The Whore of Akron

Hey, I'm with you. I'm having an awfully hard time wrapping my head around this level of fandom, a lack of self-awareness that makes your ups and downs more important or more noble than those of the fans of another team.

 

If those people didn't exist, would there be a sports section to put out?

 

Oh, I don't think a sports section's reader base is completely populated by the lunatic fringe. And certainly not the lunatic fringe to the extent we're seeing in this book.

 

FACK YOU!

 

Ah, West Point fans.

 

Bill Simmons has made a good chunk of his career building up this notion. People inherently like to think they're special and better than other people. It manifested itself in a large way during the Penn State scandal (have you heard of that, shotty?), when so many students and alumni lost sight of the fact that Joe Paterno was a football coach and he would be replaced by a football coach and the football team was just a football team anyway.

 

I understand the link you're trying to make. I think there's a bit of an apples/oranges thing going on there. There were aspects to the Penn State situation -- most especially, a man being an icon in his venue for a half-century -- that simply don't exist in the LeBron/Cleveland scenario.

And as important as anything, Penn State seldom felt like an underdog prior to the recent happenings. Cleveland has seldom felt like anything but an underdog. Penn State people went around saying, "How could this be happening to us?" Cleveland people went around saying, "I knew something like this would happen to us."

 

You should cover SEC football.

 

Very true all Clevelanders just know that this sort of thing is going to happen to them and their sports team. It hurt because it felt like it came from an insider or someone who knew what it was like. But the truth of the matter is Lebron is a front runner and doesn't really understand the mentality of a Cleveland sports fan.

 

I just finished the book. And if Raab is a typical Cleveland sports fan ... I don't really understand the mentality, either.

 

God forbid they take the attitude that, "Gee, we were fortunate to win the draft lottery --- despite only a 22.5% chance of doing so --- and obtain a homegrown talent who happened to be the league's best player (or one of). And we were fortunate to see our team make it to the NBA Finals and be a threat for the better part of a decade to compete for a championship."

 

Optimism is not a Clevelanders strong point after all the years of near misses and disappointment. For most rational fans in cities that have won something in the last 50 years that wouldn't be so hard to do but not in Cleveland the disappoint capital.