Experiencing the Cavs' parade

Sean Gentille

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Experiencing the Cavs' parade image

CLEVELAND — The guy flopped in the door on the corner of Euclid and Sixth, sunburned, sobbing and struggling to form words.

There was a lot of that in Downtown Cleveland on Wednesday; 1.3 million overheated, emotional, sleep-deprived people packed the Cavaliers' parade route, 1,299,999 of whom were not J.R. Smith. After seven hours of that, starting around the Pennsylvania-Ohio state line, one more barely deserved a glance. There were sandwiches to eat.

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Turns out our man wasn't overwhelmed by the day — not by the part you'd expect, at least. He'd heard gunshots a couple blocks away, bolted toward his friends in the line at Potbelly's and arrived too spooked to explain what happened. Whoops.

One of the bullets hit somebody; a girl went to the hospital with a wounded leg , and the boy that pulled the trigger didn't last long before he wound up in a cop car. This is good — and poetic in a pathetic sort of way, given the event at Quicken Loans Arena next month.

It was scary, but it could've been scarier. When you've got that many people crammed into a one-mile radius, things are going to happen. It's an unfortunate, sad truth to large-scale gatherings no matter where you are in the United States, and this was a gathering on a larger scale than anyone's best guess. By Wednesday night, the estimate hit a million, and the reality wound up exceeding that by 30 percent.

For an outsider — especially one that grew up 137 miles from center court at The Q, where he was unsuccessfully conditioned to dislike any and all things about Cleveland — it was an odd, appropriate way to end a day's worth of regional emotional release. I didn't completely understand why that dude was crying, but I came close.

***

I'd been around championship parades. A week before, the Penguins had their Stanley Cup celebration in Pittsburgh, and it was absurd; 400,000 packed a short route through downtown Pittsburgh that terminated in a small public place along a street corner. Fans there are insane. They're also lucky; the Penguins had done the same seven years earlier. The Steelers have won two Super Bowls in the last decade. The Pirates, somehow, are good, and have been for a few years.

So Pittsburgh sports fans, beyond any standard, are spoiled. The "City of Champions" stuff has been around since 1979. Fallow periods notwithstanding, it was always viewed as something as a birthright, even when the results didn't justify it.

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In Cleveland, a two-hour drive away, the exact opposite was true. Civic sports failure followed fans from birth until death; the city's last major championship came about two years before Dan Gilbert was born. In the interim, they'd taken to naming the pain, maybe because it's easier to say "The Shot" and "The Fumble" and "Jose Mesa" than it is to explain.

When we made a pit stop along the Ohio Turnpike about 45 minutes outside Cleveland at, oh, 7:15 a.m, I saw people in Cavs gear sprinting to Starbucks, then sprinting back to their cars. The parade wouldn't start for four more hours, but they'd waited for this day against their will. Might as well minimize how much longer it'd be.

***

As we got closer to the city, we heard that city had closed down its rapid transit stations. They were full of people who'd paid attention to the warnings about driving into the epicenter and opted to take the train. Their reward was a 3-4 hour wait, and we had to alter our plan.

We parked in Ohio City, a mile and half from The Q. Exiting from I-90 meant that we’d approach the city from the Southeast. Our revised plan: Park at St. Ignatius on 30th St., then walk down Lorain Ave. and cross the Cuyahoga River via the Hope Bridge.

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Nope. The lot was full. The streets were full. Everything was full. My friend Darci, a native Clevelander, saw a pickup truck pull into a church parking lot and followed him in. There was nobody else in the lot. When we got out of the car, we touched base with Pickup Truck Guy.

“You think they’ll tow us?”

“I’ll take the risk,” he said. “Worth it.”

He’d attended the Indy 500 in May. “This is going to be double that,” he said. The Brickyard holds 500,000. He was right.

***

We camped out at The Q, in a media staging area set up near the start of the parade route. We hadn’t gone farther into town, so we didn’t see the full extent of the crowd, but it was obvious early on — cell towers were swamped. Forget tweets and phone calls; texts weren’t going through. Downtown Cleveland had been cut off from the world.

I could only use my phone directly in front of The Q; there was, for whatever reason, an in-arena wireless signal that I could pick up. If not for that, nobody would know I was there.

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That was good enough. At the corner of Sixth and Bolivar was a parking garage. All five platforms were packed with the smartest parade-goers in the area; they’d see everyone — if it ever started.

About 15 minutes past the 11 a.m. start date, volunteers started getting restless. It was hot, and they’d been standing for hours. What was going on?

Word started circulating that Ninth Street, one of the main arteries for the procession to Mall B, was swamped; police arriving in the morning were too late to set up barricades. If the parade was going to head down 9th, it’d be a crawl.

