We Atlantans cringe when Forbes names us the most miserable sports city in these United States, and mounting a rebuttal isn’t worth the effort. Who cares to flip through the Rolodex of Regret — from Brooks Conrad to Eugene Robinson with Levingston and Leyritz and Lonnie in between — when we can talk about something cheerful, like traffic on the Perimeter?
One small point, though: As a city, we’ve only been major-league since 1966. Our teams in the four major sports have won one championship in 162 tries, which is awful. But it’s not quite as awful as Cleveland, which over that same span has taken an 0-fer and whose Cavaliers will face our Hawks in an Eastern Conference finals that might be subtitled the Misery Series.
A Cleveland team last took a title on Dec. 27, 1964. (The Browns upset the Baltimore Colts 27-0; Gary Collins caught three touchdown passes.) In the years since, Cleveland teams have played for a championship three times — the Indians in the 1995 and 1997 World Series and the Cavs in the 2007 NBA finals.
In two different manifestations, the Browns have never graced a Super Bowl. Even the famously forlorn Falcons have managed that. They messed it up — the aforementioned Robinson got arrested for solicitation and beaten for a touchdown — but they made it. The Braves reached the World Series five times in the ’90s. The one time they won, they beat a team from Cleveland.
Bill Livingston has been a sports columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer since 1984, the same year this correspondent started at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Between us, we’ve seen so much heartbreak we ought to be writing daytime soaps. On Monday I asked him: Who’s more miserable — Atlanta or Cleveland?
“I’d have to say Cleveland,” Livingston said, “because of the World Series.”
He meant the 1995 edition, which the Braves won in six games by holding a fearsome team that hit .291 during the regular season to a batting average of .179. The ultimate indignity came in Game 6, when Tom Glavine and Mark Wohlers limited that mighty assemblage to one single (Tony Pena’s) and Marquis Grissom gloved Carlos Baerga’s liner for the 27th out.
So: Head-to-head at title time, we’re 1-0 against Cleveland. (We shouldn’t get giddy. We’re 0-1 against Ontario.) But that World Series wasn’t the most excruciating the Indians have known. Two years later, the Indians led 2-1 with three outs to go in Game 7. Closer Jose Mesa yielded two hits and a tying sacrifice fly. The Marlins won in 11 innings. The Tribe became the first team to lose Game 7 after leading in the ninth.
John Hart, then the Indians’ general manager and now the Braves’ president of baseball operations, tells the tale of that ninth inning: MLB officials ordered the Cleveland brass — meaning owner Dick Jacobs and Hart — to move to the visitors’ clubhouse for the trophy presentation even as Mesa had three outs to get. Hart protested, saying they were tempting fate. He was overruled. They watched their team blow the title on TV.
As for the Browns: They were undone when Brian Sipe threw an end-zone interception when a field goal would have won a 1981 playoff game; when John Elway took the Broncos 98 yards to force overtime in 1987 and, the very next year, when Earnest Byner was stripped at the 2 in Denver. (In Cleveland lore, those are “Red Right 88,” “The Drive” and “The Fumble.”)
As for the Cavaliers: They were eliminated from the playoffs twice by Michael Jordan — on “The Shot” and “The Shot II.” The 66-win Cavs were upset by the Magic in the 2009 Eastern finals; a 61-win team was ousted in the semis by the Celtics the next season. (The latter two Cavs squads were assembled by general manager Danny Ferry, now the general manager, albeit in absentia, of the Hawks.)
We around here get grief for losing two hockey clubs to Canada, but Cleveland saw its NHL Barons fold after two seasons. In 1995 Art Modell gutted the city by announcing that his Browns would move to Baltimore. (Cleveland was granted a replacement expansion team, which has stunk.) In July 2010, the Akron native LeBron James fled to South Beach via “The Decision.” He returned last summer, vowing to bring a championship to the shores of Lake Erie.
Sure enough, the Cavs have reached the Eastern finals in Year 1 of LeBron’s second coming. Maybe Cleveland’s wait is about to end. Relatively speaking, we Atlantans should be happy campers. We’ve gone 20 years without a title. A Clevelander born Dec. 28, 1964, would have turned 50 without seeing one.
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