The Whore Of Akron Part 6

"He's a great man. The funny thing is, last summer we were golfing together-me, him, and Alonzo. I don't know how to golf, but it was an unbelievable opportunity for me to go out there and golf with one of the greats, right? And I can't hit the ball, and he's making fun of my swing, and I'm getting frustrated-Alonzo pulled me aside and said, 'Man, you're playing golf with Bill Russell. How many people can ever say they've done that?' I looked at him and said, 'You're right.' "

Cool. Very cool. But I'm still not rooting for you this season.

Wade nods, once. His smile is kind, indulgent.

"No one likes change. We'll be the Yankees of basketball. It's already true, but you know what? We're fine with that-we did something that we wanted to do."

An hour later, Wade's behind a long table set up on a podium in a room full of press. LeBron sits to his left, Bosh to his right. The Heat have been consistent and careful: in every photo, poster, public appearance, D-Wade is the man in the middle, the sheriff flanked by his new deputies, still the centerpiece of the Heat.

Utter bulls.h.i.+t, of course. Three hundred or so members of the press aren't here because Dwyane Wade chose to stay in Miami, much less because of the ethereal Chris Bosh, who has spent his NBA days toiling in Toronto and is known best for having been dismissed as "the RuPaul of big men" by Shaq after Bosh whined about Shaq's low-post bullying in 2009. Everyone's here to see LeBron.

Especially me. I've shaved my Santa Claus beard-Lisa missed my dimples, which apparently are more pleasant to behold than the adipose cascade of the rest of me-and I have no idea whether James has any idea who I am, regardless of how many times we saw each other last season in Cleveland and at Cavs' road games. I sit in the front row, make sure that my Chief Wahoo tattoo is in his line of sight, and stare at him. His eyes dart each time ours meet. Scowling, he strokes his beard.

I haven't been this close to him since I was in the Cavs' locker room, since I told him he was the best basketball player I'd ever seen, and I'm undone by my rage. Seeing him up there in his Heat uniform, I know that in a world of pure will and no consequences, I'd pay to have him knee-capped, with no sense of guilt at all. And at the same time, I know that this says far more about me than it does about LeBron James.

"For me, I've moved forward," he says, answering a question rendered inaudible by the fire roaring inside my head. "I don't want to dwell on the past. There's been a lot of things said about me, about my family, but I'm moving forward."

All three-decked out in their pristine home whites, sitting like schoolboys in front of a bunch of morons with their tape recorders and laptops and notebooks-look like they'd rather be somewhere else, but only LeBron, grim and frowning, looks p.i.s.sed off. His obvious discomfort makes me happy, makes me hate him all the more. I want to stand atop my chair and shout, Smile, motherf.u.c.ker-this is what you wanted.

"It's funny when things happen in life, and how people react," LeBron says. Again, I've missed the question. "It seems like a lot of people try to tell you what to do with your life-and most of the time they don't even have their own life in order, and that was just funny to me."

Ah-he means Dan Gilbert's letter, right? He couldn't possibly be referring to me.

"I went home and I been home," James is saying. "I been home all summer, still standing tall. Hasn't been a problem."

Standing tall, my a.s.s. His annual Bike-A-Thon in Akron was cut short; a source at NBA headquarters told me that the league was concerned enough about his safety to send their own security folks to the event. He was booed in New York City as he entered the church to attend Carmelo Anthony's wedding; booed and mocked at the ESPYs, where he was a no-show; taunted at Cedar Point-an amus.e.m.e.nt park in Sandusky, Ohio, an hour west of Cleveland. The movie he was supposed to star in, a basketball comedy, was shelved after The Decision. He's a motherf.u.c.king pariah.

Bosh has hardly spoken, and Wade has grown increasingly silent as question after question goes to James. Bosh, long of neck, walleyed, may as well not be there. Wade turns in his chair, lips pursed, looking at LeBron.

"All this hero-villain mess is bizarre," James says. "You guys know me-I study the history of the game. That's what the league was back in the day. You had three or four All Stars-you had two or three Hall of Famers-on the same team. That's what this game is all about. I'm gonna go out and let my game do the talking."

