We've bought seven of these shirts. One for each day of the week. You can get yours here at Shelf Life Clothing Company. We won't mind at all if you ever show up wearing this shirt at the same party where we're wearing it.
We are mourning the passing, last week at the age of 95, of billionaire philanthropist John Templeton. Born into a poor Tennessee family, Templeton was an investing pioneer, who became a billionaire by being the first person to invest in globally diversified mutual funds. In 1999, Money magazine called Templeton "arguably the greatest global stock picker of the century."[Templeton] became one of the world's great fund managers by investing at what he called 'points of maximum pessimism.' Yet Templeton . . . was never himself a pessimist. As an investor he always had confidence his picks would improve over the long term. Appropriately, the same 'enthusiasm for progress,' as he put it, also made him one of the world's great philanthropists.One way he did this was by founding, in 1972, the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research of Discoveries About Spiritual Realities. The Wall Street Journal tells us that "Templeton was unhappy that the Nobel Prize excluded faith, so he ensured the honor always had a higher cash prize (now about $1.6 million). . . . [Additionally, Templeton] established the Templeton Foundation, which supports academic research in fields like cognitive science and evolutionary biology, as well as work related to the origin and nature of spirituality."
A devout Presbyterian, Templeton believed 'that God is vastly greater than human beings can comprehend,' and sought to use his wealth to help reconcile science and religion.
We haven’t been motivated to post about the Sabathia trade because we don’t think there’s much to say about it that we and others haven’t already said.
But -- and despite the fact that he was throwing at a tiny tiny strike zone against the Red Sox -- we’re also thinking of Cy-Cy’s 8.80 ERA in last year’s playoffs and wondering if he has the mental toughness to get it done when it counts the most. We’re also thinking that Sabathia’s physique doesn’t exactly call the phrase “world class athlete” to mind, and whatever implications that might have on his mental toughness, it certainly calls his durability into question.
The trade is also nice for Tribe GM Mark Shapiro because it has everyone talking about the time when Shapiro traded Bartolo Colon for three young All-Stars (and one superstud) to be, Grady Sizemore, Cliff Lee, and the since departed Brandon Phillips. Good job there Mark, yes, but not enough to get you out from under the Curse of Wahoo. This one won't be either.
Yesterday, Ben Keeler at the Akron Beacon Journal website politics.ohio.com linked to our essay on the Curse of Chief Wahoo. Last week, Kyle at the Chief Source linked to the piece at his site, and Keeler linked to it at the Keeler Report. Yet despite this exposure, and our own not insignificant efforts to get folks to sign our online petition to end the Curse of Chief Wahoo, only 29 have signed so far. These results and the comments here and at the above mentioned sites show just how strongly folks feel about Wahoo. Commenters on these sites have called us "crazy," "foolish," "lunatics" and "f*cking idiots." Yet nobody has articulated a good reason why Cleveland should cling to the only racial caricature currently accepted in American society -- one that potentially mocks the genocide of our nation's first people and reinforces the image of Natives as anachronistic savages -- as the symbol of our baseball team and a symbol for our City. Further, folks' willingness to dismiss the idea of a curse is at least amusing. Is basic karmic justice that hard to understand? Apparently. Should it be? No. Please please please sign and pass on our petition if you want to help end Cleveland's curse. Otherwise, enjoy whatever exquisite sporting misery will be put on our plate next. The Drive. The Fumble. The Shot. The Move. The Ninth Inning of Game Seven. There's no reason to think that it can't and won't continue to get worse. All of the Natives buried in these parts give us plenty of reason to think that it will. Meanwhile, the Indians continue to suck.
Note: The photo at the top shows Chief Wahoo on a William & Mary football helmet. Weird. There's obviously some more interesting history to chase down here, which we will do our best to do. Stay tuned.
