TFLN: NFL to look into Cleveland Browns texting fiasco
January 9, 2015Former Browns coach Eric Mangini to interview with Washington
January 9, 2015(Thinking to myself, on the couch near the fireplace, sealed away from a sub-zero wind chill): Z’s jersey banner sure looks great up there at the Q. So: now there’s Z, Brad, Mark, and Nance; Bingo, AC – and Joe Tait. There’s one more- it’s on the tip of my tongue… I must close my eyes… and… ponder…
(fade in, to a rapidly strumming harp): Whoa, the entire crew is here. Roger, Pam, Dad, Mom…
Hey. Roger… Looks young. Like about eleven years old. His blond hair is past his shoulders… But he’s actually shaved his head for years now. Pam… She’s wearing wiiiiide bell bottoms. I think our Aunt Beverly handed those down to her, back in the 1970s. She’s looking like she might have looked while listening to her just-released Bay City Rollers record album. And Dad… His hair is longish, too.
Roger regards the confused, astonished look on my face with the knowing smile of a brother; Pam smiles too, but with a measure of dismay. Wait—it’s not true. I have not been imbibing illegal adult beverages during my trips to the men’s room! Honest. What is going on—
HOOOOONNNNNK “Now entering the game, number forty two, Nate Thurmond.”
The crowd has been roaring its approval since he arose from the bench and removed his warmup jacket. He enters the game in place of starting center Jim Chones. This crowd is LOUD, and the energy is contagious. Uh, Roger? These are the newly crowned, Central Division champion Cleveland Cavaliers. Out on the court- there’s the Washington Bullets. Wes Unseld. Elvin Hayes. Phil Chenier. The Cavs are lookin’ good, rockin’ the original unis (and the short shorts). This is Game 5 of our first playoffs, ever.
Wow. The team has come so far in six years. In 1970, the Cavs were maybe drawing 3000 per game at the old, dingy Cleveland Arena- a run-down, minor league hockey venue.
It is a wonder the team survived those early years. They chose not to stock the roster with veterans; they were developing youngsters like Butch Beard, Bingo Smith and Austin Carr. By the third year, they did trade Beard in a deal that landed the steady Lenny Wilkens. The year after that, they dealt Rick Roberson and John Johnson for the right to draft Jim Brewer out of the University of Minnesota. More recently, they acquired the former ABA-er Chones’ rights in what by now seems to have been an annual deal with the LA Lakers. And just last year, veteran shooting guard Dick Snyder (from North Canton) came aboard along with the drafted Clarence “Foots” Walker, out of the State University of West Georgia.
Now—look at this palace. The Richfield Coliseum. Not a bad seat in the house. Any area is accessible to anyone. That crazy, brilliant Nick Mileti built this place in the middle of nowhere -well, actually pretty much in the middle of the greater Akron- greater Cleveland area. Nobody else saw this kind of success coming. He’d faced strong opposition from the Cleveland establishment, too.
Saw Skynyrd here a couple years ago. And a bunch of other concerts—almost none as loud as this Cavaliers playoff crowd. Except maybe for Ted Nugent. When this crowd chants, it’s from the depths of their souls. It can even be kind of frightening in its intensity. Alternately ear-splitting, then silent enough to hear a whisper while it sucks in its next breath. Responding to a ‘bad call‘: “BULLSH— (silence) BULLSH— (silence).” There is no quickening of the pace, as is typical with fan chants. The cadence of the riff is resolute. Fans young and old, black and white are united in a way only sports can occasionally foster.
Clevelanders are tired of being down. These Cavs are a winner, and we can help will them to a victory.
This is a team that had been so marginalized that it did not have a local TV deal. Now, radio icon Pete Franklin is broadcasting his pre-game shows before a several dozen fans from a tiny, see-through Plexiglas booth in the outer concourse. The energy throughout the building crackles like electricity.
