LeBron James

Cleveland:
Rise Up!

What a championship would mean for Cleveland

by Ben Wolford

From East Fourth Street, you can see The Q three blocks away where Lakers and Cavs fans are starting to go into the game. Strangers drift up and down the restaurant-lined alley. Sometimes they exchange compliments as they pass each other.

“I like that jersey,” one man shouts across the street to another.

The guy smiles and touches his LeBron James jersey.

“That’s where it all started,” the man shouts again.

LeBron James scoops up some talcum powder and swirls it around on his hands.

The lights are on, and there’s no spotlight, but there might as well be. No one at Quicken Loans Arena is watching anything else.

LeBron mounds some powder onto one hand and heaves it 10 feet over his head in his signature puff as the audience claps.

Nike features the pre-game ritual in a dramatized, black-and-white “Just Do It” commercial for LeBron’s latest sneaker, the Zoom LeBron VI.

He has the third-most popular jersey in the NBA and is the front-runner for the Maurice Podoloff Trophy, awarded to the season’s Most Valuable Player.

“We’ve never had a LeBron James before,” says Joe Tait, radio voice of the franchise for all but two seasons. In fact, few franchises have ever had such a transcendent player. The Chicago Bulls had Michael Jordan, who brought in six titles and has sold his share of shoes. But “this is a first for the Cavaliers,” Tait says.

LeBron driving

It all started when a (pingpong) ball finally bounced Cleveland’s way. By winning the top spot in the 2003 NBA draft, the Cavs earned the right to select an 18-year-old phenom from Akron’s St. Vincent-St. Mary High School. LeBron James was hyped more than any other high school player. ESPN televised his games and Sports Illustrated dubbed him “The Chosen One.” Now he’s revered as royalty: King James. His first season was the only time he didn’t set a franchise scoring record, but he did win Rookie of the Year. Since then, he has led the Cavaliers to four straight playoffs, including their first NBA Finals appearance in 2007.

Even Jordan didn’t win titles by himself. Seven-time all-star Scottie Pippen was just as pivotal. Cavaliers’ General Manager Danny Ferry has always sought a super sidekick for LeBron. Now he has one: Mo Williams. He joins a starting rotation of Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Delonte West and Anderson Varejao, who all give the Cavs their best chance ever of bringing multiple championships home.

Hear extended audio from Terry Pluto

“Nothing can take a big city and turn it into a small town faster than a championship team,” says Terry Pluto, Plain Dealer sports columnist and one of the foremost authorities on Cleveland sports. In 2007, he published his latest book, “The Franchise: LeBron James and the Remaking of the Cleveland Cavaliers.”

“It’s things people talk about at work,” Pluto says. “It’s a great diversion is really what it is. It’s also something that can unite races and classes, whereas something like politics could be very dividing. You go to a game and there could be a guy who’s a Greyhound bus driver sitting next to a millionaire businessman, and they both are just cheering for LeBron.”

People already talk about the Cavs at work. But there’s a new word in the conversation, a word rarely spoken with optimistic inflection in Northeast Ohio: championship.

Championships are slippery things in Cleveland. The Cleveland Indians didn’t finish in either of their World Series appearances in the mid-1990s or close out against the Red Sox in 2007. The Indians boast two World Series crowns, the most recent one coming out of the same year as the color newsreel, 1948. And the Browns … uh … they’re rebuilding.

To their credit, the Browns earned Cleveland its last championship by beating the Baltimore Colts in 1964, the year before the first Super Bowl. (Baltimore secured its revenge by stealing the Browns and winning a Super Bowl as the Ravens in 2000.) The Browns have never been to the big show, flirting with the notion three times in the late ’80s.

As for the Cavs, their trophy case is still barren.

But this season they rank among the Eastern Conference elite, along with the Boston Celtics and the Orlando Magic. They haven’t had any luck against either team on the road. Fortunately, if the Cavs face either the Magic or Celtics in the playoffs, game seven would be in Cleveland. Almost invincible at home, the Cavs’ only loss came against their purple and gold opponents.

