James LeBron - Youre welcome, Cleveland: how I helped Lebron James win a championship and save a city

To my fatherSanford Raaband to David, Robert, and Michael, my brothers

Im home again, among my people for Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finalsin downtown Cleveland, in a bar on Huron Avenue, a two-floor cavern in a century-old bank building that sat vacant for ten years and sold for less than well get for our house in New Jersey next year. Every tap in the city is jammed, and in the streets outside, two hundred thousand natives huddle, howling, praying for salvation, beseeching King James.

Poor bastards. The score is 89-89 with two minutes left, and both teams have gone cold, gripped by fatigue and the vise of Game 7. With each missed shot, this saloon swells with body heat and a roar less animal than machine. Fifty years of failure is the sound of hope in my hometown.

I have come to warn my people of the coming flood of tears, but I cannot make a sound, and none of them could hear me anyway, and none of them would listen if they could.

Fools.

Then the Warriors rebound another Cavs miss and start a textbook two-on-one fast break: Andre Iguodala and Steph Curry, honeyed godling, running hard, splitting the court against the Cavs rescue adoptee, the dubitable J. R. Smith.

I know whats coming, know it in my bones. Grief and irony, irony and grief, laid atop fifty-two years of loss, and sealed with an enduring fury. My first and last Game 7 was nearly twenty years ago, when the Cleveland Indians took a one-run lead into the ninth inning and blew it. No chariot came; no chariot has come since. I am among the living who saw the Browns win it all in 1964, when I was twelve. I was baptized in the spirit of Jim Brown then, on the Lake Erie shore, but I have seen the town and these teams crumble and collapse for fifty years, and my heart is a scar hard with dread and despair, and my faith consists of duty, not belief.

At the midcourt line, Iguodala passes to Curry, who swings wide, to draw JR out of Iguodalas way. One step, and Curry zips the ball back, a bounce pass that Iguodala catches in stride as he arrows to the hoop. JR has recovered and curls past just as Iguodala jumps, the ball aloft in his right hand. JR has done his best; he always does, to little avail.

This cant end welland it wont be the teams fault, much less this woebegone towns. Blame this old Jew, wandering parched in endless, empty sands, cursing at the faceless sky. Not a prophet: a dollar-store Virgil trembling at hells gate. A curse incarnate.

My son is here, only seventeen years old, still saddled with me. Ive heard that dads hunt and fish and camp. Dads golf. Dads build thingsoften using power toolsand dads somehow repair them. Not my dad. Not me. I hit the road with Judah and drive through the night to my hometown, so that we might bear witness to another Cleveland team turn triumph into a rictus of defeat and misery.

Judah, my beloved heir, here is my gift, your legacy: Game 7 in the land of your fathers, and a soul-crushing defeaton Fathers Day.

And as the ball leaves Iguodalas hand, LeBron, out of the ether, streaks into the paint. For eighty-eight feet, nearly the entire length of the court, he has sprinted behind the play, seeing all of it during the three or four seconds since the rebound.

Trailing Iguodala by two yards, he launches, at the perfect angle and instant, soaring toward the ball, still rising, his hands held high, arms spread, carrying the weight of a people and a citys soul.

A foot above the rim, LeBron James blocks the shot and cracks the sky.

I cant believe my eyes, which are brimming with what could be tears of joy, though I dont believe for a moment that the Cavaliers are actually going to win this game. Theres too much time left, the scores still tied, and twenty thousand fans in Oracle Arena, three thousand miles away in Oakland, are standing: Fops, arrogant, soft, with cash to burn. Heartless, greedy, demanding glory as their due, cheering for their defending champs, who have won more regular-season games than any team in NBA history, and for the first-ever unanimous MVP, Steph, sweetheart of the hardwood.

The Warriors and Cavs trade misses for a minute on the clock, time enough to lock eyes with my son, mine only child, New Jersey born and bred. His gray eyes shine. He is a pale prince, lean, quick, strong. He gets his sinew and good foot speed from the Brennansmy wifes side. From my side, he gets warnings and wisecracking.

I dont know what he sees when he looks at me. I am sixty-three, thick, slow, bummy enough to be too often mistaken for his grandfather, stamped in the image of Sanford Raab, my father, who died eleven days ago, early on June 8or, as Ill always think of it, Game 3.

The Cavs curb-stomped Golden State that night, rose to their knees after losing badly in the first two games of the Finals. I cant credit Sandy. He was no Cavaliers fanhe lived most of his life, and died, in Los Angeles, and boxing was his only sports obsessionbut he, too, walked these streets when he was twenty and thirty. He isnt heremy brother Michael in Burbank has the cremainsbut I am, and so is Judah Raab.

With fifty-three seconds left, Kyrie Irving launches a step-back rainbow inches over Currys fingertips, a rainbow that kisses the far rim and whirls through the net, and the Cavs go up 92-89.

Im still in doubt of everything but doom. This is not possible: no team in NBA history has come back to win the title after being down three games to one. I left the Cavaliers for dead then, a week ago, after Game 4. Bled of belief, unready for joy, insufferable to myself, I kept driving us, dodging deer on I-80 for nine hundred miles round-trip, driven by the same primitive force that led me to pay the mohel to mutilate my eight-day-old son: a covenant of myth.

NowNOWthe answer is at hand to the fundamental question: Does the God of Sports loathe Cleveland even more than Yahweh hates His Chosen People?

This cant happennot against the Warriors in Game 7, not in Cleveland, not on Fathers Day. Of all the bitter, burning losses over half a century, this would be the worst by far. I will survive itmy whole life has steeled me for thisand someday, surely, Judah will bounce back.

Only in the astonishment that followsKevin Love locks down Steph Curry at the three-point line, a sentence no more likely than Babe Ruth died a virgindoes doubt creep into my doubt. Love, Clevelands gentle Billy Budd, is all of a sudden a dervish, and Curry, smothered, befuddled, heaves another hopeless cinder block.

Miss.

Cavs ball.

With ten seconds left, LeBron goes down hard at the other end, fouled at the Warriors basket by Draymond Green, a gift box of jewels wrapped in razor wire. It was a clean shotrare for Draymond in these playoffs, where his various assaults on opponents junk have already cost him a Finals game suspensionbut LeBron lands on his right shoulder and wrist, and down he stays, writhing on the floor as if torn at by wolves.

The entire Cavs benchplayers, coaches, assistants, and trainerjog down to surround and console him. Finally, he is able to stand.

Ecce LeBron. His battered majesty. His body hewn of boulders from Olympus. Two free throws ice the game.

Two free throws.

He botches the first, rattles home the second.

93-89.

In order of their likelihood, three possibilities remain: a Cavalier foul on a three-point Warrior make, after which the single free throw for the foul knots the game, forcing overtime and killing me outright; or a tsunami swallows Oracle; or this is the best night of my life, and Clevelands.

Build the ark, man. Build the fucking ark. Now.

Too late. Curry clanks his final three, and as LeBron waves his teammates away from the ball, the game clock runs out.

It is finished.

LeBron has brought his people home, turned our home into the Promised Land, and Im alive, in Cleveland, weeping, waltzing with my boy.