An Open Apology to the Fans of West Virginia

To all fans of the West Virginia Mountaineers:

I'm sorry. I'm really, really sorry. The last 3 years I have made some bitter comments on this blog and otherwise about you, and similar schools to you, but I owe you an apology. Your behavior was justified, and really, we should all applaud you on your restraint.

I owe this apology because of the rash of comments I have made, justifying Rich Rodriguez's decision to leave West Virginia for the greener pastures of that pristine land known as Ann Arbor, Michigan. West Virginia fans were angry. They were really angry, and they let RichRod, his family, the state government, ESPN, everybody know they were angry. For some reason, I mocked these fans for their behavior. I told them to suck it up, this is the way it is in college sports-- big time coaches start at lower programs, build them up for a couple of seasons, then bolt for big money, big stadiums, and big exposure. It's the way it works in academia in the classroom and on the athletic fields-- professors bolt out of Knoxville to New Haven, coaches leave Lousiville for South Bend.

I was wrong. I was conceited, stuck up, self-centered, and ignorant. I was so selfish and excited about my own team that I did not begin to think about what you were going through. RichRod was one of you. He's a bit of a hick who takes "country twang + aww shucks= people's hero" to levels even a politician would envy. Most of all, he was one of you. He was a walk on player, won a bowl game and had an interception in it, and came back home to do good. He revolutionized the offense and made people forget about Major Harris and the '88 Mountaineers, which was also the last time WVU was considered a "great" program. RichRod took WVU back to national prominence, winning 2 BCS games and even putting them 30 minutes from the 2008 National Title Game. If you were a WVU fan, you had to be beside yourself. Here was a coach not only taking your team to the top, but also a guy you didn't have to worry about bolting. The school was showing cash, renovating the stadium, and he was one of you. I'm sure he made you unbelievably proud of your team, school, and to be a 'Neer. He would make you a dynasty. After all, for most schools, it only takes one iconic coach to take a school that was a second thought and transform them into one of the most desireable jobs in college sports. Just look at Bear Bryant at Alabama, Steve Spurrier at Florida, they made those jobs nationally known.

And then he left you. That was it. Sudden, unexplained, and holding nothing but vacated hopes, dashed dreams, and bitterness. Oh, the bitterness. The kind of bitterness that consumes you. The kind that makes you hate your coach. The kind that makes you hate the media for justifying, even encouraging, the coach's decision to leave. You hate everyone else's fans who laugh at you, when you know deep down they are all deathly afraid that their coach will bolt for another team or another league. And most of all, you hate sports. You hate that you care, you hate that it means so much to you, you hate that you are bitter in the first place.

This is where I am now in life. Here we talk only about college sports, but since I went to a small school as an undergrad. I may love college football and the Michigan Wolverines, but at the end of the day, it doesn't consume me. My hometown of Cleveland, on the other hand, is a different story. I love my city, and even though I'm in Atlanta and haven't really lived full time in Cleveland since I graduated from high school ten years ago, it's still "my" city. When I introduce myself, I still say "I'm from Cleveland, but I live in Atlanta." It is an essential element to understanding who I am. In college, I used to give the book Crooked River Burning, a book about growing up in post-industrial Cleveland and the tragic horror of watching your city's identity as a steel producing power die as you grow up, to my closest friends so that they would understand why I am the way I am.

Now that I have left Cleveland, my only true links to the city are 1) my parents and 2) my love for their sports teams. Even though I left, I feel like if I root harder and care more about the teams, somehow I make up for the fact that I am the classic example of the brain drain that is killing the city. When I defend my city and my teams to some Southern doucher who can't understand why I care so much about pro sports, or some East Coast asshole who can't understand why I root for teams that don't have the payroll to compete annually, I feel like I'm repaying the city the debt I owe it for raising me and letting me leave. It makes me feel like an ambassador to the city-- someone who defends it in foreign territory, that gives people a face to think of when when Cleveland comes up rather than Jay Leno's weak ass jokes. "Ha, their river caught on fire in 1975, coincidentally the last time that I was culturally relevant! The Tonight Show, tonight at 11 on NBC!"

So now I am in a similar position of West Virginia fans were in 2008. Tomorrow, the single greatest athletic specimen of our generation and arguably the greatest raw athletic talent to ever come out of the state of Ohio is announcing on national television where he will play NBA Basketball for the next 3-6 years, depending on the contract he wants. In one way, however, it's vastly different from the WVU-RichRod experience. RichRod went from not even in the running to being announced as coach in 48 hours, I remember getting the text that he was interviewing with Michigan while I was at Browns game, and if I remember correctly he was the coach by the next day. I. on the other hand, have been bracing for this moment for years. In fact, I specifically remember when it started. 5 years ago, I started teaching in the summers at a boarding school. My first summer was the first time LeBron was a free agent. I frantically checked espn.com all day on July 1 to see what he would do as a free agent. When he said he was going to resign, I immediately called Hoogs, overjoyed. The next day, however, LeBron announced he was only signing a 4 year deal, and not the max 7 year deal. People immediately assumed it was because he wanted to leave Cleveland early, and most assumed, it was to leave for the Knicks. That rumor started in July. July of 2006.

