Wahoo …

The Indians are one game away from the World Series, there’s mayhem and excitement and so much to write about. But for some reason, I’m motivated tonight to write about Chief Wahoo. I wouldn’t blame you for skipping this one … not many people seem to agree with me about how it’s past time to get rid of this racist logo of my childhood.

* * *

Cleveland has had an odd and somewhat comical history when it comes to sports nicknames. The football team is, of course, called the Browns, technically after the great Paul Brown, though Tom Hanks always says it’s because everything Cleveland is brown. He has a point.

You know, it was always hard to know exactly what you were supposed to do as a “Brown” fan. You could wear brown, of course, but that was pretty limiting. And then you would be standing in the stands, ready to do something, but what the hell does brown do (for you)? You supposed to pretend to be a UPS Truck? You supposed to mimic something brown (and boy does THAT bring up some disgusting possibilities?) I mean Brown is not a particularly active color.

At least the Browns nickname makes some sort of Cleveland sense. The basketball team is called the Cavaliers, after 17th Century English Warriors who dressed nice. Perfect. The hockey team, first as a minor league team and then briefly in the NHL, was called the Barons for reasons that seem to be lost to history and logic. Another hockey team was called the Crusaders. Another hockey team was the Lumberjacks. You get the sense that at some point it was a big game to try and come up with the nickname that had the least to do with Cleveland.

Nickname guy 1: How about Haberdashers?
Nickname guy 2: No, we have some of those in Cleveland.
Nickname guy 1: Polar Bears?
Nickname guy 2: I think there are some at the Cleveland Zoo.
Nickname guy 1: How about Crusaders? They’re long dead.

Cleveland’s baseball nickname history has its own crazy history. The baseball team was, for a year in 1890, called the Cleveland Infants. My best guess is they were named that for 16-year-old pitcher Willie McGill, who won 11 games that season, but I don’t know. Maybe they brought infants to the games. Maybe they had a deal where you could use your infant as a ticket into the game.

In other years, the baseball teams were called the Blues, the Bronchos and, of course, the Spiders. We’ll get back to the Spiders in a few minutes.

Then, from 1903-1914, they were known as the Cleveland Naps. This was after the great Napoleon Lajoie, who signed with the team as a free agent in 1903. II’m guessing it was in the contract that they name the team after him; I’m surprised Roger Clemens didn’t ask for this. Though Lajoie was a great player, you do have to admire a team that would name itself after a quick afternoon sleep.

Then, in 1914, the Naps lost 102 games, and Lajoie hit .258, 80 points below his career average. He was 39 then and clearly done (he did play two more mostly ineffective years in Philadelphia), and so Cleveland needed a new nickname. You know what’s coming. This is when legend and fact blur.

* * *

The way I had always heard it growing up is that the team, needing a new nickname, went back into their history to honor an old Native American player named Louis Sockalexis. Sockalexis was, by most accounts, the first native American to play professional baseball. He had been quite a phenom in high school, and he developed into a a fairly mediocre and minor outfielder for the Spiders (he played just 94 games in three years). He did hit .338 his one good year and apparently (or at least I was told) he was beloved and respected by everybody. In this “respected-and-beloved” version, nobody ever mentions that Sockalexis may have ruined his career by jumping from the second-story window of a whorehouse. Or that he was an alcoholic.

Still, in all versions of the story, Sockalexis had to deal with horrendous racism, terrible taunts, whoops from the crowd, and so on. He endured (sort of — at least until that second story window thing). So this version of the story goes that in 1915, less than two years after the tragic death of Louis Sockalexis, the baseball team named itself  the “Indians” in his honor. That’s how I heard it. And, because you will believe anything that you hear as a kid I believed it for a long while (I also believed for a long time that dinosaurs turned into oil — I still sort of believe it, I can’t help it. Also that if you stare at the moon too long you will turn into a werewolf).

In recent years, though, we find that this Sockalexis story might be a bit exaggerated or, more to the point, complete bullcrap. If you really think about it, the story never made much sense to begin with. Why exactly would people in Cleveland — this in a time when native Americans were generally viewed as subhuman in America — name their team after a relatively minor and certainly troubled outfielder?

There seems to be some evidence now that the Indians were actually named that to capture some of the magic of the Native-American named Boston Braves, who had just had their Miracle Braves season (the Braves, incidentally, were not named AFTER any Native Americans but were rather named after a greasy politican named James Gaffney, who became team president and was apparently called the Brave of Tammany Hall). This version makes more sense, certainly. There’s also a theory that the name was chosen by a fan contest in the newspapers and you KNOW they weren’t honoring Louis Sockalexis.

We do know for sure they were called the Indians in 1915, and (according to a story written by author and NYU Professor Jonathan Zimmerman) they were welcomed with the sort of sportswriting grace that would follow the Indians through the years: “We’ll have the Indians on the warpath all the time, eager for scalps to dangle at their belts.”

