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The Franchise - Turnaround of the Cavs |
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Thursday, 27 March 2008 |
I recently met the Cleveland Plain Dealer's own Terry Pluto at the opening of the Cleveland Gladiator's first arena football league game. Terry writes one of my favorite weekly columns for the Sunday Plain Dealer. The column contains a variety of insider's notes of the Cavs, Browns, and Indians that you don't get anywhere else. If you have ever read them, you know that Terry is well connected in the Cleveland sports scene. He is also a renowned author of 23 books such as Loose Balls, which was ranked 13th on the Sports Illustrated list of the top 100 sports books of all time. He has been nominated twice for a Pulitzer Prize and has twice been selected by the Associated Press Sports Editors as the nation's top sports columnist for medium-sized newspapers.
Having seen excerpts of Pluto's and the Akron-Beacon Journal's Brian Windhorst latest collaboration entitled, The Franchise - Lebron James and the remaking of the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Plain Dealer, I was excited to read more about the team's rebirth. The book is 224 pages of well written non-fiction and is easy to read as are all of Pluto's books I have read thus far. The story is about the Cavs long road to acquiring The Guy (a.k.a. Lebron James), and all that went into building the right team around him. If you think for one minute that it simply hinged on the right ping pong ball in a lottery, then you would sorely mistaken. Getting Lebron James was the culmination of years of hard work by many people. Pluto and Windhorst have written a book not unlike how the old PBS show Connections used to draw lines through history from one invention in the 1600's up to the computer in the 20th century.
In order to provide you a brief summary, first the Cavs had to have the right owner. Does anyone remember Ted Stepian and how he almost destroyed basketball in Cleveland? Then, the Cavs had to recognize their need for The Guy following several fairly successful years in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Each campaign seeming to end by having their hearts trampled on time and again by the original #23, Michael Jordan. Next, Cleveland thought they had The Guy in Shawn Kemp only to discover too late that their prince was really an overweight toad. To the rescue came the unlikeliest and unsung of all heroes in Jim Paxson, who freed our fair city of the toad's ugly contract. That GM made our team so bad (few knew on purpose), so that someday we could all dream. Then came that fateful day when the sports gods finally smiled on our fair city, soon to be followed by a new owner, Dan Gilbert, with the vision, energy and cash to hopefully complete the task. All the while, he had to make sure The Guy remains in Cleveland for his entire career.
This also is the story of a child named Lebron, blessed with not only amazing physical gifts but also a brain to match. He grew into THE GUY with the help of a many good people. If you think his rise was an accident, then you would be naive on how the real sports business world works. The book discusses topics such as how college coaches viewed James and the inside story on his Nike shoe contract. It also offers the reader a look into how the Cavaliers work to satisfy James in the hopes of retaining him throughout his entire career.
Of course, I am leaving out many juicy details of how it all happened described in fine detail by the authors. I highly recommend this book for your favorite basketball fan. There is a lot of behind the scenes information packed into this book. It provides details about the inner workings of the NBA just as Feinstein's book Next Man Up did about the NFL. But best of all it is about a Cleveland team.
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