Ten Years After....
Looking Back on My Experience of the Cavs' Title Run
Ten years ago today the Cavaliers played that fateful Game 7. Without it, I would never have written my book, King James Brings the Land a Crown. Indeed, I had already been down that road, the year before. After the loss in 2015, I looked at my then-wife, Michele, and we talked about whether we should run it back. They were so close. It was still a great story. It had gone quite well, outside the Finals. Coach David Blatt had taken a shine to me. We were both literature geeks; he wrote his dissertation on Bernard Malumud’s The Natural.
The second time around was a lot different. Blatt was fired in mid-season, despite the best record in the East. The fingerprints on that decision led the Cavs press team to freeze me out, for fear I would be “trouble.” Honestly, while it was pretty clear to everyone involved that LeBron got his coach fired, I wasn’t that interested in following that thread or banging that drum. After all, my endgame was the Cup. I wasn’t a sports journalist looking for an angle, just a tourist with a book idea.
(Frankly, I find most sports journalism shoddy, lazy and piffle-like. At the time, Zach Lowe was the only guy I liked. I didn’t hide my lack of respect, and gave McMenamin, who was there for ESPN, the business about asking if Kevin Love’s presence – injured by Kelly Olynyk in Boston in ‘15 – on the bench was going to be inspirational for the team. He didn’t like that, but come-the-fuck-on, inspiration isn’t winning these games, and you shouldn’t be trafficking bullshit emo crap – especially when the team had a long on/off again thing with Love’s “fit” all year long fercrissakes.)
I wasn’t paid, though my columns ran every game in the Cleveland Scene. My pieces were long, generally between 2000 and 3500 words. ON A BASKETBALL GAME. But I wrote about the game. The newspaper guys wrote 750 words that they began writing in the third quarter because of their tight deadlines. They felt they were better writers because they were at the city paper, and wrote on deadline, but they wrote their pieces before the game was even over and geared their questions toward the quote holes they had in their story at the end of the game. They would be done and heading home within 90 minutes of game end.
I would arrive home, spark up the bowl, rewind the tape, and get about the 3-4 hour process of writing my postgame piece. I had the tiniest bit of local celebrity, between the handlebar mustache and the familiar voice. (The local postgame scrums were one-camera, focused on the podium.) I think three or four times someone knew me without knowing me.
Between the stakes of the second year, the effort of going to the game at like 5-something for the pregame scrum, then finishing around 4am for 42 home games and playoffs, on top of road games and west coast games that would have me up until 5 or 6, and the steady static from the press team, it was a difficult year in 2016, post-firing.
(One time they ignored my hand in the front row the entire postgame presser and shut off the cameras, when Coach Ty Lue, to me forever respect, said, “Hey what about this guy, he’s had a question the whole time?” shaming them into turning the cameras back on and letting me ask my question. Yeah, the Cavs press team was out to screw me post-Blatt firing, it was very overt and to some level performative for the trio of dopes working for the Plain Dealer, outside the fourth guy, brought in from Portland, Chris Haynes, who did TNT baseline reporting when they had the NBA contract.)
Of course, however difficult the season, the playoffs were great. The year before I hadn’t made the Boston trip. Didn’t get a press pass for the series. But I got the pass for the three rounds in Chicago, Atlanta, and Golden State. I covered the Golden State Finals games for The Guardian. In ‘16 I was there in Detroit, Atlanta and that terrific Toronto series, where the home team held serve until the Cavs blew them out in Toronto for Game 6. I drove to Toronto and Detroit games to save money.
It was an extraordinary experience. I remember when I heard that Draymond had been suspended for Game 5, with the Cavs down 3-1, and I felt like I knew, KNEW that we would be back there for Game 7. They would seize that opening, as Irving and James both scored over 40, a first in the finals, and you just knew they were going to hold serve at home after the painful Game 6 loss the year before. (If you recall the Cavs went up 31-11 in the first quarter.) My seat was on the end of the Coliseum and so I had a great view of the Irving three over Curry. I will never forget how depressed the Warriors fans looked; I’d seen it personally the year before. I don’t think I even went to the postgame presser in ‘15, I was so bummed.
Among the priceless moments from that night was meeting Bill Walton and Bill Russell in person, on the court at least an hour after it was all over. Walton was waiting for his son Luke, a former Cavs player, now Warriors Assistant Coach. (Luke led the team on its 24-game winning streak to open the season after Kerr opened the season in bed from back surgery.) It was an amusing exchange, as I had promised my father to get him a Warriors hat, and took the moment to ask Bill Russell to sign my had by suggesting he was one of the greatest ever.
Bill Walton stopped me, and asked, “One of….?” So I bowed down Garth & Wayne style and pronounced myself not worthy, which didn’t move Russell in the least. Bill offered to sign, the mensch that he was, and I told him about seeing him spin Elvis Costello’s Singing Songbook at the Orpheum in Boston when he was a Celtic during that comeback championship season. Just kinda crazy.
