Cleveland, where I was born and raised, had a birthday last Tuesday. The city turned 218, which feels young, particularly for a place so associated with being old and faded. Even the I.M. Pei-designed Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, sitting on the city’s lakefront, feels like a relic of the past.
The joke about the Cuyahoga River catching on fire is tired, too. (It actually happened, in 1969.) So are the jokes about our sports teams.
No major Cleveland pro sports franchise has won a title since the Browns’ NFL title in 1964, earned at Municipal Stadium where my father and my uncle braved the wintry Lake Erie crosswinds to witness it in person. My dad had just turned 18.
That long wait is why I rejoiced at the return on NBA superstar (and Akron product) LeBron James to the Cavaliers, joy that host Melissa Harris-Perry recounted a couple weekends back when I wasn’t interrupting her with a photobomb on live air.
Yes, I was that hyped; still am. But I’ve also been thinking a lot about a cliché being tossed around, one that troubles me as a fellow northeast Ohio kid who also moved away: “You can’t go home again.”
You can’t go home again, LeBron. LeBron proves you can go home again. LeBron decides he can go home again.
Sure, as a lifelong Cleveland sports fan, I was indignant when “King James” announced in an ostentatious live ESPN special in 2010 that he was leaving his long-suffering city and “taking his talents to South Beach.”
But in retrospect, who was I to complain? I haven’t lived in Cleveland for nearly 17 years. Neither have many of my childhood friends.
Like James, we had reasons to leave that made sense to us at the time. We wanted opportunities we couldn’t see possible in a city we were raised to love but that the rest of the country saw as a loser. We wanted a chance to travel, to grow, to make mistakes, and not be sent back defeated.
Many a late night at the office was fueled by fear of failure — visions of showing up in my father’s driveway with a brimming U-Haul, the big city having kicked my behind. Cleveland became a consolation prize, at best.
But now, the suggestion that “you can’t go home again” touches a nerve for many of our fellow Northeast Ohio expatriates. Frankly, it pisses us off. The idea that a Cleveland kid can’t return seems utterly contradictory, given how often we are forced to defend our hometown from sophomoric jokes and correct the misconceptions of out-of-towners who see, quite literally, nothing to celebrate about the area.
What do we hear when the words “Cleveland” or “Ohio” make the news? Aside from LeBron and the news about the 2016 Republican convention, you see a lot about cutting early voting hours, rejecting alternative energy sources, crackdowns on abortion and contraception access, not to mention the guy who held three women as sex slaves in his house for more than a decade.
James touched on the city’s challenges in the Sports Illustrated essay where he announced his return to Cleveland. It almost felt more like a promotional ad than it did a message about basketball.
“I want kids in Northeast Ohio… to realize that there’s no better place to grow up. Maybe some of them will come home after college and start a family or open a business,” he wrote. “Our community, which has struggled so much, needs all the talent it can get.”
The region needs more than just a star basketball player’s talent. While the trend has reversed slightly in the past year, Cleveland and the rest of Ohio has been suffering from a “brain drain” for decades. From 2000 to 2010, the state lost more than 65,000 young adults, Census figures show – a drop of nearly 3%. Only Michigan did worse.
ESPN host Jemele Hill, a native of Detroit, another struggling Midwestern city, spoke on this point during the July 13 Melissa Harris-Perry discussion about James.
“Detroit, Cleveland; they’re sister cities. The mentality is very much the same. This is a place that people leave and forget about, that people leave and they go on to do great things, and they never come back,” Hill said. “And so for him to actively choose them when he doesn’t have to, it’s just symbolic and it’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen in sports.”
That’s why James’ return resonates in a new way with me. Yes, I am a lifelong Cavaliers fan, so I was thrilled that the best basketball player on the planet will be playing for my team again. I hope my dad and I might see a championship, together.