♦♦♦
The Cavaliers had started giving the league’s elite teams all they could handle back to 1975. During the off-season, their first and only coach, Bill Fitch, traded promising center Steve Patterson to the Bulls in November. Patterson, drafted in 1971, was the center who had bridged the careers of Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton at UCLA. In return, Fitch added two solid contributors to the roster: forward Rowland Garrett and center Nate Thurmond.
Nate Thurmond was a tall, gangly kid out of Akron who had been a star for Central High School. His team eventually lost to Jerry Lucas’ Middletown team in the state playoffs. The Ohio State University recruited Nate the Great, but he did not want to be Lucas’ backup there. Thurmond starred as a Bowling Green Falcon, and was acknowledged as having raised the stature of the MAC conference. In 1963, he averaged 17.8 points and 17 rebounds, and was an All-American. Thurmond did not face premier big men in college, however, and later admitted he had yet to learn to play the tough rebounding and shot-blocking game for which he was renowned. He experienced physical play in pickup games against NBA players, including former high school teammate Gus Johnson (not the broadcaster).
Drafted in the first round by the San Francisco Warriors, Nate Thurmond found himself under the wing of all-time great Wilt Chamberlain. After a short time, Chamberlain was dealt to Philadelphia, and Thurmond became an all-star several times over due to his presence as a defensive force. Many ex-players believe he is vastly underrated, and that he took a back seat to no NBA center- not Jabbar, not Chamberlain, not Russell. Walt Hazzard has said he’d seen players get an offensive rebound and back away fifteen feet to be sure they could get a shot off. Thurmond played for the Warriors for over a decade before being dealt to Chicago. He was expected to be the Bulls’ savior, and actually recorded the NBA’s first quadruple double in his first game there (points, rebounds, assists, blocked shots). However, his stay in Chicago soon soured due to the unreasonable expectations with which he was saddled.
To this day, when people talk about Nate Thurmond, they emphasize his reserved demeanor and his classiness, which was obvious in his character as well as reflected in how he dressed.
♦♦♦
Here in the Coliseum, Coach Fitch has the Cavaliers contending for the NBA title. Getting the players to believe in themselves is widely credited to the final piece- the team’s glue and foundation: Nate Thurmond.
Nate the Great has returned home. His biological family attends his home games, but of course, every one of the 21,000+ fans in the house regard him as family.
Borrowing a concept from teams such as the Warriors and the Celtics, Fitch has stocked an extremely deep roster. His first team is Brewer, Bingo, Chones, Snyder and Jimmy Cleamons. His second team could probably make the playoffs on its own: Campy Russell, Garrett, Nate the Great, AC (still kind of gimpy due to injuries but still able to stroke it) and Footsie. A squad of assassins, with an all-time dominant defensive presence in the middle.
This team’s coming of age has either caused, or coincided with, the simultaneous rise in the hearts and minds of Clevelanders of Cavs announcer Joe Tait. His calls in these playoffs are legendary. Thirty years later, Tait will still be calling Cavaliers games. Recordings of the most exciting portions of his broadcasts will be accessible on personal computers, on what will become known as the ‘Internet.’
I am sitting with my family as the Cavs are about to win Game 5 against the Bullets; Joe Tait will scream at the end of regulation (but hardly hear himself in the din) as Dick Snyder inbounds to Bingo, who misses his shot- but Cleamons is there to grab the rebound and sink a reverse layup for the win! The crowd reaches new levels of wild abandon.
The series will ultimately reach Game 7 back at the Coliseum, where Cleamons will inbound to Snyder, who will dribble in on the left side of the key. He’ll throw in a right-handed runner in the lane very high off the glass with time winding down for another crazy win. The smudgy, black and white Plain Dealer photo of Snyder’s shot will be etched in the minds of a generation of Clevelanders. It will be another symbol of “The Miracle of Richfield.”
Before facing the legendary Celtics in the next series, Jim Chones will break a bone in his foot during practice. The Cavs will be down 0-2 in the series, before Nate Thurmond will star in Game 3 in a win back at home. The good guys will not prevail in the Celtics series, but the fans of Cleveland are hooked. The Cavaliers will have arrived. It will have been a great rise from the ashes for the fledgling franchise.