Whatever one thinks of Chief Wahoo, the face of the Cleveland Indians, one must find remarkable that so few people talk about a “Curse of Chief Wahoo” here in Cleveland, the city suffering the longest and arguably most painful championship drought in major American professional sports. Surveys show that an overwhelming majority of Americans prefer to believe in some metaphysical order, so it’s no surprise that as bad results accumulate, speculation about the metaphysical source of those results -- a curse -- is soon to follow. So, if the Boston Red Sox had to endure an 86-year curse for trading Babe Ruth, and if the Chicago Cubs have been cursed for the last 63 years simply because they wouldn’t let a Greek bring his Billy Goat to a ballgame, why don’t more believe that the Indians, if not all Cleveland franchises, have been cursed for what many view as a hateful affront to the entirety of Native American culture and a callous disrespect for the beginnings of American history? The answer to this question lies in understanding that for a great many, if not most, Indians fans, Chief Wahoo represents something entirely different. It’s long past time for us to come to terms with the Chief. This will not happen until the activists and others who are so convinced of Wahoo’s evil can understand the good that he represents to so many others.
To understand why Chief Wahoo has endured for so long in this world that long ago turned Bullets into Wizards, and Redskins and Redmen into Red Hawks and a Red Storm, one must also understand that for so many Tribe fans, Wahoo represents the very best of “Take me out to the Ballgame.” In Northeast Ohio, one can live in beautiful country that is only a short trip away from a relatively big city. It’s no surprise that many choose to do this. And because such a small percentage of Tribe fans live in Cleveland proper, so much of the joy of going to a ballgame is inseparable with the joy of coming to the big city on the big lake. For so many of us, our first trips to the Stadium were our first times in any real city. So many of us can remember the wonder that came with seeing the bridges over the Cuyahoga for the first time, standing in the Flats and looking up at the city on the cliff, or craning our necks to try to see the top of the first skyscrapers that we’d ever seen. Our parents didn’t want to get stuck in post-game traffic in the Stadium lot. So they parked at the Terminal Tower, or in the Muni Lot, or southwest in the Flats, or southeast by the Greyhound station, and we made the trek through the city to the Stadium together with so many others of all shapes and colors. And many of us had never seen so many different people of so many different shapes and colors. And we saw, many of us for the first time, that those people were no different from us – at least because we all wanted the home team to win.
And at the end of this fascinating trek, as we crossed Route 2 and approached the magnificent structure on the lake, we saw it; the 35-foot tall neon-lit Chief Wahoo of glass and steel, perched atop the southeast corner of the Stadium roof, eyes gleaming, smile beaming, bat cocked, leg raised, ready to knock the next pitch all the way back down to Youngstown. And we didn’t think of Native Americans, or any kind of person at all. All of the magic of the trip to the ballpark coalesced in that smiling slugging alien angel of joy as we entered the Stadium gates. And then there was the magic of the ballgame itself, with Wahoo smiling in approval all the while -- from the stadium roof, our heroes’ uniforms, and seemingly everywhere else. Indians executive Bob DiBiasio touched on this when he told the New York Daily News in March 2007 that, "[w]hen some people look at our logo they see baseball . . . They see Bob Feller and Omar Vizquel and Larry Doby.”
An honest examination of Wahoo’s origins would be a good place to start in answering this question. Any such look back gives lie to the company line that the Cleveland baseball franchise was named “Indians” to honor former Cleveland second baseman Louis Sockalexis, the first Native American to play Major League Baseball. According to an October 2007 story in a Maine newspaper, the Kennebec Journal, for which the reporter interviewed the author of a book on Sockalexis, Sockalexis’ arrival in Cleveland in 1897 “created such a sir that local newspapers jokingly dubbed his team, the Cleveland Spiders, the ‘Cleveland Indians.’” This was not done to honor Sockalexis’ Native American heritage, but rather because, "[r]acism was accepted in journalism in that day . . . Sportswriters would write things like, 'He's gonna be scalping people.'" Sockalexis was “burdened by alcohol abuse and racist taunts from opposing players and fans,” and his time with the Indians was short, ending in 1899.
