Opinion | LeBron James rises above the hatred to become Cleveland’s new hero
The Cavaliers star has played a defining role in helping his team fight back from 3-1 down in the NBA Finals against Golden State Warriors
In 1964 the NFL champions Cleveland Browns did not need a parade to celebrate their big win. After all, they had been on a pretty good run. Over the previous 18 years they won eight titles, four in the NFL and four in the now-defunct All American Football Conference, while playing in 12 championship games.
Their peerless running back Jim Brown was the best player in football and all of 28 years old.
But a little more than one year later, Brown called the team from London where he was filming The Dirty Dozen to tell them that he was retiring from football.
It was the beginning of a tortuous championship drought for the city’s sports teams that reached 52 years coming into 2016 and left Cleveland, the lynchpin of the Rust Belt, a piñata of futility continually beat on by the rest of America.
Things could not be any more different in the San Francisco Bay Area. With its stunning urban vistas, haute cuisine and world-class wine country as well as a plethora of hi-tech tycoons, where else would you rather be?
Of course, their sports teams have also had a bounteous haul recently with the baseball Giants winning three World Series in the past six years and the Golden State Warriors, the NBA champions fresh off the best regular season in league history, preparing to meet the Cleveland Cavaliers in this year’s finals.