A City That Refused to Stay Down
On championships, rivers, and what redemption looks like
June 19, 2016.
If you’re from Cleveland, I probably don’t have to tell you what that date means. That was when the Cavs finally brought home the city’s first championship in more than fifty years. I know exactly where I was.
We’ll get to that in a minute…
But first, let me take you back a week earlier to where this story really begins.
Every summer, I take my family on vacation. This trip was different because it was our first time traveling overseas with all five girls (Canada doesn’t count). It was their first time using passports, flying across the ocean, and visiting another country.
We spent our first night in Miami, and the girls were excited for their first trip abroad. We left the US early in the morning, crossed the Atlantic, and landed…
55 minutes later.
In The Bahamas.
180 miles east of Miami, about as far as Cleveland is from Dayton. Maybe not the adventure of a lifetime, but still pretty cool.
We definitely weren’t in Cleveland anymore. There was turquoise water, endless sunshine, clear skies, and 98% humidity. We loved it immediately.
The girls were between 11 and 17, and if you know preteen and teenage girls, you know they’re obsessed with…food. They soon found their favorite spot, a tiny beach hut by the water run by two Bahamian guys. Their go-to meal: chicken fingers, french fries, and non-alcoholic piña coladas and strawberry daiquiris. It became a daily ritual.
Leave it to Cleveland. We fly 1,200 miles to The Bahamas and somehow end up eating lunch every day at a beach hut run by a diehard Cavs fan. How cool is that? I still shake my head when I think about it.
Soon, we learned the other guy was a diehard Warriors fan.
These two had a history. They’d been jawing back and forth since the 2015 Finals, when Golden State beat Cleveland for the championship. Their rivalry only grew over the next year, and by June 2016, it was at its peak when five girls from Cleveland sat down in front of them.
The girls quickly told the Cavs fan we were from Cleveland and loved the Cavs. There was an instant connection. He flashed a big Bahamian smile as my girls jumped right into the fight and defended their beloved Cavs.
I’ll never forget the look on their faces when the girls showed they knew their stuff. They could name the players, their positions, even their strengths and weaknesses. The guys were truly impressed by how much the girls knew about basketball…and their trash-talking skills. These girls could hold their own!
For the rest of the trip, every afternoon was the same: chicken fingers, fries, piña coladas, and trash talk. I never got involved; didn’t have to. I just stood back, papa proud, and watched five little spitfires stand up for their city and team. Oh, that poor, misguided, overmatched Warriors fan. He never stood a chance.
52 Years
Fellow Clevelanders already know what June 19, 2016, meant. They lived it, just as I did.
But for anyone who hasn’t carried the burden the way we have, here’s a little history.
The last Cleveland team to celebrate a major sports championship was the Cleveland Browns, who won the NFL Championship in 1964 before the Super Bowl era even existed. The Indians won the World Series in 1948. The Cavaliers had never won anything.
That’s fifty-two years without a major championship, in a city that bleeds with its teams; through every losing season, every heartbreak, every “wait ’til next year.”
But it wasn’t just our sports teams that struggled. For years, Cleveland was the butt of national jokes. We were the “Mistake on the Lake,” the city whose river caught fire, and a place many people had written off.
The incident that cast the longest shadow over Cleveland happened on June 22, 1969, when the Cuyahoga River caught fire after oil and industrial waste on its surface ignited. Time magazine ran a devastating story about it, and Cleveland became the symbol of industrial pollution and the butt of every joke.
We weren’t the first city to experience a river fire. Detroit, Buffalo, Chicago, and Philadelphia all had them too. But we became the lasting symbol of industrial pollution, and the jokes followed for decades.
There is a reason our firm is called Burning River.
When I was choosing a name for the firm, I loved the connection to Cleveland. I loved the acronym — BRAG. But I hesitated. The burning river wasn’t exactly one of our city’s proudest moments, and I wondered whether the name carried too much baggage.
Then I caught myself.
Wait a second…why am I letting something that happened more than fifty years ago influence a decision I’m making today?
The more I thought about it, the more it irritated me. I realized I was on the verge of doing exactly what people had been doing to Cleveland for decades—reducing an entire city to one chapter in its history. I knew that wasn’t who we were, and once I saw it that way, there really wasn’t much left to debate. There was no way I was going to let something that happened fifty years ago keep me from using a name I loved.
“Tough times never last, but tough people do.”
The Return
When LeBron James left Cleveland in the summer of 2010, it wasn’t just another player leaving town after his contract expired. This was different.
LeBron grew up in Northeast Ohio. He was our hometown hero, the one we thought might finally end our long run of sports heartbreak.
The announcement came during a cringeworthy nationally televised special called The Decision. When LeBron uttered the infamous words, “I’m taking my talents to South Beach,” he left Cleveland standing there, stunned and embarrassed in front of the whole country.
The reaction was immediate, and it wasn’t pretty. Fans burned his jersey in the streets. Grown men smashed things. Not exactly our finest hour, but heartbreak rarely brings out the best in people.
Dan Gilbert, the Cavs owner, wrote a passionate but ill-advised letter to fans rebuking LeBron’s decision and guaranteeing the Cavs would win a championship before LeBron did.
Two years later, LeBron won his first of two NBA championships in Miami. Meanwhile, Cleveland kept losing.
Then, in 2014, he came home.
