Watching ‘The Last Dance’ • Recalling ‘The Shot’ • Appreciating a Local Giant

FRIDAY SPORTS | Brad Sellers on MJ, ‘The Last Dance’ and ‘The Shot’ • Ted Ginn Sr., others recall Leonard “Big Jack” Jackson

By R. T. Andrews

We haven’t watched the entire ten episodes of ‘The Last Dance’ that have saved ESPN’s bacon, been a godsend for its advertisers, and delivered an unexpected bonanza to sports junkies thirsting for something fresher and more domestic than last century’s NBA all-star games or South Korean baseball.

In sports, as in life and broadcasting, chance favors the prepared. So some folk at the network are likely getting bonuses for having the ten episodes ready to run when the NBA season and playoffs were halted, and major league baseball delayed.

Ex-Plain Dealer sportswriter Branson Wright, already into the next phase of his career as a filmmaker, reached into his network of local sports figures this month to produce some interesting programming on the Last Dance of the Bulls and the Final Dance of a titanic community figure, Leonard Jackson, who died April 30.

Almost ten minutes focused on an unforgettable six seconds

Warrensville Heights mayor Brad Sellers was a standout area high school basketball player who went on to star at Ohio State University and become a professional basketball player. He joined Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls in 1982 as their first round draft choice, the ninth overall pick that year. Seven feet tall but weighing only 210 pounds, Sellers is listed by basketball-reference.com as both a power forward and a small forward.

Sellers played three years with Jordan — fellow Clevelander Charles Oakley was a teammate for the first two — before moving on to play for other teams in a six-year NBA career that eventually took him overseas to play for teams in France, Greece, Israel, and Spain. He knew Jordan as both teammate and opponent.

While his comments about Jordan are interesting, they are mostly politic, which is to say non-controversial and not especially insightful. But it’s the last third of nearly 30 minute chat that sparkles. And that almost ten minutes is focused on an unforgettable six or so seconds.

As any Clevelander of a certain age knows, those twelve seconds were the last moments of the winner-take-all Game 5 of the playoff series between the Cavaliers and the Bulls. The game was May 7, 1989 at the old Richfield Coliseum and Sellers talks about it as if it were last week.

For the disappointed 21,000-plus fans in attendance that day — I was one of them — we had no idea history was being made. Sellers, who inbounded the ball to Jordan for the most important assist of his life, lets us inside his head, the huddle and the play in a remarkably captivating manner.

It was the moment, he says, “where the folklore became real”. You can watch the video interview here.

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Wright also does his bit to memorialize history by gathering three Cleveland sports figures to talk about former Cleveland Schools athletic commissioner Leonard Jackson. Coach Ted Ginn Sr.  and former scholastic stars Pierre Woods [Glenville HS, University of Michigan, New England Patriots] and Barb Turner [East Tech HS, 2002 state champs; UConn, 2003, 2004 national champs, and member, Ohio Basketball Hall of Fame]. The video, with all parties sheltered in place, reminds us of how important caring adults are to the development of young people.

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BREAKING NEWS: Business leaders seeking end to impasse on Q deal

Talks may be on tap as civic leaders regroup in wake of referendum petition filing

CLEVELAND — The Real Deal has learned that civic and business leaders have made overtures to the Greater Cleveland Congregations that may result in negotiations that could allow the expansion of Quicken Loans Arena to go forward.

At this point no one will speak authoritatively for fear of jeopardizing the possibility that a negotiated settlement might be found to end the current impasse. No dates have been set, no negotiators identified, no pre-conditions established. But movement is afoot.

Although both the County and the City of Cleveland have approved the deal, serious questions remain whether the project can go forward. GCC formed a coalition with political and labor organizations that also oppose the deal on multiple grounds. The coalition gathered more than 20,600 petition signatures of Cleveland voters calling for a referendum on the deal.

The city technically refused to accept the petitions when they were presented on Monday, but when GCC leaders adopted a resolute stance that was evocative of 1960s southern civil rights demonstrations, city officials agreed to receive the petitions for “safekeeping”.

Whether or not the petitions are ever officially accepted and forwarded to the Board of Elections for certification, and the issues put before the voters, the coalition that gathered them has made its strength known.

The coalition had 30 days to submit about 6,000 valid signatures from registered Cleveland voters to force a referendum on whether the Quicken Loans deal passed last month by Cleveland City Council should remain in force. By submitting more than three times the number required by the city’s Charter, the coalition demonstrated the immense unhappiness on the part of ordinary Clevelanders over financing the proposed expansion of the Q and cast doubt on the project’s survival.

Deal proponents want the County to issue bonds on June 1 to finance the project and to commence work as soon as the NBA playoffs end for the Cavaliers, which would be June 18 at the latest.

It is unknown exactly who has reached out to GCC leaders or who might have seats at the table. That may become clear over the next several days as talks likely have to begin soon if the Cavaliers’ June 19 project start date is to remain intact.

