THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, October 3, 1995 TAG: 9510030372
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
Tonight, at 8:07 p.m., nine guys wearing blue hats bearing a weird red cartoon from a politically incorrect age, a grinning mawkish-red Indian named Chief Wahoo, will trot onto a lighted field and do something that hasn't been done in more than 40 years. They will play major league baseball playoff in October in downtown Cleveland.
I was 5 years old the last time that happened, and couldn't have been less aware. A few years later, when baseball obsession filled the years between pabulum and puberty, my Indians were still a tough team but on a downward spiral that wouldn't end until I was old enough to suffer, simultaneously, the advance of arthritis and the retreat of my hairline.
To listen to sports analysts, the casual fan would believe that the Boston Red Sox, whom the Indians face in the first round of the playoffs, are the most cursed team in baseball. Not so. Boston simply has a better myth: the ghost of Babe Ruth. Cleveland's only mythology involves rivers that catch fire in the night.
The Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees after the 1919 season and haven't won the World Series since, making ``the curse of Ruth'' one of the more colorful legends of pro sports. But the Red Sox have made it to the World Series four times since then, most recently in 1986, when they were just one pitch from winning the whole thing.
Some curse. Cleveland hasn't played a postseason game since Dwight David Eisenhower was president. And in most of those years they were sucking oxygen from a tube by the Fourth of July.
There is no earthly reason why tonight should matter, given that I moved to Virginia 17 years ago, due in part to twin plagues that swept south from Cleveland to the town where I lived: snowstorms, and the Indians' team batting average.
Most of us are bound to sports loyalties by geography, in the same manner that we are born to a family based on genetics. I was born to both in a small rust-belt burg on the AM-radio fringes of the Cleveland market. Just two blocks to the east of my parents' house is the Pennsylvania state line.
Had I lived two blocks to the east, my sports loyalties would be Pennsylvanian, and I'd have been graced with the Pittsburgh Pirates' World Series wins in 1960, '71 and '79 and frequent playoff appearances. The entire Terry Bradshaw-Steel Curtain reign of the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Penguins' remarkable Stanley Cup victories.
Instead, I was assigned to 41 years of Indians' futility, a Cleveland Browns football team that is one of a bare handful never to have appeared in one of the XXIX Super Bowls, and basketball and hockey teams that provide scrimmage fodder for the rest of the leagues.
The people in Boston cannot make that claim. Nor can those complainers in Chicago who follow the Cubs. They've at least made the playoffs. And the Bears have made it to the Super Bowl.
No, to be a Cleveland sports fan is to know humility. Ohio expatriates recognize one another by the Chief Wahoo ballcap in summer, or the occasional Brownies sweatshirt in the fall. We nod at one another, grimly. We know what's coming.
Or at least we used to. We'd grown calloused to Randy Newman singing about the once-filthy Cuyahoga River catching fire. We no longer blinked when the Monday Night Football announcers referred to Municipal Stadium as ``the mistake on the lake.'' (Frankly, Frank, it holds 80,000 and there are worse places to watch a football game.)
Glimmers of hope began to shine from Cleveland for the past couple of seasons, but we'd been teased before, so we checked our hopes at the door.
Then, in what seemed an instant, Cleveland blossomed. A beautiful new stadium and a fast, powerful baseball club that left the American League in shreds. Down the street, the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame brought the city weeks of upbeat international acclaim. The Browns sit atop the AFC Central. And, for good measure, Ohio State kicked the tar out of Notre Dame the other day.
When the first pitch crosses the plate tonight, the Red Sox will still be trying to shake the Ghost of Ruth, but the Indians already will have shaken their curse: 41 years of October shutdown. And if they can keep the Cuyahoga River from catching fire before a national TV audience, the playoffs will be a shining moment for the city.
Pardon me, fellow Ohioans, for mentioning the river again. But as a Cleveland sports fan I've learned to live with a certain sense of dread. We know that anything can happen. Sometimes you can just see it coming. MEMO: Dave Addis is a writer for the Virginian-Pilot's Real Life Team.
ILLUSTRATION: [Cleveland Indian logo]
by CNB