Stories from my fandom

While attending sporting events, I tend to get swept up in goofy fan traditions. College sports present especially rich opportunities for doing so. during one Ohio State football game, in between singing the team fight song and spelling out O H I O with choreographed arm motions, along with the other 100,000 rabid fans in attendance, I stopped mid-way through and thought two thoughts: This is crazy, and These Are My People.   

Getting married (1988) and having children (1995 and 1998) were the best things I’ve ever done, but neither my actual wedding day nor the days I gave birth were as awesome as June 19, 2016. That was the day the Cleveland Cavaliers NBA team won the national championship. Besides the obvious elation that all fans feel when their teams win, the absolute joy and excitement of this particular championship on this particular day will likely never be equaled for me or many other Cleveland fans. LeBron had returned to Cleveland two years before. We were facing the Golden State Warriors who had the best regular-season record (73 wins and 9 losses) of any NBA team ever. The Cavs had already shocked the NBA world by winning the first three playoff rounds to make it to the finals. Nearly everyone expected the Cavs to go down without a fight. In the best-of-seven series, we were down 3 games to 1, a hole from which no NBA had ever come back from to win. Remarkably, we tied the series 3-3 which forced a Game 7. Google “2016 NBA finals Game 7” and you will find no shortage of stories about that intense series and that unreal game. Google “which NBA finals is generally considered the most epic” and the internet will tell you it is this game and this series. I watched in a Washington, DC bar full of Cleveland fans with my husband and college-age son. Our daughter was watching from her college apartment in Atlanta. I cannot describe the screaming, the crying, the hugging that filled that bar. In the midst of the celebration, we realized the garage where we parked our car, was about to close. We left the bar breathless, with sore throats, pounding hearts, damp eyes and fantastic memories for a lifetime. To this day, no other NBA team has ever had a regular-season record as good as that Warrior record and no team has ever had a comeback like that Cavs comeback. The memory still gets me choked up. 

I attended the premiere of this 2017 documentary film at the Cleveland International Film Festival. The Film Festival website describes the film this way: The Drive. The Fumble. The Shot. The Decision. José Mesa. And so it goes for Cleveland sports fans. Years of getting so close, followed by years of futility, followed by just dumb luck, followed by stars leaving for greener pastures seems to be the resumé of our hometown teams. So what keeps the fans returning for more? BELIEVELAND, part of the award-winning “30 for 30” ESPN documentary film series, attempts to explain the masochistic devotion many Browns, Indians, and Cavs fans have when it comes to cheering for teams that continue to break our hearts. Believeland is also printed on one of my T-shirts and on a banner I regularly bring to Cleveland sporting events. 

Our dining room is a mecca of sports paraphernalia, including jerseys, autographed bats, shoes, balls and photos, a LeBron Ken doll (Google it), bobbleheads and more. The first rule of home decorating is to make your home reflect you. So I did, starting with my sports dining room. It is where we display two arena seats from the University of Maryland’s legendary Cole Field House and two seats from Progressive Field, where the Cleveland Guardians (formerly the Indians) play. The Cole Field House seats were part of a silent auction when the University gutted the facility to transform it from a basketball arena to a football practice facility and a center for sports science and research. We “won” (ie, paid for) the seats in the silent auction. Acquiring the Progressive Field seat, however, was a three-year odyssey. The minute we learned – through an email to fans – that the team would be replacing stadium seats with new ones and that they would be selling old seats, we clicked “yes” but were already too late. That first batch sold out very quickly. About a year or two later, the team included a couple more Progressive Field seats in a silent auction for charity. When the going price shot up past $2000, we tapped out. At that point, on my request, Guardians Fan Services put our name on a waiting list in case there was ever another sale of old seats but the agent I talked to advised me not to get my hopes up. He didn’t think the team was going to sell any more seats and the waiting list was very long, he explained. So, I forgot about it. Then about a year later, I got an email indicating the final section of old seats had been replaced with new ones and the team was indeed going to hold one more sale. The email indicated that it was for season ticket-holders and a few other select group of fans, none of which I belonged to. But somehow, I was on this list. The email said we’d get a link in a few days and that we could use that link to purchase seats. The official day arrived and this time I succeeded in purchasing a set of two seats. The team established  a window of a few hours on a specific day in which all buyers had to pick up their seats in Cleveland, at Progressive Field. It was a December day. We live in Maryland. It snowed 15” in Cleveland that day. Undeterred, we made our way to Progressive Field and snaked our way around the block as part of a long line of others who had also bought their piece of Cleveland history. With the help of a friend, we loaded the seats in our car and drove home to Maryland in the snow, with our prized cargo in the back. They look great in our dining room opposite the seats from Cole Field House. 