He announced his return in an essay for Sports Illustrated titled I’m Coming Home (watch). It wasn’t an apology, and it wasn’t a promise. It was thoughtful, honest, and surprisingly emotional. Winning championships in Miami had meant something, but it had also taught him something. Home still mattered. Bringing a championship to Cleveland wasn’t just another career goal anymore. It had become personal.
We wanted to believe him. We also weren’t quite ready to pretend the previous four years hadn’t happened. Quite honestly, I don’t think many of us knew what to think.
The Comeback
In the 2015-16 regular season, the Golden State Warriors were a juggernaut, going 73-9 and recording the best regular-season record in NBA history. Not surprisingly, they were heavy favorites to win their second championship in a row.
When the Warriors went up 3-1 in the Finals, most of the country thought it was over. No team had ever come back from a 3-1 deficit in the NBA Finals. The Warriors hadn’t lost three consecutive games since February 2014, almost two and a half years. Now, Cleveland had to beat them three times in a row.
Nobody outside Cleveland believed it could happen.
We believed it.
We had to.
I know I did.
In fact, I distinctly remember what I was thinking after we lost Game 4:
“We beat the Warriors by 30 points in Game 3 at home. If we win Game 5 in Oakland, and there’s a good chance we do with Draymond Green out, we’re back home for Game 6. There’s no way we lose Game 6 at home. Then it’s on to Game 7, and the pressure flips. Anything can happen in a Game 7. Game 5 is the key. Just get Game 5, and we’ve got this.”
Maybe it was just a pep talk, a way to convince myself that the impossible could happen. Whatever it was, it worked. I believed we still had a chance if we could just win Game 5.
And the rest, as they say, is history…
Game 5 in Oakland. Cavaliers win 112-97. LeBron: 41 points, 16 rebounds, 7 assists, 3 blocks, 3 steals (16-30 FG).
Game 6 in Cleveland. Cavs win 115-101. LeBron: 41 points, 11 assists, 8 rebounds, 4 steals, 3 blocks (16-27 FG).
Game 7 felt different. Everything was harder. For 46 minutes, it was a back-and-forth battle. Then one of the greatest two minutes in NBA Finals history unfolded…
The Block (Watch)
With under two minutes left and the score tied at 89, LeBron James tracks down Andre Iguodala’s layup from behind and pins it against the backboard. One of the greatest defensive plays in Finals history, and it came from a man running on pure will. The block preserves the tie.
The Shot (Watch)
With fifty-three seconds left, Kyrie Irving faces Steph Curry at the top of the key. He crosses left, pulls up right, and releases a three-pointer over Curry’s outstretched hand. The moment it leaves his fingertips, you just know. As the ball settles through the net, Oracle Arena goes silent. Cavs 93, Warriors 89. Cleveland’s dagger.
The Stop (Watch)
There are thirty-three seconds left, and Cleveland is up by three. Steph Curry, arguably the greatest shooter in NBA history, goes one-on-one with Kevin Love. Somehow, Love, not known for his defense, holds his ground, stays in front of Curry, and forces a miss.
Curry gets one more desperation heave with 4.7 seconds left.
It isn’t close.
The horn sounds, and the sweetest words any Cleveland sports fan had heard in more than fifty years are uttered:
“It’s over. It’s over. Cleveland is a city of champions once again.”
Final: Cavs 93, Warriors 89. (Watch)
LeBron collapses on the court, face down, sobbing. He made a promise. He kept it.
Then came the tears. “Cleveland, this is for you!” It was obvious this championship meant something different.
I wouldn’t fully appreciate just how much it mattered until many years later.
The Cleveland Way
Over the past ten years, I’ve thought about that beach hut in the Bahamas more times than I can count.
Five girls who knew their basketball. A Bahamian wearing a Cavs shirt. A Warriors fan who made the unfortunate decision to take on Cleveland. What started as an ordinary afternoon on vacation somehow became part of one of the greatest moments in our city’s history. It’s a memory I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life.
The older I get, the more I realize it wasn’t just the championship that made that day unforgettable.
It was everything the championship came to represent.
It couldn’t be easy.
Not here.
LeBron had to leave. He had to discover that talent alone wasn’t enough and that home meant something different. He had to come back carrying the weight of an entire city, face impossible expectations, and somehow deliver against a 73-win Warriors team after falling behind three games to one.
Anything less wouldn’t have felt like Cleveland.
In many ways, that’s been Cleveland’s story too.
The river caught fire. We became the butt of late-night jokes. But from those failures came the EPA, the Clean Water Act, and eventually a river that people now kayak, fish, and enjoy. The “Mistake on the Lake” has steadily become one of the country’s great comeback stories, not because anyone handed us a new reputation, but because generation after generation kept showing up and making the city better than they found it.
Maybe that’s why this story resonates so much with me. Cleveland has never been a city that avoids hard things. We get knocked down. We get back up. We go back to work. Little by little, we build something worth being proud of.
The Cavaliers gave us a championship none of us will ever forget. The Guardians keep proving that smart organizations can compete with anyone, even without the biggest payroll. And the Browns? Well, trading away your best player usually isn’t part of the master plan. But if there’s one thing Cleveland fans never lack, it’s optimism. A Browns Super Bowl? Any year now. Probably next year.
When I think back on that afternoon in the Bahamas, I don’t just remember a championship. I remember five girls proudly standing up for their hometown. I remember convincing myself after Game 4 that we still had a chance. And I remember watching LeBron collapse on the court after carrying the hopes of an entire city.
Looking back, I don’t think it could have happened any other way because anything less wouldn’t have felt like Cleveland.