Oh yes, we honor you Louis Sockalexis.

What, however, makes a successful nickname? You got it: Winning. The Indians were successful pretty quickly. In 1916, they traded for an outfielder named Tris Speaker. That same year they picked up a pitcher named Stan Covaleski in what Baseball Reference calls “an unknown transaction.” There need to be more of those. And the Indians also picked up a 26-year-old pitcher on waivers named Jim Bagby. Those three were the key forces in the Indians 1920 World Series championship. After that, they were the Indians to stay.

* * *

Chief Wahoo, from what I can tell, was born much later. The first Chief Wahoo logo seems to have been drawn just after World War II. Until then, Cleveland wore hats with various kinds of Cs on them. In 1947, the first Chief Wahoo appears on a hat. He’s got the yellow face, long nose, the freakish grin, the single feather behind his head … quite an honor for Sockalexis. As a friend of mine used to say, “It’s surprising they didn’t put a whiskey bottle right next to his head.”

Three years later, they changed the Wahoo logo — I suspect this is not because people thought it was racist (nobody really cared) but because they liked a newer, cleaner version of Wahoo. This new Wahoo was another grinning, slightly-smaller-nosed, one-feather Indian, only this time his face was all red. This is, more or less, the Chief Wahoo of today.

This is also the Chief Wahoo I grew up with, though it should be said that there was a time during my childhood when the Indians seemed more or less embarrassed by Wahoo. I never thought this was because of any PC sensibilities — I think they Indians were just so bad they were looking for a new start wherever they could find one. They started going back to trying various Cs on hats throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including the unforgettable “Crooked C” blue and red catastrophe of 1975. I have to find one of those hats.

Wahoo was around though — there was a giant Wahoo on Cleveland Municipal Stadium, you could see it from a half mile away. I know I wore lots of clothes with that grinning Wahoo on them. I had no problem doing that. I liked Wahoo. To me, he was funny. Then, that’s the point, isn’t it?

You know, I remember once walking through the Holocaust Museum, and seeing all of these horrifying caricatures of Jews that they would give to kids in 1930s Germany. I looked at these things in horror for a long, long time. You know why? The logos themselves weren’t so different from Wahoo. I’m not comparing anything but the style of logos — obviously, the Jewish caricatures were a billion-billion times more sinister. They were meant to raise an entire generation of Jew-haters. Wahoo is, I think, just a stupid sports logo.

But — and this is the point — those logos, like Wahoo, were of real people only they were cartoony and goofy and exaggerated and meant to make a child laugh. They did not LOOK much different.

* * *

Here’s a newspaper quote you might enjoy, taken from the same article I mentioned earlier:

“To insist that Native Americans be given equal rights with other citizens is one thing. To insist that their particular sensibilities entitle them to exercise a kind of sensorship is quite another.”

That’s the argument for Wahoo, isn’t it? The argument is that Native Americans are being too sensitive. What’s the big deal anyway? Chief wahoo doesn’t hurt anybody. Don’t Native Americans have much bigger problems to deal with than a logo on a baseball cap? Wahoo has been around for a long time, we don’t need censorship of our sports because a few Native Americans are marching, right?

Trouble is, that quote wasn’t about Native Americans. It was actually a quote taken from Washington Post in 1947, and you can replace “Native Americans” with Negroes. It was an editorial The Post wrote about how Little Black Sambo was a fun little storybook character, and anyone who took offense to this grinning, big-lipped abomination was just acting silly and politically correct.

Symbols do matter. The funny thing is, everybody really does understand this on both sides of the argument. The Confederate Flag doesn’t just matter to those who see it as a racist symbol. It also matters to those who put in on their trucks or state flags. Neo-Nazis spray paint swastikas on Synagogues — they know it matters. You could not put a Little Black Sambo statue on your front lawn and then say, “Oh, I just appreciate the artistry.”

Wahoo is an inherentry racist symbol. Nobody could really deny this. Nobody could look at that grinning mug and say, “No, it’s really a flattering portrayal of Native Americans, who were conquered, nearly wiped off the planet by our ancestors and then forced to live on reservations.”

The thing is, I think so many of us were raised to think of Indians as cartoon characters, as movie villains, as the Native American who had a tear in his eye because people kept dumping garbage all over this great land, that we have become desensitized. I heard someone doing a comedy bit on XM Radio about Native Americans and casinos and alcohol and how nobody should care anyway because they lost the wars, and though I’ve heard similar bits (and I think I have pretty tough comedy constitution), this particular one was so cruel, so mean-spirited, so wrong, that I realized there was probably no other group in America someone could say such awful things about without drawing the Kramer backlash.

The only reason Chief Wahoo is around is because Native Americans don’t have a strong enough voice in this country to put a stop to it. When Native Americans protested at the 1997 World Series, they were mostly laughed at. Three were arrested. Is this really the kind of country we want to be? And for what? To stand up for our inherent rights to enjoy a racist sports logo?