LeBron and the Cavaliers lost both regular season games to Bryant and the Lakers, a team with 14 national titles and a legacy that includes icons like Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson. Their culture is winning. Cleveland’s culture has been losing. A role-reversal is needed this summer to prevent a regional depression and provide a need for a trophy case.

Cleveland sports fans have been conditioned for 45 years to expect failure — The Drive, The Fumble, The Error — terse phrases from a troubled playoff past. Perhaps this season, no John Elways will cover 98 yards in 15 plays, no Ernest Byners will be stripped at the 3-yard line and no Tony Fernandezes will forfeit double-play opportunities.

Teamate help

Todd Brandeberry of Geneva has been watching the Cavs for a while.

“I’ve followed them since their inception, and this is actually more exciting than what we had back then with Austin Carr and all those guys,” he says on his way into the Feb. 24 game against the Memphis Grizzlies, which the Cavs won handily. Incidentally, Carr’s 1976 team made it all the way to the Eastern Conference playoffs, but Jim Chones, the leading scorer, broke his foot two days before the series began and the Cavs went on to lose.

Tait has seen all that. The veteran sportscaster says he doesn’t “get excited about much of anything anymore.”

Hear an extended interview with Joe Tait.

“Let’s wait till they play it out,” he says. “I mean, LeBron gets hit by a bus in Phoenix. Why, all of a sudden it’s a whole different game.” Cleveland fans would just add it to the list. The Drive. The Fumble. The Absent-minded Bus Driver.

Because of all the flukes and failure, ESPN’s Kieran Darcy called Cleveland the number one most tortured sports city. But this city’s torture goes beyond sports heartbreak.

Cleveland is the second poorest major city other than Detroit, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2007, nearly a third of Clevelanders lived below the poverty line ($16,530 or less in income). That’s 17 percent above the national average.

Educational attainment and unemployment rates were similarly grim. And when the housing bubble burst late last year, Cleveland’s soaring foreclosure rates caught the eye of the national media. All this, and not to mention the city’s population has been steadily decreasing, losing more than 130,000 people since 1980 with no sign of stopping.

The Quicken Loans Arena is one of few places in Cleveland still attracting out-of-towners.

Every purple or gold thread on Rus Walia’s body reveals the city he came from, where he was “born and raised.”

He and his two friends look around like out-of-towners from their seats on a fountain in Tower City Center in downtown Cleveland. A general enthusiasm circulates among the people buzzing through the lobby. Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers are in town.

“We’re seeing the two best players on the planet go at each other,” says Walia, a 28-year-old Lakers season ticket holder.

In 1970, the Cavaliers’ first year in the NBA, few would have flown all the way from Los Angeles for a basketball game in Cleveland, the mistake by the lake that has the dirty Cuyahoga. Yes, it caught on fire. No, not once. Ten times.

But those days are gone. The river is clean(er), and the Cavs have LeBron.

Tad Carper, the Cavaliers’ vice president of communications, says 30 percent of game attendees now come from out of state, and more than 65 percent are from outside the Cleveland designated market area.

Watch the Tad Carper Interview

Coming soon!

“So what that means is when folks are coming from outside of the area — outside of the state, certainly — they’re coming in and spending money locally,” Carper says. “And the better the team gets, the longer we play. We end up going into June for the NBA finals, and each one of those games has a multi-million-dollar economic impact on the region.”

Actually, it adds up to $4.6 million from each game Cleveland hosts, says Tamera Brown, vice president of marketing for Positively Cleveland.

It’s an organization that tries to draw “business and leisure travelers” into the city. They compile statistics on the Cavaliers economic contribution. In the 2008 regular season, the Cavs’ economic impact was almost $123 million, according to Positively Cleveland.

“We work with the Cavs to develop the background information based on how many people from out of town are coming versus how many people in town, and then come up with everything they spend on souvenirs and meals and parking and all that sort of thing,” Brown says.

It’s money spent by people like Walia and his friends, who said, “We’re here till Tuesday,” two days past the Cavs-Lakers game. What will he do the extra days?

“Party.”

