Written by Andrew Clayman

---

Ok, we get it. It’s a new era in sports. Great players dictate their own destinations and everybody’s heroes have an expiration date.  We’ve accepted these grim truths. But is it asking too much to let us keep our silly, childish sports nostalgia untarnished? After all, the only athletes we can put our unyielding faith in these days are the retired ones, right? What I’m really trying to say is, why the hell is Mark Price in a Warriors uniform on basketball-reference.com?

Jonathan Knight already wrote a fine piece on the love affair between #25 and the awkward, young Caucasian boys of greater Cleveland (totally platonic, mind you), so I needn’t regurgitate that tale. This is merely a rant about two abstract concepts—memory and legacy. To take the snarky philosopher’s approach, “If Mark Price plays nine years with the Cavaliers, but history records him as a Warrior, was Mark Price ever really a Cavalier?” The answer is yes, he was. But that’s not the point. The point is that basketball-reference.com had a choice to make when they selected a player profile photograph for Mark Price—the Cleveland Cavaliers’ all-time leader in 3-point field goals-- and they chose this picture: Mark Price evading a defender in mid-dribble… as a Golden State f’ing Warrior.

I know, I know. Big deal, who cares? It’s just a picture on a stupid website. But it’s a slippery slope, my friends. Consider the images we’ve already been forced to accept as part of our current everyday sports reality: Jim Thome and Victor Martinez in the jerseys of division rivals. Ozzie Newsome proudly presiding over the ratbird nest in Baltimore. Our beloved Lithuanian lad Zydrunas Ilgauskas draping his Jack Skellington torso in a Heat jersey-- creating a sort of grotesque DeVito-Scwarzenegger Twins gimmick with his good buddy, the self-fellating egosaurus of Akron.

In times like this, the Cleveland sports fan’s only consolation can be found in the deep recesses of our dusty memory banks—the place where irrational sports fandom is born. It’s nostalgia that allows us to recall Municipal Stadium as a warm, delightful old place; or to know Clay Matthews not as the stud draft pick we passed on two years ago, but as the All-Pro workhorse who spent his entire 18-year career as a proud Cleveland Brown.

What the hell?! What is that? Is that Clay Matthews as an Atlanta Falcon? Holy shit, I forgot we cut him loose in like 1993 or something. Great. Now do you see what’s happening? The whole fabric of our nostalgic Cleveland sports fan faux-reality is starting to collapse. Thanks a lot, basketball-reference.com!

It’s one thing to see Manny Ramirez in another uniform. He took the money, we booed him a bit, it’s done with. But we’ve always been able to unconsciously counter our buried pain over those sorts of betrayals by harping on the select few superstars who belonged to Cleveland sports to the very end. Icons like Bob Feller, Otto Graham, Jim Brown…

You’re kidding, right. What is that? Is that the old Sports Illustrated issue where a 40-something Jim Brown talked about returning to the NFL… as an L.A. Raider? Was it really necessary to dig that up? He didn’t actually come back. It was a crock. This is just getting cruel and unreasonable now. I need to see another legendary Cleveland Brown to balance this out and get my sports fan mojo back.

Ha, very funny. That’s rich.

Look, we all know that very few guys ever spend their entire career with one team—even in the “golden era” when players were essentially indentured servants.   It didn’t make sense to keep Mark Price in Cleveland when the team was trying to rebuild in the post Lenny Wilkens era. So they shipped him off. Same thing happened with Omar Vizquel, although it's turned out he was actually a Venezuelan android programmed with a sophisticated male pattern baldness microchip to create the illusion of aging.

Sometimes, a player hangs on a bit too long and stumbles around in the “wrong uniform” for a while. The aforementioned Sports Illustrated did a whole photographic bit on this a few years back. But in the same way all of America agreed to never speak again of Willie Mays as a New York Met, Cleveland made a private pact to put the retroactive “franchise tag” on some of its most cherished stars of yesteryear. I mean, take Austin Carr for instance. Could there possibly be another man who comes closer to being the living embodiment of Cavalier basketball?

I see what you did there. That’s Austin Carr with the Dallas Mavericks, washed up and completely unable to throw the hammer down. You’re just toying with me now.

Or maybe there's actually an important message behind all this dastardly jpeggery. Maybe you’re trying to teach us all a lesson through tough love-- a la Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver. Maybe looking at all these disturbing images is just the slap in the face we need to unearth all of our repressed memories of our Cleveland sports heroes. 

Like, for example, it might be high time that we all accept that Bernie Kosar really did have diminishing skills. And perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to acknowledge that Charles Nagy’s final Major League pitches came as a member of the San Diego Padres. Hell, maybe it’s even appropriate that basketball-reference.com cropped our boy Mark Price in Golden State threads.

If we can all decry the selfishness of those players that have recently abandoned us, it’s only fair to remember those that we once abandoned.

Mark Price, if you're out there, I'm sorry I stopped giving a rat's ass about you after Wayne Embry jettisoned your 31 year-old ass. I know you would have loved to finish your career as a Cavalier, and I promise I didn't immediately put a Terrell Brandon poster on my wall (I'm not sure if they sold those anyway, but even if they did, I still didn't). And Omar, I'm sorry that we all got excited about replacing you with Jhonny Peralta. It was cruel and borderline insane in retrospect. And I know you would have loved to finish your career as an Indian. But it just seemed like the right thing to do at the time. We had to take our fandom in a new direction.

Hmm, that felt kind of therapeutic. I guess I was wrong to get so foaming-at-the-mouth enraged over a stock photo on basketball-reference.com. Turns out, remembering the sad downward spirals of our past heroes can make us feel a lot better when our new ones choose to screw us over. Someday, LeBron James may yet become the chunkiest member of the Washington Wizards-- and perhaps we'll be able to empathize with him in a way he never could with us. In the meantime, there's no reason to think any less of our mightiest sports idols just because of where they ended up.

Okay, this isn't cool anymore. Please stop.