I love Cleveland. I love the Indians and I even love Wahoo in a weird way because it is such a part of my childhood. But it is not just time to get rid of Wahoo, it is way, way past time. I don’t think this is the biggest problem facing the world, or even the 5,4993,287th biggest problem facing the world. I don’t care about political correctness either. No. It’s just wrong. Very wrong.Get rid of it. The fewer wrong things in the world, better.

And it brings me all the way back to this … why can’t we just go back to calling the team the Spiders. That’s a great name, and it’s not taken by anybody in major sports. There’s history there. It actually fits Cleveland (believe me, there are more spiders in Cleveland than Native Americans — especially those creepy Daddy Long Legs that are like walking paperclips). And there are a million incredible logo and mascot possibilities.

Even if they don’t get rid of the Indians nickname (I think you might as well go all the way) it’s definitely time to bury Wahoo. This would be a good year to make it happen. The Indians are a game away from the World Series. There is some real joy happening. There is some real exciement. The Indians have a real chance to end the longest citywide sports drought in American sports. There are a lot of good feelings in the Cleveland air. It would be a good time to bury a logo that should never have been born to begin with.

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LeBron’s Hat …

This is a brutally long blog about my history as a Cleveland sports fan. It is self-absorbed, certainly, and I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you skipped over it. But it’s also thousands of words (footnotes and all), and I have to do something with it. (I have added a few footnotes to clarify some of the Cleveland heartbreaks).

* * *

Things have changed in Cleveland. Things have changed all over. When I was kid growing up in on the East side — in South Euclid, if you want to be specific, home of Steve Stone (1980 Cy Young Winner), David S. Ward (director of Major League) and Eric Carmen (Hungry Eyes) — I’m pretty sure it was in the city ordinance that any locally born minor caught rooting for a team outside the city limits was to be fined and, on second offense, publicly caned. I suspect it was like this all over.(1) You rooted for your hometown teams or else, hell, there was no or else, no other option, you rooted for your hometown team because that was how it was.

Now, of course, it’s different, a topic which has been analyzed by us sports old-timers much in the same way sociologists have analyzed the development and modernization of the Kondh tribe. Kids root for whoever the heck they want to root for now, we have decided, because they have access to all the teams, free agency has changed the landscape (leagues, especially the Major Leagues, are set up more to root for individual players rather than teams), America has become more homogenized, etc. It also could be that there’s no loyalty left in the damn world.

All of this might explain how LeBron James, who grew up in Akron (which is just South of Cleveland) became a fan of the New York Yankees (which is nowhere near Akron, either geographically or emotionally) and therefore felt the need to wear a Yankees hat to the Indians-Yankees playoff game.

But I could not care less WHY he wore the Yankees hat (an Akron kid who grows up to be a Yankees fan defies explanation) as why it had such an enormous effect on Cleveland sports fans. I’m really wondering why the heck it ticked me off. Who really cares what teams LeBron James roots for? He’s a brilliant basketball player. He carried — in every possible way that verb can be used — the Cleveland Cavaliers to their first NBA Finals last year. He’s a Cleveland hero. What possible difference does it make if publicly roots for the Yankees or Dallas Cowboys or practices voodoo in his home or believes, deep down, that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame should have been put in Detroit? Who cares?

I care. It flat ticked me off. And when I tried to come to grips with this, I realize that I have hard time coming up with a sensible reason why it ticked me off. It’s not logic, I guess. It’s emotion.

I read a letter to the editor from some Boston transplant who could not understand the fuss over LeBron — he wrote that Tom Brady was seen wearing a Yankees hat, and after a brief uproar, things quickly died down in New England. People even laughed about it. That nutty Tom Brady. “What difference does it make anyway?” the Boston guy asks. “We hate the Yankees more anyway.”

But he can’t understand that Cleveland and Boston fans are just different, just as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh fans are different, or San Diego and San Francisco fans, New York Mets and New York Yankees fans. Tom Brady isn’t from Boston. He doesn’t stand for the same things.

The feeling we felt about LeBron — or at least the feeling I felt — wasn’t anger or hatred or even betrayal. It was more like this red-hot disappointment. He knows us. He knows what it has been like. He knows how many times his hometown sports teams have crashed to the ground the last 40 years. And he wore a freaking Yankees hat to the freaking game.

* * *

Cleveland Municipal Stadium, as we used to call it (all three words) had its own smell. All stadiums have their own swirl of scents, of course, popcorn, stale beer, sweat, cut grass, chewed gum, old shoes. Cleveland Municipal Stadium had all those, but it also featured a mystery smell, a constantly-shifting fragrance that sometimes burned the eyes like chlorine and in the next moment smelled sickly sweet, like burnt cotton candy. The scent undoubtedly blew in from Lake Erie — which was then a bouillabaisse of Lex Luthor chemicals and unimaginable garbage — and this scent mingled with the rust and asbestos and despair to create a smell that was new and unforgettable.