I heard your game last May, LeBron. It said, No mas. You choked, you quit, you ran. I really ought to grab one of these folding chairs and smash your skull.

Not good, I know. Homicidal ideation rarely is a sign of quality sobriety. I'm a dad, a husband, a pillar of society. If I'm in an uproar like this in a room of sportswriters over a ballplayer, the player can't possibly be the real problem.

Fred Exley: that's who flashes through my mind. Exley was a great writer-A Fan's Notes, a barely fictional memoir of a raving New York Giants fan, is his best work by far-and an awful drunk. He drank away his talent, then he drank away his life; he died in 1992, 63 years old.

Much of A Fan's Notes details his obsession with Frank Gifford, which began at USC when they both attended school there. Gifford was all that Exley wasn't, all that Exley's father, a local sports legend in Watertown, New York, wanted his son to become.

Exley's love for Gifford was profound, gut-wrenching, hilarious, and frankly insane. Exley himself was nuts-much of the book is about his time in the loony bin-and filled with a self-loathing refined unto purity by a life spent not just failing, but endlessly fondling each failure. The man forgave himself nothing and boozed until he drowned his voice, which failed long before his heart.

But I'm not thinking of A Fan's Notes; I'm thinking of Exley's second book, the sadly inferior Pages from a Cold Island, required reading for writers who wake up with shaking hands and no clue what comes next on the page. Toward the end of that book, Exley recalls a fan letter from a shrink who, deeply moved, tells Exley "he had never before encountered a man so haunted by sense of place."

I have met such a man. His face fills my mirror every time I brush my teeth.

Behold this spoiled p.i.s.sant basketball player who imagines that he's standing tall because he took a televised s.h.i.+t on Cleveland and somebody with nothing to lose has yet to cap his silly a.s.s. Strength, Lord. Give me strength.

Water. I need water. I need another Vicodin. My lower back is clenched so tight, I can barely lift myself off the chair.

One of the interns herding the Heat to the basketball court to tape short one-on-ones with the local broadcasters kindly brings me a small bottle of water. I fish the pill bottle out of my briefcase.

I'm calling my wife now. As ever, I get rolled into voicemail. I try the landline. Nope. I try her cell again. Nada. Landline. Cell. Landline. Cell. Landline. Cell. She is unavailable. Unreachable. I miss her. I want her to be there for me every time I want her to be there for me. I want to whisper into the small pink sh.e.l.l of her ear that as our years together have unfolded, the mystery of our love grows ever more unfathomable, especially the mystery of where the f.u.c.k she is or why the f.u.c.k she doesn't answer her f.u.c.king cell phone. I leave a message: "It's me. You're probably upstairs banging the Poland Spring guy. I just took a Vicodin. I saw LeBron. Now I need to find Z. It's almost three-try to get the Poland Spring guy out of the house before the boy gets home from school."

Inside the arena, I spot an intern.

Has Z been in here yet?

"I'm sorry?"

Mr. Ilgauskas. Tall Lithuanian chap?

"I don't think so."

I grab a sideline seat and watch and wait. LeBron's on a folding chair in front of a white screen being interviewed by a local TV guy-one of a half dozen, each with his little setup and cameraman-looking miserable. This is the c.r.a.p he'd refuse to do in Cleveland, but Dwyane Wade is the Man here, and Wade does it, so King s.h.i.+t can't ditch the media. Not yet, anyway.

I see Z come through the runway, all seven pale feet and three inches of him. Zydrunas Ilgauskas, drafted by the Cavs in 1996 out of Kaunas, Lithuania, is one of the most deeply loved athletes in Cleveland sports history. The bones in his feet started fracturing early in his career, after he signed a $70 million contract in 1998. He had surgery on both feet and missed three entire seasons, and he kept rehabbing with no guarantee he'd ever play another game in the NBA, and he did this even though he could have quit and still been paid all of the money owed him.

