Two Brothers, Two Coasts: Driving from Vancouver to New York
Going All In in Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland isn’t on too many people’s road trip itineraries, but we found ourselves with a few days to kill before the CMA music festival in Nashville and the Cleveland Cavaliers had a key game three of their NBA Finals series with the Golden State Warriors, on home turf, on the Tuesday night. There seemed like no better time to visit.
We had booked into an AirBnB with Anna and her motorcycle-enthusiast boyfriend. Anna reminded me of an American version of an old colleague of mine. Covered in tattoos with short jet black hair and glasses, she was as chilled out and knowledgeable a host as you could ask for, and I even liked her cats.
Anna’s place was in Ohio City, an outlying neighbourhood just off the highway. It looked exactly as I had expected, rough potholed streets lead the way to smart new housing sat in close proximity to old beaten up houses and industrial looking buildings with all the windows smashed in. The creep of gentrification was more and more obvious the closer you got to the historic West Side Market, the beating heart of the neighbourhood. French cafes, craft beer pubs and artisanal ice-cream shops all jostle for space with cheap hot-dog windows, dive bars and boarded up shop windows.
Ohio City felt like a neighbourhood on the bounce back. Much like the city’s beloved Cavaliers basketball team, under the guidance of the otherworldly talent, and recently returned hometown hero, LeBron ‘King’ James. The team had never won an NBA Finals game until two nights before we got into town, so expectation and optimism was at an all time high.
Me and Ted went downtown before the game and checked out the harbour area, where the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and other smart new glass buildings along the river, contrast with the other side of downtown, which still has an industrial aesthetic thanks to a trio of worn bridges and a host of chimneys. The three main stadiums are all right in the heart of downtown. Even the Quicken Loans Arena (known as The Q) was all dressed up for its big night, alongside office workers wearing Cavs shirts over their suits.
Ted and I bought Cavs hats, as a memento but also as a mild form of body armour around here, drawing random shouts of “go Cavs” from every passer by, service staff and even the teenage girl that validated our parking ticket. The city really was All In for the night.
You don’t have to spend long in Ohio to hear about the curse of Cleveland. This is a city that truly believes it’s sports teams (The Browns play football, kind of, and the Indians baseball, kind of) are destined to continuously fail in the most painful ways possible. To make matters worse, two of Cleveland’s three best players were injured for the finals.
The city hasn’t seen a national championship in a combined 156 seasons between the three teams. This sense of doom was starting to lift though, and on this day, when we headed back to the Ohio City strip of bars to catch the game, you could genuinely feel the optimism of a fiercely proud city on the brink of redemption.
The bars were packed early but we managed to grab two seats at the bar of Nano Brew for the first half, before moving to the livelier TownHall, two doors down, for the second. The Cavs came storming out of the blocks, but an injury to Iman Shumpert had the crowd mumbling about curses again. LeBron was dragging this team up with him though and he just kept making shots, slinging impossible passes to team-mates and hitting his first dunk of the series, leading to an ear splitting eruption across the whole city. He finished with 40 points.
The unlikely hero of the night though, was Matthew Dellavedova. Delly, as he is affectionately known by Clevelanders, looks as much like an NBA player as I do. He’s white, he’s got a ginger beard, he looks a couple of inches shorter than everyone else and his jump shot is as smooth as the surface of the moon. But tonight he was making plays, the Australian “just hustles,” as the guy sat next to me kept saying. He was tearing around the floor, harassing Golden State’s star man and league MVP Steph Curry into a sub-par performance and making unlikely shots on the other end of the floor. The crowd were drinking it up. Chants of “Delly! Delly!” rung out along 25th Street.
Then in the fourth quarter, it looked like it might all come undone. The insecurities of a city used to losing in crippling ways surfacing in an almost audible intake of breath as Steph heated up and started nailing three pointers from all over the place. But the Cavs had worked too hard to fall short. The home crowd roared them on, and Delly made a shot while falling to the deck, after nearly losing his own dribble, that drew an additional foul that would go in once every 1,000 attempts, and Cleveland knew that it was their night.
The bar erupted with relief on the final whistle, the barmaid started handing out shots on the house and everyone was high fiving. The town had been brought together by a sports team in a way you would never see in Europe. LeBron James had the ball in his hand as the final buzzer went, and slammed it down onto the boards so hard with a mix of joy and relief that I thought the whole court would split open like something from Space Jam.
There really can’t have been a better time to visit.
Next Stop: Nashville, Tennessee
