This is a story that not many people know.
Sure, they know how the Cavaliers became the first team in fifty-two years to bring a major championship back home to Cleveland. They know how the Cavs became the first team to overcome a 3–1 deficit in the NBA Finals to come back and win. They know how we beat the first team ever to win 73 games during the regular season to do so. They know we became the first team since the Washington Bullets in 1978 to win a Game 7 of the Finals on the road and hoist the Larry O’Brien Trophy on the same floor that our opponents fought so hard to host the game on.
But they don’t know what happened to the Larry O’Brien Trophy three days later when more than a million people descended upon downtown Cleveland for a championship parade the likes of which has never been seen before.
The story starts with me and Channing Frye.
We were supposed to be in our own individual cars to soak it all in during the parade route. Somehow, Channing ended up on a flatbed truck with his family. We both have little kids. I was like, “Yo, I’d rather jump in here with you guys than be stuck in a convertible.” Because it was hot out. So me and my family, we jump in that car with the Fryes and we’re just taking in the scene and it was mayhem.
People everywhere. Lined up fifteen–twenty deep wherever you looked. On rooftops. Climbing out of windows. Hanging on streetlamps. Everywhere. I realized the magnitude of what this day was. You could tell that the city had never planned a championship parade in, well, fifty years. They didn’t know that they needed to have guardrails up. They didn’t know what hit ’em.
Kind of like the Warriors, actually.
I remember about halfway through the parade, me and Channing look over and I see this guy running next to the car with a big towel covering up something in his arms. I was like, “That looks like the trophy.”
And the guy, he’s running—and he’s not running fast because our cars aren’t really moving—and he says to us, “Hey, do you guys want this?” And I’m like, “Yeah! We’ll take it!” In my head, I’m thinking, “Oh, this is our turn. He’s just taking the trophy from car to car and everyone gets some time with the trophy.” So he gets on the truck with us and after a few minutes, after we’ve been raising the trophy, and after the crowd is going crazy every time we lift it up and the sun shimmers off its polished, sphered head, the guy was like, “You don’t understand how happy I was to see you guys.”
I mean, everyone was happy to see us that day. We just won a championship for Cleveland. But there was a different level of appreciation coming from this guy.
I was like, “What are you talking about? Didn’t you just bring this over from another player? You’ve seen one Cavs player lift this thing up, you’ve seen ’em all, right?”
He was like, “Richard, the trophy was on the back of a truck that went the wrong way at the start of the parade route. So all of the sudden, it’s me, the trophy, one million fans, and no security, no nothing.”
Oh.
He was panicked. He unbolted the thing and started running around looking for a place to put it. He said, “Your car was the first one that we happened to see and we latched on like Rose to the floating door in Titanic.”
So that’s the story of how it came to be that the only people with video or pictures with the trophy during the parade are me and Channing—two lifelong friends ever since I helped recruit him to our alma mater, the University of Arizona—because some guy ended up stumbling upon our truck in the parade route. He didn’t bother bringing it to anybody else—you know, like that LeBron James guy.
It kind of felt like all the things that had to happen for us to become champions. I know the city of Cleveland can relate. While Northeast Ohioans lived through The Shot, The Fumble, The Drive, and The Decision, I had my own downfalls on the biggest stage before I finally had my championship moment.
In the days leading up to Game 7, in my head I ran through all of them. I’ve come up just short so many times. I lost back-to-back Finals with the then New Jersey Nets. I’ve been top 10 in the league in scoring multiple years and didn’t make an All-Star game. I’ve been on the U.S. Olympic team, but it was the team with Larry Brown and a bunch of misfits, and we had to fight just to win the bronze. So it was just like always so, so close. This was my entire life. This was my entire career. I’m not Tristan Thompson who is twenty-five years old. I’m not Kyrie Irving who has his whole career in front of him. This could be it for me.
When I was a kid, I’d imagine what I’d do if I was fortunate enough to win it all. Somehow it worked out just the way I pictured it. As soon as the buzzer sounded, everyone takes off, jumping and hugging and piling on top of one another, and I was the one guy on the bench that just kind of froze there and just put my head in my hands and started crying. I wouldn’t say I was sobbing. I wouldn’t say I was weeping. It was just more of, “Wow, man.” Not only have I been through so much in fifteen years in the league, but to feel it for those ten days just slipping through your hands again after falling down 3–1 and to come this close, it was something. After the amount of stress that was in all that, the championship feeling was a feeling of relief. The initial feeling wasn’t that of joy for me, it was of relief.
