When I lived in New Jersey, I always kept my bedroom window cracked, listening for the hollow sound of orange leather hitting the asphalt of the driveway a few houses down. The boys who hooped there were older kids, middle and high schoolers with wave caps and Jordans, who as long as I wasn’t too annoying, let me sit and watch and learn. When, the summer before eighth grade, my parents announced we were moving to Ohio, I refused to board the moving van until after I could ring the doorbell and say goodbye.
Two months earlier, the Cavs used the number one pick in the NBA draft to select an Akron kid who, as a junior in high school, had already been crowned “The Chosen One” on the cover of Sports Illustrated. “If you ever find yourself in Cleveland…” I mumbled awkwardly to the teen boy who’d taught me about Playstation, Eminem and jump shots and who has undoubtedly since forgotten all about me. “...we can go see if this LeBron kid is any good.”
A friend of mine moved here about a decade before me and despises the city to this day. Compared to the 1990s Atlanta, a mecca of culture, the Black American Hollywood — post-crack Cuyahoga County was a life sentence to a layer of hell. But when I arrived a decade later, I saw the blighted industrial wasteland through bright immigrant’s eyes. The suburbs surrounding New York City, where I’d grown up to that point, are a salad bowl of ethnicities and religions and cultures; a picture painted with countless clashing colors. Cleveland, at least in the 2000s, moved with bolder binaries. Black and white. East and west. The city and the ’burbs. The public schools and the parochials. It was a hopeful city when it wasn't busy being depressed. That, I understood. Some places feel complicated. To me, Cleveland never did.
Male friendship, on the other hand, has, for me, always been hard. But less so then. You talk, watch sports, and then you talk about them. Fandom is a bonding agent, an assembler of tribes, a crafter of community. I’m no lover of rules. But the rules of Cleveland sports were easy enough. We like the Dolans. We hate the Wolverines. We curse the Modells. LeBron was our child king, our promise of better days ahead. He was the future. And we believe in the future. We’re earnest, brokenhearted fools who know that this could be the year, and that this won’t be the year, and that there’s always next year. We can make fun of our city, each other and ourselves. (“At least we’re not Detroit!”). You, on the other hand, cannot.
Each morning of eighth grade, I’d convene with Teddy and Mike outside of the middle school science lab to recount LeBron’s highlights and statlines from the night before. In high school, when Chip ruled the radio and we knew Travis Kelce as the big white guy who hooped for Heights and had a nice mom, Colin and I would sit at Winking Lizard, one in the burbs not the city, to eat wings, drinking Cherry Cokes and shout at Drew Gooden. At the college paper, Joe and I would argue with Vince, our sports columnist and in-house Cavs (and Cavs fans) critic. My roommates wanted to fight him, but that was more about his Ohio State takes. On weekends, KG, Sean, Drew and I would debate which hat we’d each wear. They were Kevin’s hats, so they were community hats. We’d pregame to the team’s ’70s fight song and then we’d watch at Steve's crooked-sitting house on Mound Street or Evan and Max’s spot in Palmer Place or, when we were home, KG’s parents’ garage in Old Brooklyn. We learned to love Varajo and Boobie, and we worked to stomach Paul Silas’ offense and Mike Brown’s allergy to timeouts. We were years from the blessing of Kevin Love. We laughed and cried and argued and hugged. We’d have given a minor appendage for Max Straus or Ty Jerome and eagerly amputated a major one for Kenny Atkinson. We were despondent. We were frustrated. We were hopeless. We were home.
On the night of The Decision, placed smack in the heart of the summer, I drank cheap beer with Josh, a fellow fellow Detroit News intern, and spent the drive making phone call welfare checks on Mike from high school and KG from college. By the time our prodigal king returned to take us to glory, my guys were dispersed across the country. And our conversations had long since grown beyond stat lines. There’d been weddings and babies, promotions and layoffs. Great loves and great losses. I still wasn’t the most natural about talking to the guys about any of it. And I’m still not. But it’s easier knowing that, if things get too awkward, we can all just glance up at what’s happening on the court. No matter what’s going on in our lives, there’s a game happening somewhere, and a discussion to be had about it in the group chats.
