Leaving Believeland

Thanks to the Cavaliers, the 52-year-old Cleveland sports curse is over. But what if you had already stopped believing in curses?

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Thanks to the Cavaliers, the 52-year-old Cleveland sports curse is over. But what if you had already stopped believing in curses?

When I was growing up in the late 1980s in a tiny town in Northeast Ohio, Ron Harper came to my elementary school. The only thing I really remember was being totally unaffected by it. Here he was, an honest-to-God Cleveland Cavalier, and the collective response was a definitive meh. The Cavs were good at the time — Mark Price, Brad Daugherty, Hot Rod Williams, Larry Nance were the stars — but Harper’s visit happened right around the time when Michael Jordan knocked Cleveland out of the NBA playoffs with The Shot.

Even then, at age 8, I’d already learned a valuable lesson about rooting for teams from Cleveland: Don’t get your hopes up.

Last night, that idea kept popping up in my head. The Cavaliers were up eight! Don’t get your hopes up. It’s tied! Don’t get your hopes up. LeBron blocked Igoudala! Don’t get y — Kyrie Irving just hit a three! DON’T GET YOUR HOPES UP. The Warriors are down four with ten seconds to go. DON’T. GET. YOUR. HOPES. UP.

And then they won. Honest to god, the Cavs won. I stood up in front of my couch and stared at the television. Motionless. After years of not getting my hopes up, I didn’t know what to do.

I was born in Warren, Ohio, about an hour southeast of Cleveland, and went to high school in Cortland, a town of 6,000. After graduating from Ohio University in 2002, I had a decision to make. Plenty of my high school classmates stayed in Ohio, moving to Columbus or Cleveland, which had more jobs than the Mahoning Valley, where all of the steel mills had closed. I decided to leave. After growing up in a part of the country where the skies are overcast for most of the year, I wanted to move south. For the last decade, I’ve lived in North Carolina. When I first moved to Charlotte in 2005, I was a bit worried about how I’d fit in. Turns out, I didn’t have to worry at all. There was a local Browns Backers club.

I spent my Sundays with the club for a year or two. Inside a bar, dozens of us watched the game as we woofed down chili dogs, spilling crumbs on our Browns jerseys and dog bone necklaces. All it ever made me was angry. The team was terrible, and nobody seemed to have any hope. Taken out of the context of Northeast Ohio, it seemed like a ritual that kept getting more and more unhealthy. After a year or so, I’d made other friends in town. I stopped going.

Last year, I went back to Cleveland after the Cavaliers lost in the NBA Finals. The Curse was alive and well. The young kids seemed to believe in it, because their fathers had tutored them in The Drive, The Shot, and Jose Mesa. Older folks, who remembered the Browns 1964 NFL Championship, seemed destined to never give up on teams that hadn’t won anything significant since they were kids. It was the people in the middle, the people in their 30’s, who were the most conflicted. They, like me, had grown up watching awful athletic tragedies befell their teams. They, like me, were trying to figure out if it was still worth it to believe. The Curse might be real, but a lot of people figured out their own way to escape from its spell.

At Flanagan’s Irish Pub, in the shadow of Quicken Loans Arena, I talked to Mike Polk, Jr., a comedian who created the once-viral Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video. That was in 2007, and even though he made a sequel, he didn’t make a third, because downtown had really turned around. There’s more to Cleveland than The Curse, he said, even if outsiders believed that it somehow touched everything else in town. Polk chuckled a little when talking about the people who were in town covering the 2007 NBA Finals. When they came back in 2015, they were astonished to find a bustling downtown, full of restaurants, bars, a casino, and condos and apartments that’d cost at least twice as much in other cities. “People came back and they’re like ‘what did you guys do?’” he said. “It’s nice now. Nobody in this country knows the vast improvements the city has made.”

It is nicer, but still, a lot of people moved away. Between 1990 and 2013, Cleveland’s population shrunk by 115,000 people. Many fled to other large cities. Many, like LeBron, moved to Florida. And when they did, they planted their Cleveland flag. The Browns Backers are now one of the most widespread sports fans clubs nationwide, with chapters in nearly every major American city, and a few internationally as well. “Here’s the ugly truth,” Polk told me about the Browns Backers. “It’s not necessarily because we’re great fans. It’s because everybody leaves here.”

And because so many people leave, and because Cleveland’s chief export has been sports misery, The Curse is always in your rear view mirror. People, upon hearing I’m from Northeast Ohio, still ask: How about the Cavs? What about the Browns? You think the Indians can do it this year? The implication is that they are terrible, and that you, Prodigal Son, are still betting on the long shot. It’s the easiest icebreaker there is.

I want to tell them that I’ve given up on those teams. I want to say I’m a long-time Mets fan (I blame being six when they last won the World Series) who’s more recently warmed up to the Carolina Panthers and the Charlotte Hornets. I could admit this. I really want to tell them that I finally got tired of being stuck in Cleveland’s feedback loop of sadness. I moved on. I was pain free. There’s no more waiting for next year for me. But usually, I don’t want to have a long conversation. I often just nod my head, as if to say, knowingly, I’m not getting my hopes up.

It worked well for years, at least until last night, when the damn Cavs won the NBA Championship.

When I stopped actively rooting for the Cavs and the Browns, I felt like I’d finally gotten out of a bad relationship. I’d moved to a new city and started fresh. I’d started seeing some new teams. It was going well. And then, last night, it was like bumping into your ex again. She looked good. She seemed like she’d turned a corner. Over time, you’d sort of forgotten all of the bad times, and only the good memories remained. Maybe, I thought, I’d made a mistake in leaving her.

But this is what adults do, right? Some people marry their high school sweethearts. Some move away and start a new life. You can’t exist in stasis forever. And yet, that’s what we expect out of Cleveland. That somehow, nothing has changed for the better since 1964. That everyone who leaves is still just the same sort of fan they were when they left.

A fellow former Ohioan (who was hung over this morning) used to joke with me about what would actually happen if some Cleveland sports team won a championship. There’d be joy, we both agreed, but long-term, people wouldn’t know how to feel. Some people had a perverse pride in The Curse, as if believing in something against all odds is noble. Loyalty is to be rewarded. Someday. After The Curse was over, what would they see? Happiness? Would they take a more sobering look at their teams? Their city? Would they move on? Would they sort of stare, like zombies, not knowing what to do next?

I laughed at that last one, but last night, as LeBron cried, and thousands of people in downtown Cleveland jumped for joy, I stood, motionless, watching the scene unfold on television. I was on the outside looking in. My wife asked if I was okay. Yes, I told her. I walked into the kitchen, poured a shot of Crown Royal, and gulped it down. I felt warm and tingly. The numbness wore off for a brief flickering moment.

I smiled.

I don’t believe in The Curse.

But I’m glad the fans finally got a championship. I’m glad they got their hopes up. I just want them to be happy.