***

At about 11:45, we had movement. (“Guess they blocked off Ninth,” I thought. Oops.)

The first player to make it off the side street was, of course, J.R. Smith.

That set the tone. For an hour, we stood on the corner, watching the Cavs start what wound up being a three-hour odyssey. It was the longest 1.5 miles in human history, but nobody cared. And they certainly didn’t care at its onset.

There was Iman Shumpert, shirtless and throwing beads from a Porsche. There was Kevin Love, smoking a cigar and holding the belt. There was Jim Brown, rolling down Sixth Street in a Rolls Royce. There was Tristan Thompson.

And there was LeBron James. Led by the St. Vincent-St. Mary band, who’d waited a little farther down Sixth Street the whole time, he had his parking garage moment.

Fans were there for Cleveland. They were there for the Cavs. They were also there for LeBron James — and given the sheer number of people along the route, and the relentless length of the process, it’s impossible to imagine anyone in human history being photographed more often over a given period of time than him.

Think about it; more than a million people, hanging off roofs and light poles, stacked on top of each other, all with phones, 25 deep on either side of the street … for three hours. There are several million photos of LeBron in that yellow hat, taken in person.

***

Some of those photos were taken from the tops of port-a-potties. It wasn’t until after 12:30, when LeBron rolled past, that we appreciated the day’s sheer scale.

The on-stage portion of the program was set to start at 1; it seemed stupid then — even more in hindsight — but we speed-walked west on Huron and then north on Fourth. The Cavs would spend the next three hours traveling about a half-mile per hour and show up on The Mall at about 3:45. Speed-walking was not necessary.

I stopped long enough to take this photo.

Fan dedication is perching yourself atop a crumpled heap of plastic, feet away from falling into a brew of chemicals and human waste, all in the name of watching a confetti cannon.

***

At Mall B, after seven hours worth of frantic wake-ups, drives, runs and walks, the wait was on. Credentialed media got to bypass the crowds and hang out in a bike-racked pen directly in front of the stage, next to the seating area for families and friends.

We were there for three hours. The Fox Sports Ohio broadcast, piped over speakers and on to the video screens, was delightful; they had as many answers as we did. How could anyone expect more? There’s no precedent. This isn’t in the media handbook. It’s not in the police handbook. It’s not in the fan handbook. Most of the people packed into Cleveland’s largest public space had waited their whole lives; what’s a few more hours?

It was time spent watching Smith stand, in his shirtless glory, in top of an SUV. If he sat down, I missed it.

“J.R., you’ve got basketball to play next season,” Jeff Phelps said on FS Ohio. “Be careful out there.”

Cameras showed Channing Frye demolishing a piece of pizza in a flatbed. “We piss excellence,” he said.

Nearby, watching the screen like everyone else, was Earnest Byner. He’d started the day on a float but, somehow, made it to Mall B before the rest of the procession. His reward: Person after person coming up to him to say hi, thanking him for his time with the Browns and, if nothing else, forgiving him for The Fumble.

It’s been nearly 30 years since Byner missed out on the tying touchdown in the AFC Championship game. He’ll never fully get over it, but he told the Plain Dealer earlier in the week he was “full of joy for the people of Cleveland, for the fans,” and that “a peace washed over me,” after the Cavs’ comeback.

“(In) reality it’s still a part of me, it’s still a part of our collective history and it’s still there and it’s not the whole story,” he said. “It wasn’t the whole story of the game, nor is it my whole story. So, it’s just part of it. That’s why I say, I’m not off the hook, but I do manage it better.”

Part of managing it better meant indulging a stream of people, saying god knows what, all because they felt they needed to. Maybe they needed to forgive Earnest Byner as much as he needed forgiveness.

***

At about 3:40 p.m, the Cavs made it to Mall B. Love was the first to walk through the stage-right metal detectors. For the next 45 minutes, local politicians, Gilbert, GM David Griffin, coach Tyronn Lue and every single player, culminating with James’ poetically profane, person-by-person set of thank-yous, took a turn at the mic.

It wasn't a letdown. Nothing about the day could've been a letdown — but it did suffer because everyone watching had roasted under a cloudless sky for three hours longer than they'd anticipated.

***

That's why it was easy not to think twice, when our guy stumbled into the sandwich shop a few minutes after everything was over. Everyone in the area had just a day exhausting themselves after weeks — and years — of emotional exhaustion. Nothing was left.

We left Potbelly's and started the trek back to the car. At no point during the day did I think it'd be waiting for us once we got back; a woman who lived next to the church had warned us not to do it. She'd know better than Pickup Truck Guy, right?

Nope.

And really, it was stupid to worry. Maybe under different, normal circumstances we'd spend the next couple hours dealing with an impound lot. Not in Cleveland, though. And not on that day.

Sean Gentille