(I flew up to see Costello two of three nights, and sure AF he played the song I yelled out from the upper balcony, “Radio Sweetheart,” though he was unimpressed the two times I talked to him and told him this. This was also a fateful October for the Red Sox.)
Afterwards, I smoked a Cohiba I had bought while outside the country the summer before, in anticipation of that moment.
All my life I had wanted to write a book, and now I had done all the work to do so. But a month after series, my agent told me they couldn’t get me a deal from anyone. So over the course of about 6 weeks, which in reality was more like four, I wrote the story of that season.
I won’t deny, I leaned hard on the game reviews I did throughout the season. I wanted a yearbook of that season. I thought that would hold value for years. I hope so because I still have hundreds of books in the basement. But I wrote a 108,000 word (or so) book, based on shipping costs/length/weight, and hired a good editor, and hired a guy to make the cover (I still love it).
I would’ve had it out in maybe the first week of December, but the guy doing the cover also worked for Skyhorse Publishing, a big sports publisher who was doing a world series book – and like the newspaper guys – had written most of the book when the Guardians were leading the Cubs 3-1 only to have them come back and win the World Series, for their first championship in 108 years, upsetting the entire cart and delaying him relying the final copy of the cover art to me by almost three weeks.
I did have the books before Christmas, but only by a week or so, ruining what could’ve been a great coup. About this time the Cavs, who had seen a copy of the book, took away my credentials on some BS I won’t go into. But the goofy thing was they polled my fellow scribes on whether they should do it. Press complicity or whatever. It didn’t really impact the book sales to be honest. I did the games in the Scene and did write ups just the same. To be honest, by year three the grind was getting to me and the ongoing tussle with the press office was wearing me out. I remember posting on Twitter after they froze me out of another postgame scrum, “You guys can do what you like, freeze me out. I already got what I wanted out of it.”
I sold something like 500 books, which didn’t seem like a lot at the time, but wasn’t bad. I got the books into every Ohio Barnes & Nobles, and did signings, which mostly sucked, but at couple times involved as many as eight sales. I drove around the state hand delivering books and talking to store owners. I really did the entire soup-to-nuts of putting out a book and Michele was hella supportive. She really helped me realize a dream and was 100% behind me and I will never forget that.
It’s been ten years and my life has changed dramatically in the interim. I’m not married and I’ve lived in three different cities since leaving Cleveland after the pandemic. I’ve written another book and this one’s on someone else’s dime, if we make it to publishing. It’s been in my editor’s possession for well over a year after I spent six years researching and writing it. Quite the change from five months prep-to-conclusion, but I wrote about 30 years of music history and talked to over 40 people so, there’s that.
In talking about the experience recently, I connected it to the several (3?) times I attended the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremonies in Cleveland. One of those times, I stood a few feet away from Yoko Ono and heard her say to the person leading her to her seat that it was a shame George couldn’t be here. Ringo was there too. But by then I had been covering music for two decades, and beyond former Beatles, I honestly can’t remember any “sightings,” even though they were all around.
What does strike me about both the NBA Finals and the RNRHOF ceremonies is our human love of pomp. It’s talking loud to cover your diffidence. We have these giant spectacles with the biggest kleig lights possible, and even imply that these people are exalted humans, but what you come away from standing just beyond the lights reporting on it, is how false the whole ceremony is. You want some make-work, let’s looking at public relations and marketing. They are tasked with making the quotidian seem extraordinary. In a way, its their ordinariness that makes the people extraordinary, when you break it on down.
I mean, ideally these are tremendous artists and athletes and there’s no denying their success. But these are all pocket Ozymandiases who never really asked for the accolades. They perform out of the love and joy in the pursuit of perfection, and I’m sure the size of the stage amplifies that experience, but they are all, when it’s said and done, frail human beings feeling about in the dark like all of us.
Who doesn’t like some pomp? It makes this moment feel special, and we should really try to value these moments, at the same time is feels like a lie, a delusion to make us sleep easier. To create meaning by exalting a ladder to nowhere. Perfection can mostly only be approached and even then only cherished for a brief time. Most of life is about failing, falling short, and losing grip on what we once possessed.
There’s a great Joe Pernice song about Bjorn Borg, just about the only athlete I can think of to surrender at his peak and walk away: “We killed the endless summer / Pray the season never ends / It slams headlong into the other one.”
There is no rest in pursuit, and in the end that makes most attaboys an empty endeavor. Still we plug away, and there is great value in the recognition. But what is that really?
An acknowledgment of the intrinsic hunger among the best at what they do, chasing an ideal they can only touch fleetingly because the chase is meaningful, not the cheese at the end of the maze.