(fade out, blinking to more harp strumming) No way. I was actually there again. Well, of course I couldn’t have been, really. But wow, that was a very special time, with the Cavaliers coming of age in the ‘70s. And yeah, Nate Thurmond was not only an emblem of that era- he was a catalyst. And a native of northeast Ohio. So sure- I get why it was a natural his number would have been retired by the Cavs.
Now, if I can only explain this far-too-small wine and gold T-shirt I am wearing, with the huge opera diva on it, declaring “It’s 1976- The Fat Lady Has Sung- Cleveland Has a Winner!!”
5 Comments
Imagine the jersey of Ben Wallace in the rafters if he had substantially contributed to winning a single playoff series in ’08. Nate was at the very end, more ready for the glue factory than Wallace was in ’08. This whole “Miracle” thing, and the Nate adoration, is a weird provincial sports fantasy that should now be laughed about in retrospect, a product of that era more than what happened.
The manic crowds and noise were real. But that thing was a product of a time of Cleveland desperation. Downtown was in full decay. Browns were consistently bad and were finally about to pull the plug on savior Mike Phipps after 5 putrid years. The Indians had one season with a winning record since the early 60s and had trouble making payroll. And into the middle of this desperation popped those adorable Cavs, like the ’80 USA hockey team writ very, very small. Quick: what was the “Miracle” – a good team beating the excellent Bullets in the last seconds? Some writer coins it “miracle” for a story, the phrase is catchy and generations of future fans actually think it was.
The crowds were not huge and frenzied all that season. They won a single playoff series and captivated the town for about 3 weeks. [Gipper voice] “Mr. Gilbert – Tear. Down. That. Jersey.” And also Bingo’s while you’re up there. A previous owner decided that a cheap marketing tool like nostalgia for the team’s brief and only moment of excitement to that point was easier than drafting competently. But fans still fawning decades later over Nate’s hobbled end of career, tough as nails limited minutes is so weird, so Cleveland. Nate must be stunned that we love him more than they do in SF, where he actually earned his place in the HOF.
That’s not an unfair portrayal. Perhaps being a kid at the time helped to instill in me more of a wide eyed perspective.
To be sure, however, something special did happen during that Bullets series. As you note, what happened on the court alone doesn’t deserve the acclaim.
The (desperate) times and sudden emergence of that team – underdogs, like us- did ignite the people of NEO. Thurmond is the enduring symbol of that.
My prob is perpetuating this total absence of perspective: we’ve embraced Nate because in CLE you’re raised to embrace Nate. He averaged like 3 ppg in his season plus here. He was hardly the team’s Elgin Baylor. World Free contributed way more to a season. It’s a grossly inflated lie, brother. Is he “enduring”? Weirdly, yes. Should he be? Not to a self-respecting fan base. And younger fans should not be encouraged to continue this weirdness. It’s like waxing nostalgic every year about moving the fences back at Muni because of the legendary Alex Cole.
Curious: if you ranked the 1976 cavalier roster in order of importance to that season’s (relative) success, who all would you rank ahead of Thurmond?
Cleamons: ran Fitch’s show and set the tone for the starting unit, very steadily
AC : points
Foots: a primary reason they were very good that year is because the second unit was almost as good as the starters. And Foots was lightning on both ends of the floor. Made serious hay running his unit against the other team’s second string.
Chones: when he went out and Nate tried to play serious minutes, season over.
Campy or Nate: Nate for his toughness and gravitas with the second unit, because in limited limits he could still school a lot of starters and certainly backups (Cowens ate him up the next series but Cowens was in his prime and Nate was about done). Nate really became a fan fav because he was bald and looked older than he was and what Clevelander doesn’t like that. Campy had a great array of offensive moves, points in bunches and could take over a game when other guys were off.
I don’t think the other starters – Brewer, Snyder – were as valuable to the team as Nate was to the team on the second unit, though Brewer had a well-rounded game. But mostly it was an extremely well-coached team by Fitch. He was the guru and they all bought in. His success later with Boston and Houston speaks for itself.