GO SCREW, CLEVELAND

Oh sure, everybody in the sports world and potentially on Earth today has a body temperature .2 degrees higher— a little warm spot for the city of Cleveland, Ohio, which just regained its lost son. I, however, have a decidedly different feeling toward the Mistake on the Lake and the two dozen or so webtrepreneurs who just registered their king-pun URLs.

As a blogger in Philly, I’ve had to endure quite possibly the saddest two years in American sports history. By my official account, we have not seen one playoff series win during that time. Worse, is that the baseball team has been managed into the ground so badly that players who were once considered heroes, who brought Philly its first championship in 25 years, are at this point viewed as little more than washed up trade bait. The basketball team, while heading in the right direction, just used its two top ten picks on players who won’t see the court for more than a year, and its last major acquisition was a $17 million lunatic who never stepped on the court. The hockey team’s two former homegrown stars have hoisted two of the last three Stanley Cups, and team’s former-GM-turned-President played the worst game of Russian Roulette ever by signing the crazy wannabe astronomer and trading the actual Vezina winner. And the football team… well, they’re OK.

I’ve had to sit here and blog about that stuff. Do you know how difficult that is? I wake up every day thinking, “Which way will we get fucked today, and how will I describe it to readers in no more than R-rated terms?” But every one of those days, until this spring, I was comforted by the fact that “we’re not Cleveland.”

And then it happened.

The NFL Draft. With Johnny Manziel, quite possibly the most bloggable athlete on Earth today, sitting there as the most perfect quarterback ever for Chip Kelly, the Eagles take a guy no one has ever heard of. Manziel goes to the Browns. It may have been the right football decision for the Eagles, but as I’ve indicated before, trying to blog about Nick Foles is like trying to mow your lawn with an electric toothbrush. It’s laborious and you get nowhere. But hey, at least the NBA Draft Lottery was around the corner. The Sixers would get the top pick and it would be fun. I was so excited when the night arrived. There was Dr. J for the Sixers! An attractive young female from the Bucks! And some dork from the Cavs. LOL. Poor Cavs, poor Cleveland. Nothing ever goes right for them. I can’t wait to watch Doc watch the attractive young female as he gets handed the number one pick! WIGGINS, BABY. WIIIIIIIIGINS.

Third pick.

3 and 10. And the girl is, like, still in high school.

The Cavs, inexplicably, got the first pick again. But that’s OK. They’ll overthink it. Wiggins will fall or they’ll trade the pick.

But once the draft finally rolled around and all that talk that the Sixers were going to move up had been shown to be just that, talk, Cleveland and its non-existent bloggers could finally say that Johnny Manziel, who has already been chastised for partying too much and was photographed rolling a $20 bill which would potentially be used to snort cocaine, and Andrew Wiggins, the NBA’s potential heir apparent to James, were hometown athletes. Meanwhile, I got stuck with Dario Saric and Joel Embiid’s dick.

Good couple of months for Cleveland— Johnny Football and Andrew Wiggins. Boy, those guys will sure be fun to write about for you Clevelanders. It’s just a shame neither will ever live up to hometown kid LeBron James. That wound will never heal.

GOD DAMMIT.

Wait, LeBron wants in? He might come to you, too, Cleveland? And he’s going to drag it out so we can have the ludicrous event of people camping out on his lawn— quite possibly the most ridiculously bloggable phenomenon in all of sports which I have wet dreams about (for real, I wake up oily after thoughts of writing about people picketing at Ruben Amaro’s house)?! And the next day he’s going to pen a love letter to your city in gushing terms and choose you and you’re going to combine Johnny Football and King James and Andrew Wiggins and if not Andrew Wiggins then Kevin Love who will make the team even heavier title favorites while I have to sit here and wait for the dismantling of the baseball team and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 years for the basketball team and cross my fingers that the football team will save me from potentially having a nervous breakdown BECAUSE I CAN’T SELL A FUCKING GRADY SIZEMORE T-SHIRT BECAUSE GRADY SIZEMORE LEFT HIS BEST YEARS IN FUCKING CLEVELAND?!?!?!?!

GO SCREW, CLEVELAND. GO SCREW.