This was the indefinable smell of my childhood. it was the smell of losing.

Most people, I suspect, do not realize that Cleveland is actually in its second phase of losing. This current phase — which we can call the Heartbreak Phase — began on January 11, 1987, three days after my 20th birthday. This was the beginning of adulthood. You can, if you want, pinpoint the precise moment when everything Cleveland changed. It was on third down and 18, with Cleveland leading Denver by a touchdown. The wind howled, and the people in Cleveland Municipal Stadium drank schnapps and huddled close and made a wailing sound that could only come from frozen men and women who had known disappointment. Up to that very instant, we all believed Cleveland could win. We had no idea we were rooting, passionately, for WIle E Coyote.

John Elway zipped a 20-yard pass to Mark Jackson, and this led to culmination of The Drive (2), which led to The Fumble (3), which led to Michael Jordan soaring over Craig Ehlo (4), which led to the bitter face of Bill Belichick in his pre-genius period (5), which led to the Browns skipping town (6), which led to the Indians losing to Atlanta in the one freaking World Series the Braves decided not to choke (7), which led to Jose Mesa and Tony Fernandez and that horrifying Game 7 (8), which led to a return of some new team wearing Jim Brown’s uniform (9), which led to the LeBron Sweep (10), which led to present day and the eventual high crime of LeBron himself wearing that Yankees hat to an Indians playoff game.

This is the phase people talk about, but the losing actually has a beginning. It wasn’t until Elway came along that we Clevelanders realized that we were cursed. Until then, we thought our teams just sucked. It’s a crucial distinction. Norv Turner sucks. Marty Schottenheimer is cursed. The first makes you want to throw a brick at something. The second makes you wish someone would throw a brick at you. Two very different feelings.

* * *

When I was 5 and wandered into sports consciousness in Cleveland — this would be 1972 — Cleveland still saw itself as a winning sports town that had fallen out of fighting shape, a once brilliant ex-jock with a beer belly. In the 1950s, the Cleveland Browns had played in the NFL Championship Game seven times. They had won the championship game in 1964, they had reached the championship again in 1965. Everyone in 1972 still remembered exactly what it was like to watch Jim Brown. The Indians were also good most of the 1950s, but were generally shut out by the Stengel-Mantle Yankees. They were erratic but reasonably interesting in the 1960s. The great and crabby Bob Feller still bounced around town and spoke to Optimist clubs and Little League banquets. He was available for Bar Mitzvahs.

The Cleveland NBA team was brand new, and nobody knew what to think of them yet. There had been one of those never-a-good-idea newspaper nickname contests, and the team was eventually named “Cavaliers” after those dashing well-dressed supporters of King Charles I in the English Civil War of 1600. There is no explanation how this name won, in large part because, seriously, what explanation could possibly answer that question? The first Cavaliers logo was an odd drawing of one the English dandies (I always suspected it was Jacob Astley, but that’s just me, I could be wrong, I don’t want to start a bar fight with you Henry Wilmot fans) brandishing his sword toward a basketball roughly the color of yellow snow, the color being the only authentic Cleveland item in the logo.

In any case, there was no sense of sports doom in Cleveland then. True, the Indians had just lost 100 games, the Browns were slowly, but steadily, sinking into the abyss, and the Cavaliers had a drawing of the fourth musketeer on their jerseys. The irrepressible feeling, though, was that the city was mired in a minor and temporary sports slump (and a minor and temporary economic slump as well) but it was only that, a slump, and the sun would rise again. That feeling of hope was best described by a hauntingly beautiful jingle that used to play on a Channel 5 commercial throughout my youth.

The best things in life are right here in Cleveland
From the Playhouse to the Karamu (11)
From the parks to the Cleveland zoo
We’re a big league city with little leagues too!
University Circle, Blossom and the Heights
Make it clear! Very clear!
That Cleveland’s a great place to live!
‘Cause all the best things in life are here! (12)

I would say it wasn’t until about 1977 that we, as a city, realized that no, this wasn’t just a minor dip for Cleveland. We had, rather unexpectedly (at least it seemed unexpected to me as a child) become the nation’s punch line. The Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, Lake Erie was specifically called out in Dr. Seuss’ odd environmental book “The Lorax” (the Lake Erie reference was later taken out), the mayor’s hair caught fire, the banks withdrew credit from the city. I knew things were bad when Cleveland was dissed on television show “One Day at a Time.” In this scene, Schneider the super, for reasons that defy memory and reason, ended up locked in a room with a Soviet dissident.

Schneider: “So what is it like in Siberia.”
Dissident: “It is cold and terrible place.”
Schneider: “Oh yeah, we have Cleveland.”