The Wh.o.r.e of Akron asked Z, also a free agent, to follow him to Miami, promising a champions.h.i.+p, and Ilgauskas signed with the Heat for slightly more than $1 million. But Z also did something else: he bought a full-page ad in the Plain Dealer: Dear Cleveland, When I came to this country 14 years ago, I was a young man who barely spoke the language and had no idea what to expect of this great country.

As I look back on those early days, I realize how lucky I was to have grown up in a place like Cleveland. All of you have taught me the importance of family and friends; of pulling together to get things done; of loving your country.

I've never felt as proud as when I've pulled on the wine and gold and stepped onto the court.

I've tried my best to return that support by playing as hard as I could each and every game.

The decision to play for Miami was not an easy one to make for either myself or my family.

But as I enter the last few years of my career, I felt I owed it to myself and my family to chase my dream of winning an NBA champions.h.i.+p.

I hope you understand.

I also hope you realize that Cleveland will always be home to me.

With Love and Appreciation, Zydrunas "Z" Ilgauskas For Cleveland sports fans-and the proper a.n.a.logy here isn't the heartbroken ex; it is the wife who has been beaten to the kitchen linoleum over the course of decades and who cowers there, trapped, helpless, soul sick, and condemned forever to a marriage of cosmic suffering-Z's love letter was unprecedented gallantry.

Between interviews, Z comes over to talk. We got to know each other a little bit in Cleveland last season, and seeing him now in a Heat uniform makes my chest ache. Although that could be the Vicodin. Or arterial plaque.

You miss Cleveland, Z?

"I do, yeah. It's hard, you know, after fourteen years. I'm a Cleveland guy."

The knot in my throat stops my voice. My eyes fill with tears. Z puts a huge hand on my shoulder. Gently, he squeezes.

Z, what happened against the Celtics? What the f.u.c.k happened?

"I think they were just a better team at that point. They just beat us. They played great. I think that we were not in the right mind-set-if we looked toward Orlando or the Lakers, or we thought we were better than we were. We just kind of thought we were going to show up and everything's going to be okay. So for us-we were in a dogfight, and we weren't ready for it."

Were you shocked when he decided not to come back?

"Yeah. I always thought that Cleveland was probably going to be the destination. I'm sure that he did, too, when it all started."

I'm writing a book. About him. I'm upset with him. Very, very angry.

"Tell him that," he says, laughing now. The intern comes over to escort him to the next interview.

I'll be back, Z. I hope we can talk more. For the book.

"Sure. It's good to see a friendly face."

Off he lumbers, a huge man in his work clothes. I hunt down Tim Donovan, the Heat's media relations head, to thank him for the credential. A little bridge building. It's the polite thing to do, the smart thing. Long season.

As soon as I introduce myself, it's clear that Tim Donovan has sized me up, found me wanting, and won't waste time pretending to be anything other than what he most enjoys being: a gimlet-eyed p.r.i.c.k. To his credit, he isn't buying any of my bulls.h.i.+t about our mutual love for New Jersey-he lettered in lacrosse at Rutgers-and couldn't care less about my gus.h.i.+ng over how gosh-darned exciting the coming season will be. He can barely bring himself to shake my hand.

"Yeah," he says. "Great."

Tim has been a Pat Riley henchman for fifteen years, going back to Riley's Thug Life Knicks. Maybe Tim sniffs Jew or despises slob. That could explain the way his upper lip curls and his wedge of prematurely gray hair bristles. His white s.h.i.+rt is bone-white, fitted; his tie is knotted small and tight at his throat.

"I have a lot of work to do," he says.

Do I blame Tim for his rudeness? Au contraire: I prize his clarity. Better to deal with a p.r.i.c.k than a merchant of smarm. He will make me a more resourceful journalist, and I will soften and cajole him, wend my way into his heart. We'll be pals by season's end; I can feel it. Although that could be the Vicodin.

Chapter Seven.

This Could Be Their Year, Scotty!