So, for four years, I've had to listen to people talk about what will happen when he's a free agent. For four years, I've listened to jokes from friends in bars asking me, "So, what will you do when LeBron becomes a Knick?" just to see me throw stuff. Four years. Four years.

So, now it is finally happening, and it's even more miserable than I could have imagined. My whole sports life, I have only known heartbreak. I'm not going to do the typical Cleveland fan's blog routine of listing all the horrible sports moments, but if you Google "Cleveland Sports Tragedies" you get a mere 322,000 hits. I have seen every sports team of mine fail every time. The first Browns game I remember is "The Drive," watching at home with my Dad. I didn't understand it, I was 4, but I knew at the end I was supposed to cry. The two greatest sports years of my life as a fan-- the '94 and '95 Indians-- were ruined first by a strike the ended the first Indians winning season in 50 damn years in '94, then losing in the '95 World Series to Braves fans who didn't even sell out the clinching game 6 followed the next month by the Browns announcing they were moving to Baltimore.

Oh my god, the Browns moving. I was in 8th grade, and it was the first moment that I learned that Cleveland was not the city I grew up thinking it was. I grew up thinking Cleveland was a great city, arguably the best place to live in the world. I thought it was a city people respected. That was when I realized it wasn't. That was when I learned that people don't get the city, that no one outside of it understands why anyone would choose to live in Northeast Ohio, and most of all, that people justify anyone leaving the city. People criticized Art Modell, but no one stopped him from leaving or publicly criticized him (other than Pittsburgh and Buffalo, our Rust Belt brethren who I will always respect for that), and now they even want to put that greedy, incompetent, stupid piece of-- shut yo mouth!-- in the Hall of Fame. Two years after the Browns came back, I was pledging a fraternity and the Ravens made the Super Bowl. I had to wear a Raven's championship shirt for an entire month. I honestly thought I was going to kill someone, and spent the month going through all the things I would do to the shirt. Needless to say, it ended up in a very large, very hot fire. I never thought anything could be worse than that.

But I apparently was wrong. If there is one thing that Clevelanders should have learned by now, it can always get worse. What could make the city's economy worse than the American steel industry dying in the 70s? Don't worry, in twenty years the auto industry will die as well! Don't worry about the Browns leaving, or the Indians selling off back-t0-back Cy Young Winners CC Sabathia and Cliff Lee in back-to-back seasons, there's still "The Announcement."

So LeBron James is going to announce his decision. Nothing in my history as a fan gives me any hope for this day. I have spent 28 years constantly having my sports teams give me hope, make me excited for next year, only to see it come crashing down in some horribly unpredictable and public manner. LeBron James seems to know exactly how this should all go.

I think I need to explain what he and this decision mean to me as a fan, however, before we get going. Cleveland, in it's 100 year sports history, as only been able to say it's had a "great" twice. We had Bob Feller, and Indians pitcher in the 30s and 40s, and we had Jim Brown who retired in 1965. That means the last time we had a great, transcendent, or even just "good" player was 1965. The best since 1965? In all honesty, it's either Bernie Kosar or Sandy Alomar, neither of whom is exactly beating down the door to the Hall of Fame. But LeBron was different. LeBron was something that we had never seen before. Never in my life had I seen celebrities show up for Cleveland games and be there to watch a Cleveland team. Sure, we get Ben Affleck, but only when the Red Sox are in town for the playoffs. But people came to see LeBron. People came to Cleveland. And as LeBron's game grew, as he grew physcially, as his billboards around the city grew, it seemed the city did as well. For a city that has been shrinking steadily for four decades, this was unimaginable.

What made it even better? He was ours! Indians fans have always hated the Yankees, because they rely on free agency and their huge payroll and not their farm system to be dominant. Year after year, we watch our great players in Cleveland tryout for the day they will be good enough to get Yankee money. They don't earn it, they buy it. Therefore, we have always taken an irrational pride in not "buying titles." And with LeBron, we weren't. He was completely homegrown. My sophomore year of college, the Cleveland paper was already following LeBron weekly. That year he had won the MVP award at the Adidas ABCD camp, beating out the entire Top 5 of the NBA Draft that year-- at 16! I tried to explain how good this kid was to my friend Grieco, and he didn't believe me. He mocked me. A month later, LeBron made his first cover of SI, as a high school junior. A year later when he played Oak Hill Academy on ESPN, I invited friends over and cleared my schedule to watch it. Not because it had even crossed my mind that he would someday be a Cav, but because he was a Clevelander and he was the best. The jokes stopped with him. That year, my fraternity all gathered in Logs' room in the Lodge to watch the lottery picks come out. I didn't, I sat alone in my room, unable to watch. I heard updates, I heard cheers, and finally I peeked my head in when they pulled out the card for the #2 pick. It was the Pistons (From Memphis). We had the #1 pick, and I just lost it. I screamed, I ran around the hallways of our upstairs, and I cheered. I remember watching as the Cavs owner, Gordon Gund, ended all suspense by announcing at the lottery selection that LeBron was the Cavs first pick.