By 1980, when I was 13, the Browns gave us our one hope. Everything else was dismal. The weather. The gas lines. The roads. The Indians were terrible and more or less bankrupt. The Cavaliers were still wearing those horrendous uniforms, and they were owned by the late Ted Stepien, a key figure of my childhood if for no other reason than he allowed me to see a halftime show called “Fat Guy (Eating Beer Cans).

* * *

My favorite Ted Stepien moment had to be the interview he did after he decided to drop softballs from the top of the Terminal Tower, the tallest building in Cleveland. He did this, allegedly, to promote the pro softball league that he had created (13), but I always suspected that he just wanted to see what would happen if he dropped softballs from the top of the Terminal Tower.

Here’s what happened: He broke a woman’s wrist, broke a windshield and grazed another guy’s shoulder. It was like a horror movie. Softball Attack! Afterward, they interviewed him, and he had this great sheepish look on his face that said, so clearly, ”Um, I guess that was kind of a dumb idea.“

Stepien, from what I could tell, was not a bad guy. He was not a good guy, but not bad. He was an advertising man from Pittsburgh who had once been a good high school basketball player, and from my perspective he mainly seemed surprised that he had actually made enough money to own his own team. He was a fan at heart, which sounds like a good thing for an owner to be, but it really isn’t. Fans think they know. Stepien was sure he knew. And he knew absolutely nothing.

He also had a huge ego, which completed the picture of incompetence. One of the first things he did was fire Cleveland icon Joe Tait — the greatest basketball announcer I have ever heard — because Tait had the audacity to publicly question a couple of the obviously bad Stepien’ ownership moves. Tait (I can still hear him now, ”The line, the lane, the shot, it drops.“ ”Pass outside to Bingo Smith, top of the key, it’s the Bingo Rainbow, and it’s good!“) eventually returned, but not before Stepien had made the Cavaliers the all-time joke in sports.

Here’s how bad Ted Stepien was an owner: As soon as he became owner, he hired Bill Musselman to be the coach. Musselman was a generally successful but indisputably insane coach (14) who once said that defeat is worse than death. His drawing card was defense — his team at Ashland University once allowed teams 33 points per game — which you might recall wasn’t an especially important feature of early 1980s NBA basketball. The Cavaliers, a motley bunch anyway, could not get it, and they won only 25 of Musselman’s first 71 games. Stepien fired him, which was somewhat more humane than dropping him from the top of the Terminal Tower (though you suspect Musselman would have preferred that).

Here’s the thing: The very next year, Stepien had Chuck Daly as his coach. So he fired Daly and hired Musselman BACK. When asked why, he said (according to Terry Pluto): ”Bill won 25 games with a team of Mike Bratz, Roger Phegley, Mike Mitchell, Bill Laimbeer and, really, no bench.“ Musselman won two of 23 games and was canned again.

Of course, Stepien became famous for his extraordinarily bad trades. The NBA still has the remrakable ”Stepien Rule“ which prevents teams from trading their first round pick in back-to-back years. Stepien traded away so many high draft picks from 1982-1985 — the league office finally had to step in and announce that it would need to approve all Cleveland trades. Before they did that, though, Stepien traded four of his high picks to the Dallas Mavericks, who apparently would have someone manning the phones more or less 24 hours a day just in case Stepien called. He also traded Bill Laimbeer and James Edwards to Detroit, where they won a championship for Chuck Daly, the man Stepien had called, ”Not a proven NBA coach“ just before firing him.

One year, I remember Stepien trying to talk a 50-year old Wilt Chamberlain out of retirement.

Stepien did, however, keep the Cavaliers somewhat solvent, and he did hire Fat Guy (Eating Beer Cans) who was, yeah, a fat guy who ate beer cans. I seem to recall that the guy wanted to be known as ”Superfan“ (though his only known superpower was his uncanny ability to eat aluminum, which might be tough to build a series around). He would move around the Richfield Arena (another genius move — the Cavs played at an arena in the middle of nowhere between Cleveland and Akron), and he ate beer cans to the confusion and eventual boredom of the 432 people who would go to Cavs games in those years. I mean how many times could you see a man eat a beer can? Stepien did hire cheerleaders called the Teddy Bears, who remain to this day the closest thing to actual strippers to perform at an NBA game. And so went my Cleveland childhood.

* * *

In 1977, the Cleveland Indians did not exactly make reservations in hotels. Instead, they would arrive in town, and the team bus would drive around and stop at different hotels until they found one where the team’s credit was still good. This would sometimes take two or three stops.

When I heard this shocking bit of news from several members of that team, a number of things began to make sense. There was always something slightly pathetic about cheering for the Indians … rooting for them always felt a little bit like rooting for a doomed restaurant in a bad location that never had any people in it. The newspaper reports sometimes hinted that the Indians were on the brink of collapse, that they were looking perhaps at moving to another city, that the owners were really, really broke. But I believe now they kept the worst from us because, hey, it was bad enough being a Cleveland fan.