Immediately after Media Day, the Heat leave for training camp. In a stroke of singular genius, Pat Riley holds it at Eglin Air Force Base-500 miles from Miami, where the team trained in the pre-LeBron era. Apart from all the sports pap about team building and discipline ("It also presents us a unique and fantastic opportunity to spend time with the airmen who defend our freedom," Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra said), it is a calculated f.u.c.k-you to the press.

Everyone, including beat reporters who'd covered the team for years, is required to complete a two-page affidavit, subject to a federal security check. Bring your own phone and online access or do without. The players' lodging is on the base itself, inaccessible to the media, whose members catch a bus each day from a checkpoint to be brought "directly to the gymnasium" at Hurlburt field.

Brilliant. I fill out the form-including full disclosure of tattoos, even the arrowed heart with MOTHER in its center-and tell Donovan I hope to profile Riley for Esquire. No interest, Tim says, which truly grieves me.

I admire Riley. An Irish lad from my wife's neck of upstate New York, the son of a pro baseball player whose hope of becoming a major league manager ended in booze and ashes, Riley's career spans most of modern basketball. He played for Adolph Rupp at the University of Kentucky (Riley led the all-white UK team that lost to Texas Western's all-black team in the 1966 NCAA Champions.h.i.+p), and after nine seasons in the NBA, mainly with the Lakers as a backup guard, he had gone on to coach both the Lakers' Showtime ballerinas and the Knicks' pug uglies before blowing New York City for Miami in a typhoon of tampering charges-plus ca f.u.c.king change-that wound up costing the Heat a million bucks plus a first-round draft pick. Riley became, en route, a tricoastal face, a perma-tanned, Armani-draped, gel-haired operator who pulls down fifty grand a pop as a motivational speaker. If the visionary king of the ancient Celts, Red Auerbach, ever had a true heir, it is the shrewd and ruthless Riley.

Instead of enlisting at Hurlburt, I fly to Chicago for my brother David's son's bar mitzvah, the first such family event I've attended in a decade, maybe more. Dave and I often go years without speaking to each other. We're not feuding; we're busy. But everyone's busy, and I've long since come to believe that the years we spent in our grandparents' house did too much psychic damage to smooth over or undo. The s.h.i.+tstorm inside those walls poured downhill same as everywhere else, and Dave was often the victim of my anger and my fists. Too often.

What we have now is an unspoken understanding based on mutual trauma. We don't talk because there's so much left to say, and it would hurt so much to say it-and it wouldn't change a thing. Long ago, we went our separate ways.

Still, you don't blow off a brother's son's bar mitzvah. I just wish I weren't in such lousy shape. My lower legs and feet have ballooned to the point that I can't get my shoes on. I've been diagnosed with lymphedema, an embarra.s.sing diagnosis for a roughneck like me. Women who've had breast cancer surgery get lymphedema. In my case, it's from forty years of losing and gaining back 50, 75, or 100 pounds over and over.

Lymphedema is the good news. The bad news is, I weigh 380 pounds. Worse: My doctor recommends the South Beach Diet, proving once more that for a Cleveland fan, there is no justice-only irony.

What was it LeBron had said about people taking shots at him whose own lives weren't in order? I go to Chicago with my legs and feet wrapped tight in compression bandages, wearing a pair of size 15 Crocs, feeling more ashamed by the way I look than scared by the shape I'm in. I don't ever doubt my game: I'll drop the weight; I'll deal with the Vicodin. I won't relapse and I can't die. Not on a wife whose voice on the phone is enough to make me hard in my hotel room, not on a son who counts on me, and, by G.o.d, not before fulfilling a sacred mission. All of which makes me hungry.

For many years after Art Modell moved the Browns to Baltimore in 1995, I tried in vain to convince the Ravens' media relations people to let me profile him.Their front office peope were too smart to ever say yes. Maybe I would've throttled that kike b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Or maybe we would have wept together over the parcel of rue each man is doomed to drag to his grave.

I was past forty when I began to make real money as a writer, but real money couldn't make a good writer out of me, much less a good man. To me, the struggle to write well and the struggle to manage my alcoholism and addiction and weight and insanity are all battles in the same war. I am not the man I want to be. Being that man isn't possible-and it doesn't matter. What matters-pardon my mitchalbomania-is the effort. A man never quits, makes excuses, or points fingers.

