#CavsRank Moments 5: The Parade

5. The Parade

On the morning of the April 28th of last year, I awoke to prepare for my annual Mancation to Las Vegas to celebrate the Browns upcoming failures in the NFL Draft. I checked my email after my only-the-hot-spots shower that morning, and I realized that an editor read my The Case for Cleveland article in drafts, and liked it enough to post it before it was finished after feeling it was appropriate rallying cry for the fan base after Kevin Love’s injury against the Celtics. I never wrote a final paragraph to it during the first draft because the synapses of my brain just could imagine what championship parade in Cleveland could be like.

In that moment I was trapped within reel time in a Hitchcock film. I had ten minutes to tie it all together. The concept of writing about a championship parade in Cleveland to me was like a Sunday school story about a man living in a whale. I wanted nothing more than to believe that it could be true, but all of the logic I had learned in life made me question if it was a realistic possibility rather than a fantasy.

Even after seeing the trinity of Cavs moments at the end of Game 7, followed by the final buzzer, I caught myself and questioned if I was making it all up in my mind. Was I in a sports induced fog of a black and white dream? I questioned if all the stress I had experienced that month made me hallucinate that the Cavs won the title as the ultimate defense mechanism for my own self-preservation.

Dazed, I met my friend Tara at the only scatchoff dust Hubbard townie bar that was still open on a Sunday after 9:00 PM. We were both in shock, but had shared independently from one another that LeBron hugged Love at the buzzer. We both watched the stage presentation. We silently celebrated as though Cleveland sports reality would shake us out of the dream. We did a shot, and talked about how we felt about the game. We slowly sipped our hand-warmed beers, and kept talking about the game.

Two and a half days later, I headed up to The Parade with the friend who had spent the most time with me watching Cleveland sports, tending those embers of faith and sacrificing our collective sanity. John, his daughter Paisley, and I started our pilgrimage at eight in the morning. We aimed to park on the Green Road Rapid, but after receiving a warning from Tara that there were no spaces left at the Lee-Shaker stop, I made a decision for us to park at Hopkins. My thought being that there’s more parking there than anywhere else along the Rapid, and it was at the end of the line that would surely fill the train first. We circled around the airport parking lot and it was completely full which was a fire to my eyes.

I became anxious in the passenger seat of John’s Buick that I had failed in my preparation, and that we’d miss the parade entirely. We were fortunate to grab one of the last parking spots at the Park ‘N Fly on Snow Road, and took the shuttle to Hopkins. Multiple riders on shuttle complained about the constipation of traffic to the airport. I retorted a few muffled expletives back at them under my breath as we were stuck in a traffic jam on our way.

Upon entering Hopkins I realized that more people were heading downtown that the city planners had expected. We walked past the Red Line entrance, and followed its assembly up a flight of stairs. The line for the gathering wrapped around the entire airport a mile deep back into the employee lot. During our descent to the end of the line, I heard folks murmuring that they had already been waiting for hours. Once we reached the end of the line, I decided to try out Cleveland’s Uber game for the first time. Five minutes later we were en route.

I felt my small sense of personal victory on that Uber ride. I outsmarted the system. I solved the Rubik’s Cube of a traffic navigation nightmare. We are all narcissists in our own way, and need that silent pat on the back from time to time. As we got closer to the city multiple cars that were just abandoned on the median of the highway, as if it were a scene out of The Walking Dead.

Our driver took us along Detroit Avenue through Gordon Square, and he warned us that he might have to drop us off at the Hope-Memorial Bridge by Westside Market, and that we’d have to walk across it. I didn’t take that possibility as a chore, or a slight, I invited it. If I got to play God that day, the parade would have started at Westside Market and crossed the bridge. Police would have barricaded Carnegie and Ontario, and the crowd would have awaited the championship caravan as it crossed the bridge over the river of fire on their slow decent to downtown to claim its city.

Rather than drop us off by Westside Market, the driver dropped us off at a lightly congested alley near Mall B. On our descent through the century worn way, John and I prepared Paisley for a plan in the event that we got separated. Then John and I reminisced about all of the times we had made the voyage to Cleveland together in our youth to cheer on teams that would ultimately break our hearts. That moment was a time machine for our experiences together believing in Cleveland.

As we exited the alley, it all became real and in technicolor. They actually did it, and we were there for it, as impossible as both of those scenarios seemed. I couldn’t see anything but wine and gold in front of me, and I couldn’t see anything but wine and gold behind me. A glance right and left justified it. I wasn’t dreaming. I’ve vacationed in New York and I lived in claustrophobically overpopulated Los Angeles, and I’ve never been surrounded by a mass of humanity like The Parade.

We baked in the sun for hours, and I’ve still got a tan line on the left side of my neck as a souvenir. It was the best sun burn of my life for sure. While we didn’t get to see the parade live, we could hear the cheers tremoring throughout the city as a foreshadowing of its progress on the route. The parade was delayed by over an hour because authorities couldn’t clear the streets because their were to many people to open a path for the route.