For instance: The team really did refuse to put air conditioners in the home clubhouse … the movie ”Major League“ was much more of a documentary than any of us knew at the time.

One year, pitcher Wayne Garland — who actually signed a big-money free agent offer with Cleveland during those dark years — bought air conditioners for everyone in the clubhouse. His pungent explanation years later: ”It was bleeping hot.“ Ownership tried to fine him for putting in those air conditioners.

Nothing made sense with those Indians teams. It wasn’t that they were comically bad (for much of my childhood, they hovered somewhere close to .500, though, of course, they were never good) but the entire experience was comical. No matter where you sat in Cleveland Municipal Stadium, your view was blocked by a metal beam. It was architectural genius. I.M. Pei could not have done better. And so you would have to lean back and forth all game long, back and forth, back and forth, like people praying at the Wailing Wall.

Then, you had to keep moving because it was cold inside Cleveland Municipal Stadium. It could be July, it could be 98 degrees everywhere else including the stadium parking lot, but once inside, the wind kicked up off the lake, and it would instantly drop to 12-degrees below zero. Then, the wind would dissipate, and the sun would blaze down, and it would be 117 degrees. Then the wind kicked up again. All around you could see rust and dripping asbestos and exposed and cut wires that would occasionally spark. The floor stuck like fly paper. It would have been a good place to interrogate people.

Who could enjoy a game in this atmosphere? Real Clevelanders. They would wear short-sleeve shirts and laugh at the shivering tourists. These were tough men and women, they had to be tough, they had STAYED in Cleveland even as hundreds of thousands fled the city throughout the 1970s for places South and West where the potholes did not eat cars and the sun occasionally burst through the smoke and the city’s No. 1 resource was not brown slush. I loved these people who stayed. Still do. Real Clevelanders. They all seemed to have incomprehensible jobs like bending refrigerators or blowing the crushing carburetors into dust with their bare hands. They lived hard lives. They drank beer that smelled like gasoline out of wax paper cups, and they smoked Marlboros and Kents without filters, and would take a nip now and again from a flask containing schnapps powerful enough to burn through metal, and they believed that this time, definitely this time, Rick Manning would come through.

We all loved Indians center fielder Rick Manning (still do) and I figure that this is because there always seemed this chance that he would, like the city itself, emerge into superstardom. Manning was fast, and handsome, and he seemed big enough to hit with a little power, and he played the game hard, and he won a Gold Glove his second year … it always seemed possible that he would turn into Duke Snider or Fred Lynn or someone heroic. Unfortunately, he wore No. 43, and that’s what he would do too often, it was 4-3, 4-3, all day long. He made 821 outs to second base in his career, and while I don’t know if this is a lot compared to other players, I’ll bet I saw 700 of them.

Duane Kuiper was my personal hero because of the way he dived for every ground ball, including those hit to third base. But there were any number of classic characters. Rico Carty would not slide because he kept his wallet in his back pocket (”I don’t trust nobody,“ he would say). Manager Frank Robinson was utterly despised by everybody on the team and once got into a still legendary fight with the immense Jim Bibby. Third baseman Buddy Bell was tougher than steel wool and he once played on a broken toe by cutting open his shoe and painting his sock red. And so on. To a kid, these players always seemed on the brink of doing something spectacular. The Indians from 1972 to 1993 never once finished higher than fourth place.

And unlike the tough refrigerator-benders at the ballpark, most people in Cleveland stayed away then. They saw the Indians as just another thing in the city to be embarrassed about. I remember once going to Cedar Point (”The Amazement Park!“) and being on the boat ride that the floated to Western World. Suddenly we passed a tribe of wild Natives who were shooting at us, and the guide said, ”Oh, don’t worry, those are Cleveland Indians, and they can’t hit anything.“ The laughter on the boat was loud and pained.

* * *

Whenever something even slightly positive happened, we in Cleveland tended to overreact. In 1976, for instance, the Cavaliers made a rather unlikely run to the Eastern Conference finals, where they were unceremoniously booted by the unquenchable Boston Celtics in six games. It was a nice story. In Cleveland we refer to it, even now, as ”The Miracle of Richfield.“

In 1980, a 25-year-old Indians rookie named Joe Charboneau hit 23 home runs and won the Rookie of the Year and, as a nice bonus, could open beer bottles with his eye socket. A great little story. We called him Super Joe Charboneau and determined that he deserved his own song:

Who’s the newest guy in town?
Go Joe Charboneau
Turns the ballpark upside down
Go Joe Charboneau

Super Joe hurt his back and only played 70 more agony-filled games, though I’m told he would later would be seen playing softball around town.