He was the hometown boy, and he was the hometown boy who did right by the team. He took us back to the playoffs for the first time in a decade. He opened schools, he financed PE programs, he started basketball camps that attracted the best players in the country to come play in Northeast Ohio. He accepted his MVP's at his old high school, for god's sake. On the court, he was even better. He won our first playoff series since the early 90s. He took us to the NBA Finals in 2007. But most of all, he was transcendent. Every year in the NBA he has played at a higher level than people expected, and he was without a doubt the most highly hyped player of all time. And we idolized him. He was exactly what we all as Clevelanders wanted to believe we would be in his position: we would ignore the attraction of other areas, ignore the snickers people on the coasts make about you being in the small market, and instead be the greatest ever and make Cleveland a destination again.

So when the Cavs announced their slogan to keep LeBron, "HOME: More Than A Player," that was not hyperbole. He means much, much more to the city than what you see on the Court. Cleveland has seen no hope-- politically it is hopelessly corrupt, economically it's still hoping for the 1940s and wartime spending to return, socially its population is fleeing so fast it's giving officials whiplash-- for forty years. But he represents hope. In a struggling economy nationally that is even worse in Cleveland, LeBron sells out luxury boxes and seats night after night, and gives people a reason to return to downtown Cleveland. He provides the example that we can make it, that for the first time, things can get better. He's more than an athlete to us because he is from Cleveland, so he represents way more than wins and titles. He inspires people to try and rebuild downtown-- afterall, selling people on watching LeBron for the next ten years is special enough that they will relocate to be closer to greatness. Seems ridiculous, but it's not. On Sunday the Cavs put one of the videos they showed James in their pitch to him on their website. They didn't have a single person talk about him as a player, no stats, no promises of the future roster. Instead, it was people talking about what he meant to the city. Cliche? Yep. So cliche I found myself saying, in dead seriousness, "If you come back, I promise I will move back to Cleveland before your contract is up. If you can rebuild the city, I will come back and help."

Moreso, he's more than a player because of what it means if he leaves. If he leaves, and all signs surely point to that, it's game over for Cleveland. What other people, or those outside the rust belt, cannot understand is what it's like to fear whether or not your city will literally be there year-t0-year. If he leaves, I do not see how Cleveland will come back from it. I truly believe that tickets sales to the Cavs will be so low that they will either fold or move out of the city in 5-10 years. Whatever downtown revitalization in the works will halt. The city will lose it's identity as a "major sports town," since it will only be able to afford 2 sports teams, which will further hurt their ability to entice new businesses to Cleveland and downtown specifically. Most of all, it will only further prove to everyone growing up in Cleveland that if you're smart, if you're talented, and if you have ambition, what the hell are you doing in Cleveland? If you want to be great, get out while you still can. After all, even someone as great as LeBron, someone who could have been great anywhere in the world, and could've been the consummate teammate to the city by bringing it up with him, got the hell out of dodge when he was ready to take the next step.

Am I proud that a 24 year old deciding which team has the right to pay him $100 mil means that much to me? Hell yes! It's awful, it's pathetic. I'm grown. I'm a man, almost 40 (metaphorically). And that only makes it worse. Now I not only hate the media, hate New York, hate the NBA, and hate everyone that doesn't get why I care so much, I also hate myself for caring so much. Helplessness, rage and self-loathing are a dangerous combination because they constantly feed on one another. Worst, it really does make you hate sports. Cleveland will never have a LeBron James in my lifetime, and certainly not on the Cavs roster. This will mark the end of the NBA for me. I will never, ever again sit down and watch an NBA game. Other people may put it on in the background when I'm around, but it will never again be must see TV. In all honesty, no sports will be on my radar screen for a couple of months. I will just hate them too much, and that's really terrible because normally they are my escape. I apologize for the typos and misspelled words, but I honestly don't think I can proofread this. It was hard enough to write, I can't put myself through it again to edit.

So tomorrow I will watch. Tomorrow I will turn off my computer, my phone, and sit in the corner of a bar alone, and I will watch. When he announces his decision, regardless of whether its Chicago, New York or Miami, I hope you now know why I will not talk to anyone that night, and why I will not visit those cities possibly ever again. More than a player.