Got to lead the @Cavs victory parade today and oh my god that was incredible. #ALLin216 #ALLinCLE pic.twitter.com/80vaxubmng

— Stipe Miocic (@stipemiocic) June 22, 2016

It wasn’t just a celebration for the Cavs proving history wrong, but a celebration for the entire city of Cleveland. Stipe Miocic, a Cleveland native, and current UFC heavyweight champion led off the festivities after the lengthy delay. The Lake Erie Monsters followed and they, ended up getting a championship parade also to celebrate their Calder Cup victory.

Then came the Cavs championship caravan. LeBron rode with sons in a Rolls-Royce, with an unlit victory cigar in his hand. Kyrie got down from peacocking on the roof of his truck to slap hands with the fans. Kevin Love had a specially made WWE championship belt over his shoulder, and a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model by his side. J.R. Smith. J.R. still didn’t have a shirt on.

There was a détente amongst the Cavs front office and players at the rally zone, and they shared the moment united together with all of us. Owner Dan Gilbert started the speeches and thanked every member of the organization.

The highlight of Gilbert’s speech was praising LeBron by saying “We wouldn’t be here if the leader, the hometown MVP, had not come back to his state and do what he ultimately said he was going to do. I’d like to thank him for his leadership, LeBron James everybody.” Gilbert then pointed his Cavs logo branded speech cards to LeBron and looked to him for approval. LeBron dipped his head slightly, and returned a quick thumbs up. Other members of the team gathered around James, and MVP chants roared throughout the crowd. After a Fred McLeod transition, General Manager David Griffin took the mic.

“We can no longer be the city that defines it’s failures by titles. The Shot, The Drive, and The Fumble all must now be replaced by The Block, The Three and The D. Our best basketball lies just ahead of us, and just as the city of Cleveland, the narrative of North East Ohio is no longer what we can’t do, or have failed to do. It’s an expectation of excellence, it’s a willingness to dream as big as you can dream.” – David Griffin

Richard Jefferson was coaxed out of his brief retirement from the crowds chant of “One more year.” We got our last soundbites of Delly and Moz’s awesome accents before they left for bigger roles elsewhere, and Moz even gave out a Brew Garden shout out.

LeBron capped off the day as the keynote speaker. He took a pause to soak in the moment. He spoke of the dedication the team gives to the game when the cameras aren’t there. He went on to highlight how much each member of the team meant to him. LeBron concluded by thanking the crowd. “I’m nothing without y’all. I love all of y’all. I love all of y’all. And we’ll get ready for next year.” The final moment of the gala, was Jim Brown bridging the 52 year title fast by feeding LeBron James the Larry O’Brien trophy.

After the celebration finally came to a close we walked through The Arcade. Basking the day away in the sun, and the fulfilled promise of The Son left us extremely dehydrated, so naturally we were heading to get celebratory beers to dehydrate ourselves a little more.

Maybe I appraise the sentimentality of moments with too much value, but walking through The Arcade was the perfect stage for our pre-beer victory lap. I looked at down Paisley and told her that she was walking through the first mall in America. We were walking through through a building that was erected in May 1890, and hosted the Republican National League Meeting just five years later. The event was the first step in the coronation of William McKinley presidency. History remembers McKinley as debatably the most crooked president. Of course he’s a Youngstown native.

The timeline from the erecting of The Arcade and it’s 300-foot sky light to The Parade strikes me in retrospect. Rockefeller Hanna, and Brush’s ambition and financial commitment made the world take note that Cleveland would become a pillar of America and a place worth investing in.

The Parade was the ultimate first event for the Summer of Cleveland, followed by Republican National Convention and the Indians winning of the Central Division for the first time in nine years. People are investing in Cleveland again with projects like NuCLEus, and the Cavs success has played a large part in that.

I slammed my first beer before the bartender was finished making Paisley’s Shirley Temple, and ordered another. After we sat for a moment Paisley had to use the restroom so I walked her down the stairs and told her to text me when she was finished and not to come out of the restroom until I texted her back before exiting. As I awaited her iMessage a flood of people frantically ran down the stairs.

One woman said that there were shooters. Fearing it was a Bataclan situation, I busted open the women’s restroom door, and her father was already in there calming Paisley. A former Army veteran, he sprinted his 3-bills frame down the stairs the second the first shot was fired. A group of us hid in the boiler room in hushed silence. We could hear distant commotion echoes throughout the marble fortress above us. John and I each held one of Paisley’s hands, and we reassured her that we’d be okay, when neither of us knew that to be true.

We checked Twitter to find out what the hell was going on. After thirty minutes of intense swiping down for updates, we learned of the tragic shooting outside of Tower City. Our parade day celebration ended, with us using the modern marvel of cellphone technology, to make an exit plan from a modern day nightmare in the belly of a 126 year-old building’s boiler room. Starkly, we’d been reminded that despite our reverie, the city, its people , and our country still have challenges to overcome. But we can overcome them.

The Parade wasn’t just one moment, it was a caravan of them. As much as the event was a celebration of the rising of the first Cleveland championship in 52 years, for me, it was also a wake and funeral for the decades of sports suffering that we, and our fathers before us experienced together. The turnout surpassed my imagination along with the city planners who estimated 800,000 as the high end projection just a day earlier. Downtown Cleveland buckled as 1.3 million poured themselves into its streets to be witness that they weren’t all dreaming too.