So, this might give you an idea just how important the 1980 Cleveland Browns were to us. They remain the only legitimate title contender of my childhood. I’m not certain, looking back, how legitimate they really were. The defense was leaky and led by the still insane but now aging Lyle Alzado, who would simply change the coach’s plays whenever the mood struck him. The coach, Sam Rutigliano, was a likable but certifiable son of Brooklyn immigrants who used to say very uncoach-like things like, ”Running the football is boring.“ The quarterback was a Southern California guy named Brian Sipe who had such a weak arm that when he threw the ball into the wind, it would sometimes come back to him. The Browns also had a straight-on kicker named Don Cockroft, and he had a herniated disc, which meant that pretty much any field goal longer than 13 yards was an adventure.

What they did have, though, was a little bit of magic. We called them the Kardiac Kids — I never liked that cute spelling of Kardiac, that seemed very un-Cleveland like — and they had this uncanny knack for winning (and losing) games in the final seconds. The Browns went 11-5 in 1980, and they won nine of those by a touchdown or less. They were exactly what we needed in Cleveland, a thrilling team in orange pants that passed the ball all over the field and somehow won in the end. We gave our hearts to them totally. We were sure that they were charmed. We were sure that something good was finally going to happen to us. We felt sure that we deserved that.

Then the Browns played Oakland on a brutally cold day in Cleveland, and it all came crashing down. Don Cockroft, predictably, missed two field goals and had an extra point blocked. Brian Sipe’s passes fluttered in the wind (he was intercepted three times). Still, we believed, we believed until the end, and sure enough the Browns moved the ball deep into Oakland territory, final seconds of the game, and that’s when Sam Rutigliano called Red Right 88 and told Sipe that if it wasn’t there, if the receiver wasn’t open, he was to throw the ball into Lake Erie, and Cockroft would try once more to kick the field goal.

It wasn’t there. Sipe threw the ball instead into the arms of Oakland defensive back Mike Davis.

Ali said that the Thrilla in Manilla was the closest thing he ever felt to dying. That was the sports feeling an entire city felt when that last pass quivered into the Lake Erie wind and died. You could feel the ground sink three inches when Sipe threw that interception. It was only sports, but it was all we had. There would be a whole lot of heartbreak after that in Cleveland — Drive, Fumble, Jordan, Mesa. But to me that moment remains. That was the moment that told me, life is not like the movies, cartoons or wrestling matches. The good guys lose.

”I love you Brian,“ Rutigliano said to Sipe as he came off the field.

* * *

So that’s what it has been like in Cleveland. Comedy. Tragedy. Stupidity. Agony. Right now, I am watching Cleveland lose to Boston 10-3 in the first game of the American League Championship Series, and I realize that at this point, as a Clevelander, after 40 years, you come to know the awful truth. Pain’s coming.

And that’s why LeBron’s hat mattered. Because even if he really does love the Yankees, even if he is secretly related to Mickey Mantle, even if George Steinbrenner paid his family’s mortgage during hard times, even if his great grandfather handed him a Babe Ruth autographed baseball on his deathbed — he still should know better. The Yankees have won a lot. The Yankees will win again. Cleveland’s a great place to live. ‘Cuz the best things in life are here.

* * *
Footnotes:

(1) t should be noted that loyalty was ESPECIALLY true in Cleveland in the 1970s. Here’s my opinion why: I think people in the pre-ESPN, NFL Ticket, MLB.com mosaic days chose their sports teams based on three main criteria:

1. Geography.
2. Media access.
3. Birthright.

Geography is obvious; you chose the team in your town. Media access is connected, but a little bit different. In Charlotte, N.C. — before the Carolina Panthers came to town — most people were either Atlanta Falcons fans or Washington Redskins fans, and this is because those were the teams on television pretty much every week. There are Yankees fans all over America (and Cardinals fans all over the Midwest) because that’s who they saw on television and heard on the radio.

The third reason, birthright, comes down to the simple truth that kids generally root for their parents team.

Well, if you grew up in Cleveland, you were hammered by all three reasons. There was a very strong geographical connection to the city; unlike other places I’ve seen, in Cleveland it didn’t matter if you were from South Euclid, Chagrin Falls, Chardon, University Heights or Chagrin. Someone asked you were you were from, you said: Cleveland.

The media access was strong too … I don’t recall reading much about other teams in the local papers. And of course there was no Internet surfing, no SportsCenter highlights, no expanded box scores, no nothing. I suppose you COULD have been an Orioles or Rams fan in Cleveland, but it would not have been easy.

The third, birthright, is especially key in Cleveland. As far as I knew, everybody’s father rooted for Cleveland teams. The reason now is obvious: Nobody was moving TO Cleveland in the 1970s. People were only moving away. In Charlotte, Atlanta, Phoenix, places like that, you could meet 100 people, and they would be from 85 different cities, and maybe 10 percent would be natives. Maybe. In Cleveland, everyone was a native or they had recently arrived (like my parents) from some place like Minsk or Lublin, which did not have a baseball team.

