Growing up in Steubenville, Ohio, we lived much closer to Pittsburgh than Cleveland, and the majority of my family was from Western PA. This meant I grew up as a Pittsburgh sports fan. Some of my earliest sports memories were watching the Steelers win the Super Bowl and the Penguins hoist the Stanley Cup. The two sports I didn’t follow much was baseball (what was the point when the local team was the Pirates) and the NBA, since Pittsburgh didn’t have one.
This changed in the 3rd grade when I won a school contest via Hoops for Heart to go see a Cavs game. My friends said I was really lucky, since I got to see LeBron James and Shaq play in-person. I wasn’t expecting much, since I had never really been a basketball guy …show more content…
I had been to the city and to the games so many times that I convinced myself that I could no longer try to root for both of them (most of you would consider this a sin.) My friends and family thought I was crazy. Why would I root for Cleveland, a city known for their teams’ letdowns, instead of Pittsburgh, the self-proclaimed “City of Champions?” I even have a hard time answering that question. I feel like I have a much deeper personal connection to Cleveland than I ever did for Pittsburgh. There’s a feeling I get when I think of Cleveland that I never got in the ‘Burgh. I love everything about the city and the people. I loved that I could walk into Tower City and strike up a random conversation about sports with someone I’ve never met, and I loved the “Cleveland Over Everything” motto that I had learned to take