Thursday, May 17, 2012

You Can Take The King Out Of Cleveland, But...

Welcome To Cleveland!

Poland was completely fucked in World War II—the brutally unlucky doormat of a belligerent continent under siege. First the Germans invaded and raped their way through, on their way to Russia, and then the Russians counter-invaded and -raped their way through, on their way to Germany, and all poor Poland did was take it and suffer terribly.

At least in the worlds of culture and sports, Cleveland is America's Poland, and World War II has never ended.

Northeast Ohio, which for our purposes we'll collectively call Cleveland, is the land of the double-fucked: the inhabitants are ridiculed, but to leave, to escape, is, in a way, to insult everyone you grew up knowing and loving, who stayed. The region needs your big brain, but you're moving to where the grass is already greener. Which brings me to LeBron James.

Perhaps the heretofore unspoken double-tragedy of LeBron James will illustrate the extraordinary double-fuckedness of being a sports-loving Clevelander.

LeBron grew up in Northeast Ohio, or, let's call it, Basically Cleveland. The Whore of Akron was never much of a Cleveland sports fan, however—and this is incontestably and even demonstratively true

"I'm not like you losers. I'm not! I'M NOT!"
—and for that reason I was honestly never LeBron James' biggest fan. I loved that my beloved Cavs were winning (during the regular season), and I greatly admired the uncrowned King's skills, but I've always felt about him the same way I feel about Ron Paul and Eminem: I love what they're doing, but there's something about them that really creeps me the hell out. 

With LeBron, I think I figured it out, and it surprises me that nobody else has mentioned this: Cleveland, the double-fucked, is the land of the goddam yip. (A yip is when someone unintentionally flubs his or her role in something important: like fumbling a football on the goal line, or giving up a World Series–losing hit.) And LeBron had to have grown up watching those local Cleveland teams yip their way out of contention every year, and he must have thought to himself, must have felt he HAD to think to himself: I'M NOT LIKE THOSE LOSERS. (What I've heard referred to as an "unsolicited denial.")

I think something within LeBron James is terrified that he's just like the rest of all the Cleveland sports heroes from history that he can remember: he's a yipper.

After all, winners want to take the shot at the end of the game.

Here we go again...



You know who doesn't want to take the shot at the end of the game? 

A yipper. 

The Difference Between A Winner And A Loser


A double-fucked Clevelander.

Lee Evans dropped a game-winning touchdown to get the Ravens into the Super Bowl last year. You know where he's from? Yipland, Ohio. You know where the Ravens are from? You betcha. Even the one Super Bowl the Browns/Ravens won is pretty much the worst Super Bowl in NFL history—so Clevelanders not only got to see their team leave and then win it all, but winning it all involved an unwatchably boring Super Bowl that made Trent Fucking Dilfer into someone whose opinions we now have to tolerate hear on ESPN.

Double.

Fucked.

And here is where Cleveland remains the double-fucked end of God's dead horse–beaten joke: If LeBron James, one of us, a yipper, wins a championship with the Miami Cheat, it means the only way he was capable of achieving his goals was to admit that he's a loser like the rest of us double-fucked Yiplanders and needed help from natural winners. And if he doesn't win a championship, it means he's a loser like the rest of us, and that all of the talent in the world can't overcome our unfortunate, undeserved, bizarre, loser's birthright.

At this point, I've started to distance myself from any emotion whatsoever involving LeBron James: no matter what happens, unless he comes back and wins it all here, it's just more bad news for goddam double-fucked Clevelanders.






Daniel Donatelli is the author of two marginally competent, unrecognized novels and a forthcoming collection of essays and short stories that absolutely nobody in the world asked him to write.