Top Five Major League Underdog Towns: 2. Cleveland

This is the fourth in a series of articles about the greatest underdog venues in U.S. pro sports. The criteria is simple: small-market towns, communities that get no respect, that personify the under-rated, that constantly challenge the giants of the world, and/or that have suffered some terrible devastation but are rebuilding.

We would have to include Cleveland on this list, and we would have to publish the article today, the day after the Cavaliers, given up for dead, clawed their way into game six of the Eastern Conference Finals.

Joe Posnaski's recent cover story in Sports Illustrated summarizes why Cleveland is either number one or number two on this list. He, being from Cleveland, would vote for number one.

This writer, being from Buffalo would beg to differ, but as I wrote in my B/R article, The Cleveland Cavaliers: Two Scores to Settle, Cleveland and Buffalo have much in common besides Lake Erie, could easily have been linked in a tie for first.

(But I think I can argue why Buffalo has a slight edge. See my soon to be published article on Buffalo.)

Posnaski does a better job than I could ever do detailing the woes of Cleveland the city and its various teams: Browns I, Browns II, Cavaliers, and Indians and why they combine to make "The Mistake By the Lake" as Cleveland is often called, one of America's two top underdog towns. If you haven't read his story in SI, please do so. Putting his team and town on the cover may have jinxed the Cavaliers this time around, but hopefully not.

Cleveland actually won six NFL Championships (including the league's predecessor the APFL). The first was won in 1924 as the Cleveland Bulldogs (moved from Canton), the second in 1945 as the Cleveland Rams (moved to LA then St. Louis) and the last four as the Browns, the most recent being 1964.

After '64 it was nothing but near misses separated by down years for the Browns until they gave up and left for Baltimore, became the Ravens and then (isn't it Cleveland's luck) became the second former Cleveland team (along with the Rams) to win a Superbowl.

The Indians haven't won a World Series since 1948 and hadn't even appeared in one between '54 and '97 when they lost to the Marlins in seven games. For a team that had waited 49 years, the salt in the wounds was the fact that the Marlins franchise was only four years old.

The Cavaliers are in their 39th year and have won only one conference championship. They've lost several conference finals and semi-finals series, especially recently, which only adds to the frustration and the irrational fear that no matter how good the Cavs may appear in the regular season or even in the early rounds of the playoffs, sometime before the end of the conference finals, a basketball shoe will drop.

That feeling is pervasive again this year, having increased exponentially without any basis in fact when the SI cover came out, but soon thereafter, as the Magic has made the Cavs actually look bad at several points in the series, the aprehension takes on a new intensity.

SI curse or no curse, things suddenly looked sickeningly familiar in the city where the expression "Close, but no cigar" is considered profanity.

Other than perhaps Buffalo, there is no city in the United States where there has been a longer or more extensive history of sports frustration, disappointment and defeat combined with civic failure, blight, and a distorted public image than Cleveland.

Therefore, Cleveland is a town that any underdog fan must not only love, but make a pilgrimage to.

Still, the current NBA season isn't over. Don't count the Cavaliers out just yet. There's a new opera in Cleveland ("Opera Cleveland") and the Fat Lady hasn't sung yet.