are The World” (really, Cleveland, what were you thinking?  How embarrassing was it to watch our Governor pleading with a guy that plays basketball through a badly written song?  If we lose LBJ, I’m blaming it on that stupid video.)  They have their politicians speaking out to the media that they want him here, there and everywhere. Even the President of the United States weighed in on his desire to pull LBJ to Chicago. Honestly,Obama, shouldn’t you be concentrating on things like, oh I don’t know…jobs?  terrorism? a couple of wars?  And what about that little mess that BP made down in the Gulf?  Don’t get me wrong, I know that the President needs a little bit of *downtime* outside of the astronomical problems that hit his desk everyday in order to stay sane and I know that Obama loves basketball.  But Really? Can’t he stay out of the bedlam surrounding LBJ?  After all, how is Cleveland going to compete with the President of the United States when all we have is Dennis Kucinich to counter the POTUS request? If that’s how this free agency is going to roll, Cleveland is doomed.

Every day, we can open up either of the main stream media newspapers in the Cleveland area and find multiple articles on the LeBron drama.  We turn on the televison and ESPN has story after story.  Our local news has all the rumors, the sightings and the sounds that is LBJ. We know where he is, who he’s meeting with, what he’s had for breakfast and what hat he has on today.   I fully expect that, come July 1st, all normal programming will be pre-empted and replaced with 24 hour coverage on all 500 of my TV stations. I expect there to be a “Day 24 of LeBron Watch 2010” scrolling across my screen.    I expect there to be crowds of reporters sitting in the trees outside of the offices of all of the NBA teams offices with a great, big long lens on their cameras waiting for the LeBron entourage to roll in. I expect millions of reporters to be on the streets of Cleveland waiting for the collective heads of this city to explode in the event that he doesn’t sign here. Are you kidding me with all of this?  If we put as much effort into cleaning up that mess in the Gulf, we’d have had it all contained, cleaned up and be back to normal right now.

Just like every passionate Cleveland sports fan, I have an opinion about this entire thing and I am going to express it in my next post here.  But unlike everyone else and their stories, it’s just my opinion on what he should do. I’m not important enough to have *sources* although I have gotten a few calls from friends that live in other cities to ask after Mr. James.  I guess since I live in the same city, go to the games on a regular basis and watched him pull down a backboard in high school, that gives me the edge.  Alas, all I have is opinions. I just wish the real media would admit to the same.