GCC has maintained all along that it is not opposed to the Q’s expansion but that any deal involving public financing should be fairly negotiated and include well-defined community benefits. These benefits would include the establishment of a Community Equity Fund to underwrite effective jobs programs, create east and west side mental health centers, and invest in neighborhood development. The size of the fund, and how it would be administered are yet to be determined. GCC leaders have disavowed any interest in controlling the fund.

Until now, there has been no willingness on the part of the Cavaliers, city or county public officials, or the business and philanthropic community to give even token credence to the GCC position.

Off the record conversations with civic leaders suggested that some civic and business leaders saw negotiations as the prudent path to finding some sort of middle ground that would allow the deal to go forward and avoid the contentiousness of a referendum campaign. The momentum for such talk likely accelerated after Monday’s confrontation, including the flimsiness of the city’s response.

The talks will likely have an undercurrent of urgency, given the desired construction timetable, and the likelihood that legal questions regarding the city’s obligation to process the petitions will remain unresolved and potentially court-bound.

But for Cleveland residents who feel their neighborhoods have been neglected in favor of downtown and select other interests, news that a community equity fund may lead to some much neighborhood transformation has to be cause for at least guarded optimism.

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CPT: Cuyahoga Politics Today: Jeff Johnson and Dan Gilbert

Jeff Johnson and Dan Gilbert: Peas in the same pod?

CLEVELAND — Roldo Bartimole, who even in his senior senior status remains by virtue of his long institutional memory and his ability to follow the money the scrivener scourge of the local ruling class, recently revisited some of Cleveland's sordid political history. It was an effort to provide context to Brent Larkin's weird column last week. Larkin expressed a false empathy for the struggles of Councilman Jeff Johnson to distance himself from his extortion conviction nearly 20 years ago. But halfway through the piece he abruptly switched to his true topic, a direct assault upon the SEIU and the Greater Cleveland Congregations.

SEIU and GCC just happen to be the leading voices in the ongoing struggle to achieve justice and equity for this city's poor and largely minority residents.

Nobody stands in opposition to the desires of our local oligarchy to recreate our shrunken city into a hip burg with cool eateries, a bustling downtown, a high tech vibe, an immigrant magnet, and world-class entertainment venues.

But some of us do look around and see people working two and three jobs trying to make ends meet, amidst Third World infant mortality, thousands of vacant and abandoned structures, a malnourished public transportation system, public schools under relentless attack from private profiteers, real job opportunities separated by insurmountable barriers to entry, and a police force infected with a rogue and reckless deadly virus that has been out of control for generations.

All that makes some of us wonder whether Clevelanders should pay to transform an arena far newer than just about all of our shelters.

We need to have real change in our community, not just the ‘transformation’ of a serviceable public building. When will we stop rearranging and painting the deck chairs and have a real conversation?

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A sit-down I had yesterday with an aspiring young office seeker has surprisingly led me to have some sympathy for Cavs' owner Dan Gilbert. With the light afforded by Roldo's column, I can now appreciate how Mr. Gilbert could have come to town and, after observing how the elites here operate, said to himself, “I can excel at this game.”

He was right! We soon gave him two casinos for life, in our hunger and low self-esteem excusing his promise to build a fabulous new casino on our crooked river.  We bestowed adulation upon him when he first dissed our home boy LeBron for taking his talents elsewhere and then later embraced the return of that enhanced talent in a way that further filled the Quicken coffers.

Given that sort of uncritical and generous treatment, along with the renewal of our regressive sin tax for his sports fraternity, why wouldn't he think that we would happily fork over another $282 million or so just to keep him around another seven years?

GCC and its burgeoning alliance are saying "Let's slow down. Let's be equitable. Let's talk about this."

Whoever advised Gilbert not to have that conversation should be put on irrevocable waivers.

Dan Gilbert has the clout to convene, directly or otherwise, the dialogue of community powers responsible for creating the ecology he so comfortably slid into. He cannot be pleased that GCC and others are raising a ruckus, but he would be wrong to blame them for giving voice to the voiceless. His upset should be directed to his peer group and their political intermediaries, who clearly were caught unawares that even gravy trains have cabooses.

 

Unless there is a community dialogue that can forge a new and true community partnership, proponents of the ‘Q Transformation’ will likely hear their plan end with a Referendum Serenade that is familiar to basketball fans everywhere: "Na Na Na Na, Na Na Na Na, Hey, Hey, Hey! Goo-ood Bye!”

Not the best theme song for the Rock and Roll Capital of the World!

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P. S. Tonight in Boston, game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals! GO CAVS!!!

Fallout from Q deal will be enduring

​A different sort of transformation may be end result

Win or lose, the principals in the controversy over whether the public should fork over $288 million dollars to enhance the profitability of Quicken Loans Arena for its principal tenant and operator have collectively ushered in a new day.