On the night that, for the Cavs, “next year” finally became “this one,” I was in D.C., pacing between the front and back rooms of Solly’s on U Street, where the Ohio State fans gather on Saturdays and an OU pennant hangs on the front wall, too nervously pacing between the front and back rooms to drink my gin and tonic. I’m reliably told that, when Kyrie hit The Shot, I mounted the bar to lead the chants. Footage allegedly exists, but I’ve never watched — less out of embarrassment and more concern that my body can’t handle re-experiencing such joy. At some point I stumbled outside to call the guys one-by-one.
It’s been 22 years since he and I arrived in Cleveland. Our city, our country, and the game, have all changed. We live, in so many ways, in the world that LeBron built. Windhorst and McMenamin are break news on national TV. Rich Paul damn near runs the whole league. Dwayne Wade is the patriarch of one of black America’s first families. Richard Jefferson is the voice chirping the in-game commentary. As King James winds down his career in Laker gold his rookie oldest son works to become part of the franchise’s future. Players speak directly to their fans, about their trades and suspensions, about the untold stories from league locker rooms, and about the Xs and Os. The Decision, today, would feel quaint.
Magic and Bird brought the game to the national stage. MJ, Shaq and Kobe made it a global spectacle. LeBron and his cohort have cemented it as America’s sport. They leave behind a league whose next generation of superstars hail from Serbia, Slovenia, Athens, Paris and Ontario but know that, to best the best, they have to play here. They leave a sport whose most exciting future chapters are playing out in the W: Angel and Caitlin. Kelsey and A’ja. The Rockers didn’t get back for Paige, but if they could manage to hurry it up maybe be able to snag Azzi or KK.
Cleveland is a city now defined less by the blight of our past than it is the brightness of our future. There’s still work to be done. The drive along the Opportunity Corridor still feels full of more corridors than seized opportunities. But we’ve got fresh leaders and new innovations. The Flats no longer resemble a Scooby-Doo ghost town. We host conventions and conferences and maybe, if we ever figure out this stadium thing, a Super Bowl.
And the Cavs are the best team in basketball. The banner that once proclaimed us all witnesses to LeBron’s greatness now instructs the city it’s time to let ‘em know of our own. We’ve got a starting lineup full of superlatives. Garland: the best pure point guard since Price. Mobley: the most promising talent since Kyrie. Allen: the best true-big since Ilgauskas. Mitchell: the purest scorer to ever don wine and gold. We have jokes that are simply silly. There’s no longer any need for self depreciation. “This team,” my youngest brother told me as we walked from the Rocket Arena toward a crowded West 6th after the Thanksgiving Eve game against the Hawks, “is something special.” To be the best Cavs team ever, they’ve got to win it all. Current ring count: LeBron, Kevin, Kyrie and J.R — 1. Donovan, Darious, Evan and Jared — 0. Hopefully, this playoff run will stretch long enough for me to make it back to Cleveland to watch a game.
To be clear, I won’t actually attend in person to it, we lost that Hawks game I went to back in November and the rules are the rules. We know hope most often brings disappointment along as its date. But maybe things are different now. It would be nice to watch with my dad and the brother who still lives in the city. KG died a few years ago, but I bet I can find his siblings and cousins in that garage in Old Brooklyn. The city has changed. Cleveland is the same. Maybe I’ll pop up to see my former roommates, now in Chicago, or my Cleveland-born buddies now clustered in New York. We’re grown men watching a children’s game that transports us back home. We’re grown men longing for more: more LeBron, more championship rings, more vulnerability between us in the still-complicated community we’ve built between us.
Will this be the year? This could be the year, even if we’re not supposed to say that. If not, there’s next year. On the night these playoffs end, no matter how they end for us, I’ll be back at Solly’s, in the corner beneath the bowling trophies and Bobcat banner, a double club soda and lime to my left and my D.C. guys to my right.
Wesley Lowery is journalist and author from Shaker Heights. He lives in Washington D.C.
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