But as the night unfolded, that scene was everything I wanted it to be. Everything I dreamed it would be. Everything I imagined it ever would be. It was all of those things. And so what did I do? My big mouth started telling anyone who would listen in the locker room, as my feet splashed through puddles of champagne, that I was retiring.
When I initially said it, I really was done. I was so emotionally spent. It was a wrap for me. Like, you’re talking about not sleeping for ten days. I took Tylenol PM at 6 a.m. one time to try to get some sleep. You’re going East Coast to West Coast and you’re running on fumes at that point and time.
Three days later, I was at the rally downtown after the parade, standing in front of hundreds of thousands of people and shouting into a microphone that I was coming back.
What changed?
I wouldn’t say things calmed down, but you start to enjoy it. You start to think. Was I all the way out when I said I was retiring? No. But the same, I was thinking, “I don’t know if I can go through this again,” even being on the winning side of it. Even being on the winning side of it, I don’t know if I could go through it again, just because it was that stressful.
And finally at the end I just thought about it and it was more about my family: They are enjoying it. My body: It felt great even in my midthirties after playing in 100-something games. And then the championship experience: It doesn’t end at the parade.
Part of winning a championship is being there on opening night when they raise the banner. Part of winning a championship is getting your ring from Adam Silver before that first game. Part of winning a championship is going into every city and just feeling that respect and also trying to defend your crown. One of the reasons I always wanted to be a champion was so I could defend it. That was half of it. So the more I started thinking about it, the more I was just like, “Okay, I don’t want to miss out on that experience.” Because this is once in a lifetime.
And this team is once in a lifetime.
There’s no way you could come back the way we did, from 3–1 down, unless you are tight, unless you are brothers.
It doesn’t mean that you have to be best friends. It doesn’t mean that all fifteen of you guys are out together at every dinner. We’re all different personalities. Nobody could match my personality anyway, come on, let’s be real.
The thing is, you have to be able to look each man in the eye and say, “Hey, I’m going to do my job. If you do your job, we’re good. If you’re struggling, I’ll lift you up.” And all year long there was always speculation about this dynamic and that dynamic and what this meant and what that meant. It was just like people would see LeBron and Kyrie or LeBron and Kevin get frustrated at each other, but they wouldn’t see them at dinner the very next night cracking jokes.
We did get closer as the season went along. We did love taking part in social media and putting stuff on Snapchat for the fans to see how we really are. That did make us closer. I think for a while people saw us and thought, “How am I going to root for guys that hate each other?” They would rather believe that guys are awesome and hang out, because they want to believe that. And I think once we kind of showed that to the fans and allowed them to see for themselves that, yo, LeBron, as much as he’s special on the court, he’s a big goofball. And, man, Kev doesn’t take himself too seriously. That’s cool.
It was just like everybody was going to have fun with this ride and it didn’t matter if we won 10 straight to the start the playoffs, if we had lost two in a row in the conference finals, if we were down 0–2 in the Finals, if we were down 3–1 and on the brink of elimination. We stayed pretty consistent throughout this whole thing.
And so did Cleveland. They got behind us like no fan base has ever gotten behind a team I’ve played for before. It was like, even if you weren’t a basketball fan, if you weren’t from Cleveland, the fact that you knew that the so-called story of the town was that there hadn’t been a championship in fifty years, you were rooting.
For my son, Little Richard, there’s now a connection to him and Cleveland. Little Rich learned how to walk in Cleveland. These guys, my brothers on the Cavs, they’ve watched him go from being carried, to taking his first steps, to running around, and now all of the sudden he’s in the locker room and he loves basketball. I’d like to think we gave him a pretty good first taste of what the game is supposed to look like at its best.
Say what you want about LeBron, but not many people in a team sport can say, “Hey, I’m going to come back to my hometown, to a city that’s never won a championship in half a century and a team that’s never experienced a championship run, period, and I’m going to go and we’re going to win one.”
Actually, forget I said not many people say that. No one says that. No one in the history of a team sport has ever said that.
This is all LeBron has ever known. This is all he’s ever known: basketball and being the best. That’s all he’s ever known since he was probably about fifteen years old. That will mess with your psyche a little bit. You can lose touch. Hell, maybe you need to have a messed-up psyche to do what he did and leave Miami to come back to the Cavs.
But I will say this about LeBron: At his core, all he wants to do is win. And he does it by wanting to be a good teammate and by wanting everyone to be successful. That’s just who he is.
Oh, one more thing.
My wife is pregnant again. Our daughter is going to be born in Cleveland. Which I think is awesome. She’ll come into this world in the city of champions.