Not since the Kucinich years has the business community encountered a challenge as serious as the one currently being mounted by citizens who object to the corporate subsidies being demanded by wealthy private interests.

Back in the mid-seventies, the long-standing dominance of corporate interests was temporarily stymied by the determined will of the city’s ‘Boy Mayor” — the diminutive Kucinich was elected to his single two-year term at age 31. His refusal to sell the municipally owned electric plant to its private rival led to a stand off that resulted in local banks pushing the city into default by refusing the routine roll over of some city bonds.

While Kucinich was ultimately vindicated by the revelation that the Illuminating Company had conspired to run Muny Light into the ground, the corporate community nonetheless molded that shameful behavior into a business-friendly narrative of the city’s turnaround, namely, the ushering in of a public-private partnership that began with the Voinovich years.

For the last 40 years, this public-private pas de deux has been relentlessly cited as justification for the siphoning of hundreds of millions of dollars in support of projects the business community favored but was unwilling to pay for. And while we now can boast of an attractive downtown, with a thriving food scene, a hip entertainment district, and a growing residential market at our core, it has come at a heavy cost to many local neighborhoods that once symbolized the heart of what made our city unique. There has been no trickle out and no trickle down.

To be sure, what we witness today in Cleveland’s devastated neighborhoods cannot be laid entirely at the feet of our leading civic citizens. Larger forces — including globalization, technology, the war on drugs, deindustrialization, the 2008 financial meltdown, population flight, and state disinvestment — have all contributed to the growing inequities that can be seen in hollowed out neighborhoods and even some parts of our first ring suburbs.

But civic and corporate leaders can be cited for their repeated failure to come up with innovative responses to mitigate the effects of these larger forces. Brick and mortar as first and primary response is not the solution to Cleveland’s problems.

Cleveland’s downtrodden and neglected residents and neighborhoods have found champions in the form of some activist civic organizations, principally Greater Cleveland Congregations and the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus.

GCC in particular is proving itself to be a worthy ally of Cleveland’s masses. It is well organized, sufficiently resourced, clear-eyed and dogged. Predictably, its leaders have been mischaracterized and demonized, no doubt a backhanded tribute to the fact that their spiritual underpinnings have not made them weak-kneed sisters. And while they may have made some tactical missteps in seeking to initiate a dialogue with the city’s movers and shakers, their adversaries have made the more fundamental error of refusing to engage. The Cavaliers and their public partners — the city and the county — have consistently sought to stonewall GCC and to work around them by allying with more pliable partners that have demonstrated no interest in changing the status quo.

The refusal of the Cavaliers, the weakness of our elected officials, and the failure of the business community to exercise any leadership, has led the city to a dangerous precipice. The likelihood is great that GCC, CCPC and their union allies will in the next week or so turn in far more than the minimum 6,000 valid signatures necessary to force a referendum by Cleveland voters on whether the city should commit a minimum of $88 million for an expanded sports arena. Few doubt that if the issue goes on the ballot, the current deal will die. And that referendum campaign would unfold without the mayor or a single one of the 12 council members who voted for the deal enthusiastically campaigning for it. They will mostly be trying to change the subject in hopes of getting re-elected.

It would not serve the community if public officials or the Cavs resort to the courts and find a way to nullify the referendum effort. The Jackson administration used a similar extra-ballot tactic last year to kill the $15 minimum wage campaign, running to Columbus to get an anti-urban legislature to pass a bill killing the initiative. The mayor was right to oppose that legislation, but his tactic eroded a good portion of his political capital. His inability to forge an emotional connection with voters and his pipefitter’s approach to problem solving are not going to sustain another end around.

Cleveland’s philanthropic and business leaders with a long-term stake in this community — we don’t put Dan Gilbert in that category — are going to have to step up and address the community’s critical neighborhood needs if the Q deal is to go forward in any fashion. They may not want to deal with GCC, but they have lost their leverage to mandate who gets to sit at the table.

In normal times, civic and business leaders could have sat on the sidelines as the World Champion Cavaliers seduced out of touch legislators and their chief executives into accepting this lopsided deal, which, truth to tell, is actually a convenient hostage to force the kind of discussion about equity this community has long avoided.

The real question is what kind of community do we want to be? What do we value? If we can’t get the right answer to that question, then another world title or two won’t really matter much. If we don't have it now, then when will we have it?

We have some reason to believe that a few civic and business leaders are looking for ways to create a meaningful dialogue that could render the referendum moot. But time is short.

Perhaps city leaders could emulate local hero and leader extraordinaire LeBron James: subordinate egos, put team first, keep eyes on prize, and act with urgency. We think that approach could get a reasonable deal struck in the time it will take to vanquish either the Celtics or the Wizards. Then we could truly be All In.

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