When our son’s high-school baseball team held a bowling fundraiser, we signed up to sponsor a lane by purchasing a banner that would be displayed in the bowling alley the night of the fundraiser. Most of these sponsor banners displayed the name of a local business. The parent who organized the fundraiser jokingly asked me if I wanted our banner to read “Lonnie Chisenhall Fan Club,” because he knew Lonnie was our son’s favorite pro baseball player. I said yes! After the fundraiser, we took the banner home and displayed it in our garage. Soon I began taking it with us to Indians games and discovered that the banner was my ticket to getting on the stadium jumbotron. One time, Lonnie himself spotted my banner from his spot in the outfield and, between plays he pointed to me and gave an appreciative nod. Another time, members of the stadium crew sat down next to my husband and me in the stands to ask about our sign. They put a photo of us on their social-media feed and we had a bit of a viral moment with our banner.  Over the years, Lonnie left the team, the Indians logo changed and then the team became the Guardians. I covered the words on the banner and updated it as best I could. I continued to appear on the jumbotron with my revised banner. Eventually I hung it in our garage and now I use a smaller version at games instead. My little banner still does the trick but it doesn’t have the magic of my original Lonnie banner. 

During the construction of Progressive Field in the early 1990s, we lived in Alexandria, Virginia but we retained roots – and family and friends – in Cleveland so we visited often. When in town, we usually took a detour through the city to catch a glimpse of Progressive Field (then known as Jacob’s Field) rising from its construction sight. From the seats of our car, my husband and I would genuflect towards the cranes, concrete and steel, willing the massive stadium to rise to completion. The act was equal parts reverence and silliness and it helped to keep us connected to the game and the team we loved. 

In the 1980 and 90s, we lived in Alexandria, Virginia which made it challenging to follow our Cleveland sports teams. We subscribed to a monthly newspaper called Indians Ink, which existed to help out-of-town fans follow their team. And follow them, we did. During Indians games, we sat down in front of our computer with its slow dial-up connection, so we could follow the game action via a scroll of data in orange font across a plain black screen. No audio. No pictures. No box score. No graphs or charts. Just words like ball and strike and run that blipped on and off as we desperately tried to recreate the scene of an actual game in our heads. 

For my husband’s 40th birthday in 1997, I bought him a $300 vintage varsity-style Cleveland Indians jacket. With its leather accents, classic wool body, and various logos and MLB insignia, it was a thing of beauty. On the back, a 16-inch tall bright red, white and blue Chief Wahoo grinned his mischievous grin. For decades, that jacket turned heads and earned compliments every time Brent wore it. When the Indians became the Guardians in 2021, Brent still loved that jacket but I had real reservations about that huge Chief Wahoo on the back. His grin now seemed more like a glare. I thought and thought and thought about the dilemma of wanting Brent to keep wearing the jacket but not wanting the Chief to be on the jacket. Eventually I found a small round area rug – probably intended for a child’s bedroom – sporting the Guardians name in a big red circle exactly the right size to cover the back of Brent’s jacket. A local tailor carefully removed the Chief and replaced it with the Guardians name cut from that area rug. So far, it’s been three years since we transformed the jacket. Brent is still wearing it and turning heads.  

Last year for Christmas, our kids got us a large wooden map of the U.S. with a small hole in the location of each MLB stadium around the country. It came with a pouch of tiny wooden baseballs to plug each hole representing the stadiums that we have visited. So far we have plugged 11 holes and we are having fun mapping out which stadiums to visit next. 

One of my favorite things about high-school baseball games what you hear from the dugouts. The loud raucous sounds are part cheer, part chant, part song and part over-the-top nonsense. These rituals sometimes have their origins in old TV shows, or reflect and inside joke or player nickname. Sometimes the players just make odd – and usually hilarious - sounds in unison from mimicking the revving of a motor to animal sounds. As far as I can tell, they’re intended to pickup a team mate, intimidate an opponent or keep the team in good spirits. They apparently have no idea that they are doing the same for the fans. 

When we were planning to move away from Cleveland, one of my criteria for our new home was that I wanted to be able to see the Cleveland Cavaliers, Browns and Guardians and Ohio State Buckeyes play near wherever we would relocate to, even though I knew we’d also still be travelling back to Ohio to see them play at home. Now in Maryland, we see the Guardians play the Nationals in DC, and the Orioles in Baltimore. We see the Cavaliers play the Wizards in DC. We see the Browns play the Commanders in DC or the Ravens in Baltimore. And we see the Ohio State Buckeyes play the University of Maryland Terrapins in College Park (even though that is harder now that the Big Ten conference expanded but that’s another story). During a Browns game at the Ravens stadium in Baltimore, I came equipped with a Browns flag and a large foam dog paw (Browns fans who are often referred to as the dog pound). As it became clear that the Browns would win the game, most Ravens fans left the stadium in disgust before the game was over, leaving the stadium largely full of Browns fans. As we streamed triumphantly out of the stadium, I tied my Browns flag around my neck like a super-hero cape. I waved my foam dog paw overhead as chants of “Here we go Brownies, here we go” were answered by a loud “Woof woof” from the crowd. The sound echoed off the steel underbelly of the stadium concourse. My husband snapped a photo of me from behind, in my cape and dog paw. I used AI to turn that photo into the cover of my book.