ESPN the Magazine dedicated almost its entire latest issue to Cleveland and there’s plenty to love there, most of all that Cleveland is the center of the sports universe these days. Along with a look into how the Cavs landed LeBron, another call for Chief Wahoo to disappear for good, and a detailed account of how often Josh Gordon has to professionally pee comes a New vs. Old Cleveland look from David Fleming with Brian Hoyer and Johnny Manziel at the center of the conceit.
Like we said, there’s plenty to love, and Fleming’s piece is overall kinda a fun, but it’s always interesting to see how outsiders see Cleveland and how journalists who parachute in to cover a story describe the people. This bit about Tremont was particularly funny and offbase to us.
At Johnny’s, saying Cleveland is now a blue-collar town mostly in spirit can get you tossed into the Cuyahoga. But the truth is, the brain-gainers have saved this town.
You won’t find them in Cleveland institutions such as Sokolowski’s restaurant just yet, but they’re swathed in Manziel gear and are just a few blocks over in the hipster enclave of Tremont. (The joke in Cleveland is that it’s now pronounced Tre’mon.) If these fans seem oddly blissful, it’s because of the designer coffee and hops, and the fact that they don’t carry the same psychic baggage as longtime Browns loyalists. Their dads didn’t kick out the TV screen after Red Right 88. To them, shame and suffering as a badge of honor is so 1990s. Their main concern is to be entertained and to be relevant, now.
That’s why, to the brain-gainers, the electric and unpredictable Manziel is already Johnny Cleveland. “We’re flipping the script on Cleveland and Cleveland football by doing something unconventional with a QB like Manziel,” says architect Jennifer Coleman, a Cornell grad, chairwoman of the Cleveland Landmarks Commission and one of Cleveland Magazine’s Most Interesting People in 2013. “It’s not about grinding him down to conform like we have with so many other quarterbacks but embracing him and his unique gifts. There’s a vibrancy and uniqueness and a style to the way he plays that is very relatable to what’s going on in Cleveland. But this is not a town blinded by glitz. He could be Cleveland’s adopted son, but in this town, he’s got to prove it.”
Also, reading magazines is so 1990s, but whatever.
This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2014.
Hhaahhahah!!!
Tre’mon? Never heard that….sounds made up….
I read the rest of the ESPN article…I don’t think this guy knows much about the city, seeing as he notices the bulk of the arts and healthcare institutions are on the East Side, he completely misses that the East arguably has more factories and mills than the West, so the artsy East vs. the brawny West doesn’t quite hold. The hipsters are mostly in the core neighborhoods and the suburbs of Cleveland Heights and Lakewood. Cleveland is very balanced, I’d say…we don’t put all our eggs in one basket here, and we are skeptical of change being the harbinger of good…we do like proof before we get on board, and we mostly only care about getting it done. Thankfully, in some respects at least, we’re starting to care about how it gets done too…which in my opinion seems to be bringing about a lot of good and worthwhile improvements (like Edgewater Park, the Flats East Bank, Public Square). Now if only we could get ODOT to discover that cars are not the only means of transportation in big cities…