Dan Wetzel from Yahoo! Sports sums up the mood in Cleveland very well after watching the LeBron James meltdown in the Finals:
Late Sunday night, a crowd of Clevelanders gathered here to watch their onetime hero turned all-time traitor, and with each disinterested LeBron offensive possession, each failed LeBron chase down of Jason Terry, each embarrassing LeBron crunch-time turnover, the prevailing emotion was simple.
Laughter.
They weren’t hating LeBron here. They were laughing at him.
LeBron started it, of course, laughing at Cleveland nearly a year ago when he took himself to a Boys and Girls Club in Connecticut of all places to announce on national television that he was taking his talents to South Beach. That South Beach has about a million nightclubs and technically no basketball arena said it all.
So on Sunday, Cleveland laughed right back.
All over Flannery’s and places like it across Ohio, they cracked oft-told jokes. (“I asked LeBron for a dollar, he gave me 75 cents back. He doesn’t have a fourth quarter.”) They showed pictures on their cell phones mocking LeBron as a quitter. Bartenders rang bells and shouted things like, “Last call for LeBron.”
He’s right. I watched it and I was laughing away throughout the fourth quarter. We saw LeBron’s limitations under pressure, but everyone else around the country bought into LeBron’s excuses. His teammates weren’t good enough. They didn’t rise to the occasion. He couldn’t win in Cleveland.
Well, he couldn’t win with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh either. And he wilted. His performance was an embarrassment.
If you want to understand how people felt in Cleveland, read the entire article.
And as Wetzel said at the end of his column, “LeBron James had the right to leave. And Cleveland has the right to laugh.”
