I had it all figured out by January of 2013. The fact that we got 100 inches of snow that winter helped.
Four years of business school in Columbia, make money, never come back. Never.
If I’d been born in 1946 instead of 1996, sticking around Erie, Pennsylvania, would have been a far sounder prospect. Even if I’d been born just 120 miles south, north or deeper into Earth’s crust, it might’ve been a more prudent investment to stay on the home front.
But I wasn’t.
Perched delicately on the south shore of its namesake lake, Erie is the largest town in its county and region, which upon a quick stroll of State Street — downtown's main artery — says everything you need to know about both. More than a third of the city’s population has disappeared since 1960, and the head count recently slipped under 100,000 for the first time in almost a century. To say nothing of the factories.
For 16 years I'd watched the decay, the lethargy, the lack of anything even approaching a legitimate rehab of downtown. I took it all in and decided I wanted nothing more than a corner office at Bank of Montreal. Carolina, B.S. Accounting, BMO, done. Out of sight, out of mind.
And then I read a review for Scott Raab’s “The Whore of Akron” in a back issue of Sports Illustrated.
I was beyond skeptical on first glance. Yeah, yeah, I’d seen this before. “Friday Night Lights?" “Blades of Glory” by John Rosengren? A more-than-sports book. Pick a town and a team and maybe a dream, grab a press credential, dash of drama, itty-bitty nugget of institutional neglect, liquefy. Serve warm.
But beyond that, I was intrigued. This guy wrote an entire book about hating LeBron James, the Cleveland Cavaliers super-duper-star and Ohio native snidely referred to in the title. Not a blog, not a tweet. A book.
I hadn't watched a full NBA game in years. I borrowed the book from the library and read it in a day.
Billed on the back cover as a “350-pound Jewish Santa Claus with a Chief Wahoo tattoo,” Raab, then a writer-at-large for Esquire, originally planned on writing a book about a Cavs championship team, which would have represented Cleveland's first pro sports title since 1964. The source of the anger with which he instead penned the title spawns with the televised announcement of "The Decision," James' 2010 signing with the Miami Heat as an unrestricted free agent. From there, the book chronicles Raab's travels to Miami and Cleveland in between projects to boo LeBron in person, talks with Cavs front office officials and futile dealings with Heat officials to gain press credentials for a less-than-light take on the face of the NBA. All of which makes a fine book alone.
But there was more to it, this being a more-than-sports book. In the Sports Illustrated review, Ben Reiter looked past Raab's LeBron virulence and found most absorbing the book's "self-portrait of a man and a fan of serious extremes, one who loves his wife and son as fiercely as he hates most of the rest of the world."
Aside from the curious outside-inside look at the Cavs’ and Heat’s respective 2009-10 and 2010-11 campaigns, Raab waxes achingly poetic on his journey as an emerging writer, from a hardscrabble upbringing in East Cleveland to the present. Outside of pro basketball, frequent human themes touched upon include sex, drugs and the teeming black hole of the Rust Belt, with Raab deeming my beloved Pittsburgh as “a human sewer,” recounting his time as a weed dealer in late-’70s Texas and waiting a full three sentences of the very first paragraph to bring up the quality of Rebecca Romijn’s rear.
In all, Raab expertly intertwines the importance of rooting for the local laundry — be it wine and gold or garnet and black — with a potent story of anger, addiction, redemption and the road to achieving what every upright-standing human wants but never has the time for: being a writer, being a good writer and being paid for it.
Eventually, I put down the book. Life went on from there. Slate named “The Whore of Akron” one of the best books of 2011. After moving to Myrtle Beach in freshman year, I went back to Erie for a brief summer visit, then dropped out of business school inside six months and took up journalism. I realized I wanted to keep track of towns like mine, of Cleveland, of Aliquippa, of Aiken and Allendale. Home tends to do that to you.
Somewhere in there, LeBron became the first known American citizen to move from Miami to Cleveland without an active arrest warrant.
We all saw what happened next. June 19, on the road, Kyrie tosses up a three-ball over Steph and brings down the roof at Oracle Arena with 53 seconds to play in Game 7. The Cavs become the first NBA team to come back from down 3-1 in the Finals and fly home with Cleveland's first trophy in 52 years.
A million people turned up for the parade down East 9th Street. Cleveland proper has less than 400,000. Do the math.
Miles from 2011, Raab was there with his son and a camera crew from ESPN shooting an alternate ending to that network’s brilliant documentary on the plight of C-town athletics, “Believeland.” Raab's sequel to "Whore," already in the works, became inevitable.
Aptly if excessively titled, Scott Raab’s “You’re Welcome, Cleveland: How I Helped LeBron James Win a Championship and Save a City” shows up in my mailbox this week. Tune in next time for the review.