THE JAMES FACTOR
LeBron’s return worked out
CLEVELAND LeBron James posed the question first, the one that matters most now.
“Who am I to hold a grudge?” James asked in the first-person essay he authored in Sports Illustrated last July, his means of announcing he would return to the Cleveland Cavaliers. This city nodded back in agreement and approval, shot through with emotion that skipped right past forgiveness straight to elation. They eschewed hand-wringing in favour of celebration. Betrayal becomes finite when suffering seems infinite.
James explicitly meant he would forgive Dan Gilbert, the Cavaliers owner who had charged him with “cowardly betrayal” in an open letter to fans, sent on the night some of them burned his jersey. Implicitly, James gave Clevelanders a hint.
And so, yes, who are they to hold a grudge? You don’t say no to the best basketball player in the world. Not when he grew up 45 minutes away in Akron. Not when the year 1964, when the Browns won the NFL championship, is imprinted on every mind. Not when the Tribe is in the cellar again and the Browns can’t get out of their own way. Not when James and the Cavaliers stand eight victories away from the city’s first title in half a century.
He left once for better weather and a sunnier outlook, but they can admit they might have — probably would have — done the same at his age. And anyway, when it came time to make another choice last summer, he chose to be here, with them, like them.
“We’re desperate,” said Mike Kovach, a Cleveland police officer. “He could be second-in-command in ISIS. If he’s got an outside shot, we’d love him.”
Kovach has lived all 47 of his years in the city: “Cleveland by birth, Cleveland by choice,” he said. He has never seen a professional sports championship. This spring, Cleveland is pinning its desperate hopes to end its title drought — 51 years going on forever — on another Northeast Ohioan by birth and, although roundabout, by choice.
Cleveland loved James when he legitimized the Cavaliers for seven seasons, loathed him when he left for Miami in a nationally televised announcement in 2010 and ultimately forgave him when he returned.
It may have seemed impossible after “The Decision,” but there is little uneasy about the alliance between James and the city. Esquire magazine writer Scott Raab, a 62-year-old Cleveland native with a tattoo of Chief Wahoo on his bicep, authored a book about James in 2012 titled The Whore of Akron. And now?
“I love LeBron,” Raab said. “I’m ... thrilled he came back.”
Raab is working on another book now, a memoir about his irrational Cleveland fandom. He still experiences “a sense of unreality” watching James in a Cleveland uniform again, back after winning two NBA championships in Miami and on a quest to bring one home.
“There’s something about the whole thing that seems a little mysterious, a little mystical,” Raab said. “I don’t want to go to biblical, but let’s see what he gets done.”
Earlier this week, at the Cavaliers’ practice facility, James stayed late to launch extra three-pointers, the last player on the court. He shot shirtless, revealing a “CHOSEN 1” tattoo across his mountainous shoulders. Assistant coach Damon Jones, a longtime confidante of James’s, chided him for lack of focus. James promptly swished 10 consecutive corner three-pointers.
“You want concentration?” James screamed at Jones, with playful menace. “I’ll give you concentration!”
Since the moment James announced his return, he has actively tamped down championship expectations. “We’re not ready right now,” he wrote in July. That was before Cleveland traded for Kevin Love, or righted its season with general manager David Griffin’s savvy in-season manoeuvring, or dispatched the Chicago Bulls in six games in the Eastern semifinal. Still, James’s restrained outlook remains.
“We’re just trying to be successful,” James said. “You don’t want to put too much pressure on you. You go out, play as hard as you can. You lead the best way you can, and you can be satisfied with the outcome.”
James certainly has lived up to his words. He had 31 points on Wednesday as the Cavs drew first blood in the Conference final against Atlanta with a 97-89 victory.
On the night James left Cleveland, people mobbed streets and infamously torched the No. 23 jerseys they had bought.
Like the citizens of so many other industrial towns, Cleveland had for years grappled with the notion that nobody good ever stayed. James, from 45 minutes away in Akron, had turned his back on the city during a televised celebration of himself. The anger came from a deep-seated place. When James returned, fans exalted at the prospect of a title but also at the affirmation of the city’s sense of itself. Here was someone good, the best in the world at what he does, and he had chosen Cleveland over any other NBA city. It helped validate a growing internal perception: Cleveland was on the rise.