Patience is the companion of wisdom – St. Augustine
If you are going to be a fan of Cleveland’s sports teams, you need more than a fair share of patience.
While we are not at the exact front of the line for the generation of fans who have never witnessed a championship, we are very, very near it, as the gray hair and wrinkles reflected back to us when we look in the mirror each day remind us.
Yet we still have patience and, hopefully the wisdom from years of watching and waiting – not for Godot, but for that elusive championship or, on what may be a more realistic level, for relevancy from our local sports teams.
Patience, even among Cleveland’s passionate and dedicated fans, rises and falls, depending on the season and the team.
It is low now for the Cleveland Indians, as the cries that “the Dolans are cheap” ring out far too frequently. Memories of the late ’90s – when the Indians were the bullies of the American League and played to a sold-out Jacobs Field night after night – fuels much of that impatience.
But memories can become cloudy over time, and the days of fielding a World Series-caliber team with a $70 million payroll are over. The local TV contracts signed this past winter by the Texas Rangers ($80 million a year) and the Los Angeles Angels ($150 million a year) have seen to that.
In the meantime, for the second consecutive year, we are watching a team filled with likeable players take an early season lead in the AL Central Division with the hope that the summer will be meaningful again.
And we patiently wait to see how the season will play out.
Many seemingly lost patience with the Cleveland Browns around the time that coach Chris Palmer made the switch from Ty Detmer to Tim Couch at halftime of the season-opening game in 1999.
Worn down by years of bad draft picks, bad coaching and more bad quarterback play than any franchise should have to bear, many fans have grown so impatient that they cry out for team president Mike Holmgren to talk to them, but then react negatively when he does because they don’t like his message of patience.
In the April 30 issue of Sports Illustrated, Peter King wrote about the philosophy the New York Giants have employed in building a team that has won two Super Bowls in the past five years.
The Giants try to build strong offensive and defensive lines, build a running game that can produce late in the season in bad weather, and find a quarterback who has an arm that can pass in bad weather.
“If I listened to the media and to the fans, and made decisions based on popular opinion, well, then they hired the wrong guy,” Giants team president John Mara told Sports Illustrated. “Fans think of the now. I think of the now – and two years from now. That way you just build.”
Over the past two years, the Browns have followed a similar path, adding Phil Taylor, Jabaal Sheard and John Hughes on the defensive line; Jason Pinkston, Shawn Lauvo and Mitchell Schwartz on the offensive line; Brandon Weeden at quarterback; Trent Richardson at running back.
“If I’m frustrated and I’ve only been here a couple of year, I can imagine what the fans are, but my message is the same, that we are going to fix this,” Holmgren said this week in published reports. “It’s difficult and painful to be this patient and I know they’ve heard it before, but this is a different group, and we’re going to get this thing done.”
And we patiently wait to see how another season will play out this fall.
Patience still seems to have a home, however, at Quicken Loans Arena despite the Cavaliers winning just a little more than a quarter of their games the past two seasons. Having a Ping-Pong ball bounce favorably and the perception that your owner will do “whatever it takes” to win can be an easy balm to soothe the fans’ fears.
It’s somewhat easy to be “all in” when you own a team in a league with a hard salary cap and the smallest roster size of the three major sports. Owner Dan Gilbert also pocketed some goodwill when he tweeted “Not in our garage” when LeBron James tried to use the players parking garage when Miami was in town during the 2010-11 season.
Of course, if Gilbert had stood up to James when he was wearing Wine and Gold things may have turned out differently.
There are fans that also cling to the notion that Gilbert will buy the Indians and serve as the Wahoos personal life saver. (Never mind that the team is currently not for sale.) Unless Gilbert has a secret deal in place with an unknown television network, there is no new revenue out there that would allow the Tribe to compete with the big-market teams. And, no, Gilbert is not putting $70 million of his own money into the payroll each year.
Many of those same fans who want Gilbert to be a dual owner are the ones who complain incessantly about Randy Lerner owning two sports teams. Somehow Lerner is “distracted” and “uninterested” because he owns the Browns and Aston Villa of the English Premier League. But Gilbert would have no problem running the Cavs and the Browns, along with the casino that is set to turn downtown Cleveland into the Atlantic City of the Midwest (and that’s not a compliment).
And we patiently wait for the NBA lottery on May 30 to see if the Cavs can get lucky in consecutive years.
Patience is great, but only if it comes with its twin – hope. We need hope that things will get better, that there is a plan in place for Cleveland’s sports teams, that the championship parade will one day roll through downtown Cleveland.
Hope has come in many forms over the years. It has appeared in Jim Cleamons’ put back, Dick Snyder’s dribble drive, a Brad Daugherty and Mark Price pick-and-roll, and in a 25-point effort in overtime in Detroit.
It’s been visible in a Brian Sipe to Ozzie Newsome pass, a Bernie Kosar to Brian Brennan connection, and in a William Green run.
Hope can also turn up in the most unexpected places. In 2007, opposing defenses didn’t know about the power in Derek Anderson’s right arm. But once they did … well, you know the rest.
Most notably, hope came in the form of an anxious relief pitcher who wanted to be anywhere but on a mound in Miami late in October of 1997.
As fans, we have to be refueled by hope from time to time over the years.
Because without that hope, even Cleveland’s seemingly bottomless pit of patience may run day hit bottom.
(Indians photo by The Associated Press; Browns photo by The Plain Dealer; Cavs photo by Getty Images)