The 43-year draught
Talking to my mom the other day, we wondered if any city has suffered longer than Cleveland. It has been more than forty years since Cleveland has won a sports championship of any flavor. Boston fans have until recently been the greatest of whiners, bemoaning endlessly the decades that had lapsed since the Red Sox won a World Series. Waaagh, the curse of the Bambino, waagh, Bucky Fucking Dent, waaagh.
Of course, in the meantime, they’ve had several recent Patriots Super Bowl wins, and the Celtics once won eight NBA titles in a row, and that was in the middle of a 11 of 13 stretch. And even more of course, that’s completely aside of the fact that the Chicago Cubs had gone a full decade longer without a World Series win, and in fact never will win the World Series again.
A little research turned up a startling fact. There are 21 cities with at least three major league teams out of a possible four. (Only New York City has two of each, though once Los Angeles did. Cleveland had, for several years in the seventies, a “grand slam” – one team in each of the majors.) Of these, all but three have won at least one championship since 1990, and most have won one in the current decade. The three sad cities are Philadelphia, Seattle and Cleveland. The ‘76ers won in 1983, and the Super Sonics last won a championship in ’79. And Cleveland has been winless since the two days after Christmas, 1964 when the Browns beat the Baltimore Colts 27-0.
We’ve been suffering fifteen years longer.
But hey, surely there are other sufferers out there! Well, let’s be generous and roll in cities with only two major league teams. It gets only slightly tougher to complain. There are ten more cities with two major league franchises. Of these, Charlotte, Nashville and New Orleans have had no championships, ever. But – but! - in each of these cities, major league sports came to the city after Cleveland’s last championship: New Orleans just after, and Charlotte and Nashville within the last decade or so.
So they haven’t suffered longer.
Only one city has actually gone longer without a championship. San Diego, whose Chargers won an AFL League championship in ’63, one year before the Browns’ last NFL Championship. The Bills just miss, and squeak by with a ’65 AFL win. However if you, like my mom, consider the AFL to have been a minor league up until the beginning of the merger with the NFL – the first Super Bowl (technically, the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game that was later renamed Super Bowl I) in 1967 – then Cleveland is still the city with the most suffering.
ESPN agrees – a couple years back they voted Cleveland the most tortured sports city.
And I know from personal experience that this is true.
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Yep. We are long-tortured. I often joke that if Cleveland wins a championship -- basketball, baseball, football, table tennis -- the city would at this point be so stunned that the entire Greater Northeast Ohio region would be on fire. Last year, when King James was tearing up the court, I informed my friends and loved ones that I intended to build an asbestos wall around my fair suburb of Cleveland Heights to avoid certain doom.
For as much as Cleveland continues to suffer, I take solace in the fact that I was born and bred near Pittsburgh, so I can look eastward to my hometown when I need a bit of encouragement.
All the same, you must realize that part of Cleveland's charm and character is ingrained in its loser-ness. One of the things that I like so much about this city is its inherent self-effacement ... We make fun of ourselves just as easily as we scoop pierogi onto our plates for Sunday dinner. We're scrappy, we're drunk, and we DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK, (*urp*). And although we wish we could Have It All, there's a kind of quiet smugness in our suckiness that implies that WE know we're living in a good city with bloody good people (and a ridiculously low cost of living) and a myriad of hidden gems, and if YOU, Citizens That Do Not Belong To Cleveland, don't appreciate it, then we'll keep it to ourselves. More pierogi and kapusta for us, thank you very much.
Come visit.
Love,
Kate