You Used to Be Big

Clevelanders, as an affinity group, didn’t deal with LeBron James leaving town very well. Few sports-related events this side of the Nika riots have ever displaced so much cubic bile. But the overreaction wasn’t a regional phenomenon. I am hard up to name a trivial event ever that’s been deoxygenated as thoroughly as the Decision. Not even angsty liberals picking at the scab of the GOP primaries compares to the LeBron hate-along.

For 18 months we have battened on LeBron character assassinations, LeBron apologias, LeBron Dolchstoßlegende theorizing—basically about 720 degrees worth of angles—about one dude’s employment lifestyle choice and subsequent job performance. LeBron’s last year and a half probably inspired more words than were written in entire early-modern centuries. Which is weird and probably bad news about the future prospects of humanity, but whatever. Life is too short to spend nursing animosities, even ultravalid ones (Hug Michigan).

Which, in turn, is why I was surprised by Scott Raab’s The Whore of Akron. The prospect of an entire book excoriating LeBron was about as appetizing as, well, LeBron winning a title. I anticipated the sports-prose equivalent of a hundred Jack Chick tracts stapled together. But Raab is a gifted, thoughtful (and gleefully profane) writer. His detestation of LeBron isn’t an act, though it’s not exactly a Rawlsian contemplation of justice, either. Whore is mostly amusing, quite often touching, and unexpectedly thoughtful for a book written by an adult about how sports can hurt your feelings.

The closing pages of Raab’s book are a passionate, harsh (even relative to the rest of the book) lecture to LeBron, set off by the ill-advised “wake up tomorrow” post-Finals monologue. Toward the end of his stemwinder, Raab informs LeBron—and the reader—that “great cities and great athletes live and die.” I think his point—besides his overall point of “Redact LeBron James with a mailbox”—is that only fans have the power to make heroes, and that LeBron can’t escape his problems by escaping Cleveland. (Welcome to the club.)

But I read another notion into Raab’s throwaway line. Sure enough, no one will give a shit about LeBron James in 100 years. The upside of eternity for LeBron, apart from the trust funds he leaves behind for his great-great-grandchildren, is, um, death. But the same thing is true for Cleveland. The sun will crash into the earth, or the planet will cook itself to rid its surface of humans, and the Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor metropolitan statistical area will shuffle off into Bolivian along with everything else. No shame in that, good effort by everyone.

It’s not *the* Rapture I spied between Raab’s words, but merely a tactical apocalypse. Maybe LeBron leaving was actually a step in the right direction. Maybe Cleveland—and plenty of other cities going through similar civic discomfort over getting older, smaller, and shittier—would be better off without big-league sports. Maybe we should go ahead and wake up tomorrow and have the same personal problems we had today, in LeBron’s words. Cleveland and Buffalo and Sacramento and wherever’s “personal” problems are bad enough without shitty pro sports teams drinking our various and sundry milkshakes.

But ”big-league” status for troubled regions is a source of tax revenue (after the team gets done shaking the county down for a stadium), some menial jobs and other goodies, and a rallying point for regional identity and pride (the real value). I could probably weave something together out of urban planning, economics, psychiatric medicine, and witchcraft that explains why Cleveland (or some other town) could do just fine with its vibrant high-school sports scene, and a handful of community-oriented minor-league teams. Of course, Cleveland’s three major-league teams aren’t about to go anywhere, nor should we expect them to surrender their licenses to vacuum up money because the city might be healthier without them.

Systematically fleecing lower-middle-class people of their money and time to watch the neo-Browns is most likely a sin, but despair is always an even worse offense. Losing sucks, but it’s not fatal. There are teams that can even afford indifference to winning: the Cubs and the Maple Leafs are cocooned in their own landmark status, safe in economically viable towns, supported by loyal fans. Then there’s the Packers. Green Bay (population 104,000) is something like a holy city of football, exempt from the realities of the market, owned by its caretakers. And as of recently, they win too, more or less constantly.

Fans of teams like the Browns or Bills don’t have the bourgeois pleasures of Chicago or Toronto or even Pittsburgh to console themselves with, let alone the pipe dream of winning. These sad-sack franchises wallow in some kind of Rust Bowl phlogiston, a slurry of bad breaks, bad decisions, bad face, and just bad vibes, a constant smolder that seems to suck the life out of not just diehard fans but the entire public culture. There is such a thing as a sports misery cult (Hi Dan Shaughnessy), ranging from talk-radio gripers to sad invocations of a curse to the more creative, like Scott Raab’s book, for one handy example.

Raab’s big point, apart from the constant, indulgent (but gratifying) up-yours-buddy to LeBron, is that what we all get out of life, what we get out of sports as a subset of life, is a faith that is its own reward, “that we’ll somehow last long enough to witness that parade down Euclid Avenue, and that this—finally, always—could be the year.” It’s not a bad lesson, really, but what if we just went ahead and had the parade without the Browns?

You can see a bigger version of Cole Nielsen's awesome original illustration here.