Flannery’s Pub on Prospect Avenue is just about the closest place you can “party” without being inside The Q. Barney Patterson, a kitchen manager, says traffic through the restaurant has gone up since the Cavs have been playing well. He says the bar has been packed.

The nearly $123 million isn’t just a drop of water in a burning river, either.

“It absolutely does something. If you consider that that’s just for the people who go straight to the game, and that it doesn’t include anybody else and their spending or the taxes, then it really is a very significant impact for the community,” Brown says.

They’ve only been tracking numbers like this since 2006, so there’s no way to see if that amount has increased since the pre-LeBron era. But Dedrick Stephens, Cleveland commissioner of Assessments and Licenses, says the municipal taxes collected from games have definitely gone up.

“Over the last seven years, it was more than it has ever been,” he says. That’s because game attendance is the highest it has ever been. They sell out nearly every game. When LeBron joined the team in 2002, average attendance shot up nearly 7,000 from the year before.

Eight percent of every ticket sold is taxed directly into the city’s general fund, Stephens says. On top of that, 8 percent of every dollar spent on parking goes into the fund, and 3 percent of money spent on hotels is taxed, too.

He says specific numbers on what the Cavaliers pay the city in taxes are confidential, but in the grand scheme of Cleveland revenue, taxes from Cavs games aren’t saving the city. “I wouldn't say (it's) a lot,” he says. “However, once you start looking at the trickle effect — people come downtown, they have to eat, they look for entertainment and all the other things that go on — it helps the economy, of course. Eventually it starts to add up the longer the Cavs are in the playoffs."

***

“You got tickets?” the man on the street corner asks.

Lots of people do. This Lakers game is packed. But the ticket scalper can’t find anyone to sell to, and he’s reticent to talk. “I got none.” If he lands a sale, though, it’ll go for at least $100, he says.

Up the road and around the corner, people cram into the Winking Lizard. They aren’t courtside, but the dollars they drop at the bar stay in Cleveland.

Still, one economist isn’t convinced professional sports teams have their alleged financial impact. Ian Hudson, professor of economics at the University of Manitoba in Canada, has conducted research that suggests as much. He looked at how professional sports teams in a city affect the employment rate.

“All I can say is that none of the impacts that they claim — whether it’s tourism or funds-moving or people-moving — must be very large at all,” he says, otherwise the unemployment would have been impacted, and it wasn’t, his 1999 research found.

“There is no evidence that teams make a significant positive impact to a city’s economy,” Hudson’s report reads.

When Browns owner Art Modell was moving the team to Baltimore in 1995, Norm Krumholz, Cleveland State University professor and urban planner, told Fortune Magazine the jobs are “seasonal, temporary, low-income jobs.”

“Sports is not a tremendous part of the regional economy,” he says. “It occupies a lot of space in the newspapers, but it’s not a tremendous part of the regional economy — it’s relatively small.”

But Krumholz says the Cavs’ run of success does no harm. “Every little bit counts, particularly in a city that’s been so devastated with job losses. The Cavs are hot. Lots of people go to see the Cavs … they’re spending money, and that’s going to help the local economy.”

Even Hudson concedes money isn’t everything. “What you could argue is that sports teams create some intangible sense of civic pride for their city,” he says. “It gives people something to talk about, something in common, something to cheer about. It makes them feel better about where they live.”

The fans in the “Loudville” (that’s a euphemism for nose-bleed) section of The Q don’t seem upset about where they live. A “Cleveland rocks!” chant echoes down from the rafters at the Grizzlies game. “Cleveland Rocks,” the song “The Drew Carey Show” made famous, might be Cleveland’s only anthem.

Chicago and New York got Frank Sinatra. Cleveland got Ian Hunter.

“In terms of how Cleveland feels about itself,” Pluto says, “really, until the city gets itself back up on its economic feet, takes care of some of the unemployment and that kind of thing, there’s always going to be kind of an inferiority about Cleveland. A championship won’t change that.

“I just think Cleveland would be a lot better off if they didn’t worry so much about what everybody else thought of them in California or New York. We’re from here, and we like it here, and that’s really what matters.”

Comment