LeBron James, Are You Suckering Us?

He could have gone to L.A. Or New York. Or Boston. He could have demanded a lot more money. But it isn’t about the money— it’s about going home to help his community.

That was Russ Stoddard’s take on LeBron James’ return to Cleveland after four years and two championships with the Miami Heat. He thinks LeBron James represents the face of the new purpose-driven economy, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and his generation of socially-minded Millennials. So knowing I’m from Cleveland, Russ asked me to write about him.

I’m only guardedly optimistic

Let’s start with the good: Mr. James appears to be a model human being. The work he and the LeBron James Family Foundation are doing for the kids of Northeast Ohio is important. Through the foundation, LeBron uses his status and fortune to encourage kids to go to school, work hard and go on to college. It’s clear that he loves the kids and they love him.

And let’s not forget, he started the foundation during his first tour with the Cavaliers and its work continued in Akron after he left for Miami, in spite of his vilification in by Cleveland sports fans and media. Compared with the behavior of a lot of other NBA players (and Americans generally), he’s a great person.

Still I couldn’t help but think his famous essay announcing his return was written by a PR firm.

To understand my skepticism, you have to understand a little bit about the industrial Midwest.

Growing up in the land of LeBron

If you live in the Rockies as I do now, you tend to forget where your huge pickup was built, where the steel supporting your office came from.

Growing up in Northeast Ohio, you could not forget.

U.S. Steel. Rubbermaid. Goodyear. Hoover. Not to mention Ford, GM and Chrysler. These were just a few of the industrial giants whose hulking factories stood within 30 minutes of my house in the suburbs of Cleveland. Driving up I-77 towards downtown at night was something to behold—the flames of industry, the smokestacks belching into the night, every night.

Thanks to union wages, greater Cleveland was solidly middle class, a mix of first and second-generation immigrants from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Ireland, Germany, Greece, Italy and other parts of southern and eastern Europe. Many African-Americans, who had migrated from the south for factory jobs during World War II, enjoyed a similar standard of living.

When I moved there from Detroit in the late 70’s, however, Cleveland had already started its economic descent. The union jobs that formed the bulwark of the economy were beginning to disappear to lower wage states. The city defaulted on its loans. School desegregation inspired ugliness. Watch “The Deer Hunter” with Robert De Niro, set in Cleveland. That’s what it looked like. That’s what it felt like—bleak.

Ah, but we had our professional sports teams

In the face of all this, the people of Cleveland clung tight to the Browns, Indians and later Cavaliers—three constants in a world changing fast. If you can name a city that has ridden the ups and downs of their sports franchises with more passion and pride than Cleveland, I’m sorry—you are simply full of shit.

My first experience with Cleveland sports worship was the Browns teams of 1978-1980, renamed the Kardiac Kids for their heart-stopping, last-minute wins. Brian Sipe, Dave Logan, Dino Hall. Remember them? Of course not. They were not the products of blockbuster deals and free agency. They were hard-working nobodies who shouldn’t have been as good as they were—a perfect reflection of the city itself.

When Oakland Raider Mike Davis intercepted Sipe in the last seconds of the 1980 AFC Championship, Cleveland’s heart was shattered, as it would be twice more by John Elway (The Drive, The Fumble), by Michael Jordan (The Shot)…the list goes on.

Enter the Anti-LeBron

Being a Cleveland sports fan was never easy, but in 1996 we suffered the ultimate loss. The owner of the Cleveland Browns, Art Modell, moved the team to Baltimore.

In his way, Mr. Modell was the polar opposite of LeBron James, a poster child for a then-new way of doing business where capital was free to move about the world, to bask in friendlier climates and leave its hometowns in the dust. The Browns were “his” team—except of course when they needed a new stadium. Then he felt the taxpayers should pick up the tab. Forget about the years of consecutive sell-outs provided by the fans, the millions in Browns paraphernalia —those profits belonged to him, thank you.

It turned out the citizens of Maryland had a better deal, one Modell negotiated in secret while also getting a stadium-funding measure placed on the ballot in Cleveland. Voters passed it overwhelmingly. He moved the Browns anyhow— the same way those industrial giants had deserted Cleveland for Mexico and Asia, only more devastating. Sure, it was his right to do that. But it wasn’t right.

And that’s when I started finding other things to do on Sundays.

A new hope for hope

When LeBron went on TV to dump the Cavaliers in 2010, I wasn’t surprised. But maybe, as Russ believes, his return is the sign of a new generational movement, where profit is just one part of the bottom line, not the sum total. There’s no doubt his foundation’s work helped ease his return to Ohio—and so it should. He’s bringing hope and attention to kids and communities who badly need it, a worthy legacy in and of itself. If he can bring a championship to Cleveland and break its 50-year streak of not winning squat in any sport, all the better.

And what about Art Modell’s legacy? His decision to move reverberated well outside of Ohio: municipalities all over the country were cowed into spending scare tax dollars to build new stadiums for franchise owners who threatened to move. After leaving Cleveland, Modell never returned, fearing for his personal safety. He died in 2012.

Ironically a few days after LeBron announced his return to Cleveland, a video surfaced on YouTube of an unidentified man in a Browns jersey urinating on Modell’s grave.

No arrests have been made.