My dad didn't teach me any of that, by the way. Cleveland did.

LeBron is not Modell. He is far worse-a native son who betrayed the fatherland. But James also is in many ways no more than an ill-schooled doofus who saw Gladiator and thought it was the greatest movie ever made. He named his second son, Bryce Maximus-his firstborn was LeBron Junior, of course-and so had WHAT WE DO IN LIFE tattooed on his right bicep, and ECHOES IN ETERNITY on his left. He is more cartoon than man.

Which makes me . . . what, exactly? The night before I fly to Chicago, as Lisa creams and wraps my swollen legs, I think of Nicky, who hasn't crossed my mind since 1983. I was working nights at a nursing home; I punched in at four, watered the flowers, then drove the van up from the back lot to take the day-care crowd home. Nicky rode shotgun, my last drop-off, a sweet, stubby man in his late twenties who had Down syndrome.

Nicky worked part-time in the occupational therapy workshop in the nursing home's bas.e.m.e.nt, lived with his parents, and loved the Cleveland Indians with a steady hope that brooked no doubt or discouragement, despite the fact that the team had by then been comatose for more than twenty years.

I started hating Nicky in mid-February, when pitchers and catchers reported to spring training.

"They look good this year, Scotty," Nicky would say. Always "Scotty," which drove me crazy-no one ever called me that.

Spring training, Nicky. Doesn't mean a thing.

"This could be their year, Scotty."

All I wanted to do was get him to his parents' place, smoke the bone sitting in my front pocket, and kill a little time driving the scenic route back to the job.

No way, Nicky. They'll finish sixth again. They suck.

"Could be, Scotty."

This goes on every day and word for word. I want to scream at Nicky that he has no idea what he's talking about, that he knows less than nothing about the subject-that they have been a bad, boring ball club for years and always will be-but at this point I just shake my head and squeeze the steering wheel.

"You never know, Scotty."

I know, Nicky. Trust me, I know.

"It's possible, Scotty."

It isn't possible, Nicky. They're not good enough. They're a terrible team-that's why they finish sixth every season. They stink.

"This could be their year, Scotty."

Never do I pull the van to the curb, slam it into Park, and clock Nicky square in his mongoloid grin, but I think about it daily. I visualize rearing back, throwing my right hand, and watching his face cave in. When I drop him off, I'm grinding my teeth and he scrambles down from his seat, a man at peace with the world and himself.

"See you tomorrow, Scotty."

There are leg wraps and foot wraps, and tan support hose that go on before the wraps. There is my wife on her knees. Not so many years ago, I weighed 200 pounds and a handjob was what I gave myself when I was on the road-a few times while on the phone with Lisa talking low about what she'd be doing to me if I were home in bed with her.

The man I used to be is in here somewhere. I don't miss him right now, recalling Nicky. I don't miss burning with blind rage at a young man with a small child's brain. Whatever his deficits, Nicky was the perfect-nay, the Platonic-Cleveland sports fan. I have no idea if Nicky's still around, or if he and I will live long enough to see the season he thought every season could be. No matter. Nicky believed-and believing was plenty good enough for him.

In the wake of the Wh.o.r.e of Akron's leave taking, Clevelanders were too blind in their rage to articulate their loss-and the sportswritters were too blind to begin to understand the source of that rage. I'd hear or read tripe like this, from Dime magazine: The getting-dumped process is going pretty much according to plan for the Cleveland Cavaliers. First there was the emotionally irrational behavior (burning LeBron jerseys the night of "The Decision"), then the period of pretending like you didn't want to be with your significant other in the first place (Dan Gilbert's open letter), then the optimism when you remember there are other fish in the sea (only the Cavs couldn't get any of them to take the bait), and finally the cosmetic payback work-new wardrobe, losing weight, better car, etc.-to make the one who dumped you feel like a.s.s the next time you meet. Hence the Cavs' new uniforms that were unveiled yesterday to a mixed response.