(2) The Drive represents the 98-yard drive, final minutes drive that Denver quarterback John Elway led against Cleveland in the 1987 AFC Championship Game. It was a torturous series of plays — the Browns were leading by a touchdown and needed only to keep the Broncos out of the end zone to go to their first Super Bowl. They did not stop him, which not only created heartbreak in Cleveland, but it also launched the heroic career of Elway, who would prove to be persistent pain in Cleveland’s neck (not to mention Kansas City).

(3) The Fumble represents the last-minute fumble of Cleveland Ernest Byner just as he was about to go into the end zone to tie Denver in the 1988 AFC Championship Game. The Browns had trailed all game … what hurt most is that Byner had played heroically all game, and at first glance he appeared to score the tying touchdown. So for a fan it sounded like this: ”YES! YES! WAIT! NO! NO! NOOOOOOO!“

(4) The Cavaliers led Chicago by a point in the final seconds of their clinching playoff game when Michael Jordan set off his career of heroics by getting the in-bounds pass, rising for his jump shot, hanging in the air long enough to allow his defender Craig Ehlo to jump and then fall back to earth, and then making the winning shot. Until that instant, Cleveland and Chicago seemed to be very similar teams. After that instant, Chicago won six NBA titles while Cleveland, naturally, won zero.

(5) Before Bill Belichick became the super-genius of sports as coach of New England, he was a disastrous and bitter coach in Cleveland. He ran the team much in the same way Richard Nixon ran the White House … I remember once going to work in the press box, which overlooked the practice field. About five minutes before practice started, a public relations person came in and, very theatrically, pulled down all the shades so that we would not be able to see practice. I have no problem with the concept — many coaches don’t allow reporters to see practice — it was the theatrics that was pure Belichick. The team did not win a single playoff game in Belichick’s tenure as Browns coach, and he also theatrically cut hometown hero, quarterback Bernie Kosar. When asked about the uproar, he said, ”I don’t care what people think.“ Good man.

(6) At the end of the 1994 season, longtime Browns owner Art Modell moved the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore, where they became the Ravens and, shortly thereafter, won the Super Bowl.

(7) In 1995, the Braves beat the Indians in the World Series. It remains the only World Series title during the Braves era of winning 14 division titles. They won when Tom Glavine threw a one-hit shutout in Game 6 without, as any Cleveland fan will tell you, throwing a single strike all game long.

(8) In 1997, Cleveland lost Game 7 of the World Series to Florida even though they went into the ninth inning with the lead. There were a whole herd of goats, starting with Jose Mesa, who gave up two hits and a sac fly in the ninth to allow the Marlins to tie the game. The Indians never came even close to scoring in the 10th or 11th innings. And in the bottom of the 11th, Bobby Bonilla singled, and then Craig Counsell hit a ground ball to Cleveland second baseman Tony Fernandez, who flat booted it. This eventually led to Edgar Renteria’s heart-crushing and run-scoring single the ended things.

(9) The Cleveland Browns returned in 1999 with the same uniforms, owners of their own history (this was supposed to placate Cleveland fans) but to me they have never been the same. I know many Cleveland fans are over the Modell move, and they feel the same about the new Browns as they did the old Browns. I’m just not one of these people. I can’t help it.

(10) In 2006, LeBron James almost singlehandedly led the Cavaliers to the NBA Finals, which electrified the city. Sadly, though, the Cavs were swept by San Antonio and the Spurs were so dominating, so overwhelming, so much better than Cleveland, it sort of took some of the fun out of it.

(11) The Karamu House was/is the nation’s oldest African American theater. I did not know that then either. I would have sworn they were singing “Katmandu.”

(12) This was actually better than a later Cleveland public relations campaign, “New York may be the Big Apple, but Cleveland’s a plum.” After a while, in Cleveland, you just lost all sense of irony. … The shame of it is, I could not find a video of this commercial on You Tube, which has to be one of the few times that YouTube has let me down. Then again, it was not a complete failure; I did find this extraordinary Channel 5 commercial which, I believe, features more or less the same tune. It’s definitely the same orchestra. Enjoy!)

(13) This was the North American Softball League, a slow-pitch league that featured the greatest collection of beer guts in the history of sports (and this includes Charlie Kerfeld’s prime). The greatest player in my memory was, of course, a Clevelander, named Mighty Mike Macenko, who could be seen smoking a cigarette as he swung his bat in the on-deck circle. Mighty Mike hit like 583 home runs that season. I personally saw him hit eight home runs in a single game. He said that was an off-day.

(14) Musselman once was so angry about his team’s lack of passion that he played his starters all 48 minutes in an ABA game. Another time, he was so angry that a referee made bad calls that he chased the referee to his locker room and banged on the door. This may not sound like an unusual thing except the calls the referee made were IN HIS FAVOR. He kept screaming how the referee screwed the other coach, and it wasn’t right. You had to admire that sort of insanity.

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