In 1915, two years after Sockalexis’ death, the president of the Cleveland ball club enlisted the help of local sportswriters to rename the team, then called the “Naps” after star Napoleon “Nap” Lajoie, who had recently been traded to Oakland. The name “Indians” was chosen by the sportswriters. According to research conducted by the Committee of 500 Years of Dignity and Resistance, none of the four daily Cleveland newspapers mentioned Sockalexis in reporting the name change. Three of these four reports (available here) refer to stereotypes about Native Americans. A January 17, 1915 report in the Cleveland Leader reported that “[i]n place of the Naps, we’ll have the Indians, on the warpath all the time, and eager for scalps to dangle at their belts.” The Plain Dealer of the same day included a cartoon titled “Ki Yi Waugh Woop! They’re Indians.” This cartoon (pictured above) depicts, among other things, a frowning umpire scolding a Native American: “When you talk to me, talk English, you wukoig.” “Wukoig,” according to the Plain Dealer cartoon, is an “Indian” word.
But despite the dubious origins of the name “Indians,” at least the name could conceivably honor Native Americans, something that Chief Wahoo could never do. Choctaw Nation member Gavin Clarkson, who teaches Native American Studies at the University of Michigan, points out that Wahoo reinforces the image of Indians as "anachronistic savages." Charlene Teters, member of the Spokane Nation and founder of the National Coalition on Racism in Sports and the Media told the Plain Dealer in April 2008, that Wahoo is “the most offensive racial icon in the country” and that his existence “really speaks to how invisible native people are in this country.” With alcoholism, unemployment, and poverty plaguing Native reservations across America, a grinning, hook-nosed, fire engine red-faced caricature that reinforces beliefs that Natives are subhuman is particularly harmful. What’s worse, as Esquire Magazine's Scott Raab has pointed out, is that Wahoo “could be interpreted as mocking the genocide of our nation's First Peoples.” New York Daily News columnist Filip Bondy puts this more pointedly: “One race can't commit genocide against another, then turn that race into a mascot. A soccer team in Hamburg would never call itself the Jews and adorn its uniforms with caricatures.”
With Wahoo seemingly standing alone as the only racist caricature currently accepted in American society, it’s hard to tell Natives like the ones quoted above to “lighten up.” Blackface has long since been understood to be unacceptable in this country, yet redface is alive and well here in Cleveland. How else to explain this disparity if Ms. Teters isn’t at least partially correct about the invisibility of Natives in America? So do we really want to be a part of reinforcing this invisibility? An insensitivity to these matters that was more understandable in the less integrated society of our parents’ day must certainly be much less so now. At some point our intention – the innocence behind our attachment to Wahoo -- ceases to matter.
Which brings us back to the Curse. Native voices have told us loudly and clearly that Wahoo offends; and given his origins and singular status among racial caricatures in America, it’s not at all hard to see how this might be true. If there is at least one Native in this country for whom Wahoo reasonably reinforces a belief that her or his race is invisible or subhuman -- thus making it even a little bit harder to engage in life’s everyday struggle -- isn’t that enough to bring a curse on our sports teams? It sure seems worse than trading Babe Ruth or banning goats from a ballpark. So why would we even want to take this chance? Haven’t we all had enough of the exquisitely painful losing? There are a lot of Natives buried in these parts. If it’s not the Curse of Chief Wahoo, what else could it be? What else would we want it to be? At least a Curse of Chief Wahoo makes sense. At least it’s a curse that we might do something to end.
So let’s not hesitate in giving Wahoo a dignified burial. In doing so, we should recognize that while Wahoo might have been born out of something bad, he turned into something very good for many of us. We should acknowledge the complexity of the lives of both persons and personifications. And we should acknowledge progress. We need not abandon the name “Indians,” and we have no shortage of persons indigenous to Northeast Ohio who would be worthy models for a new logo; one that truly honors Native Americans. We could call him, simply, “The Chief.”
We don’t have much to add to what’s already been said about the series between the Cavs and Celtics. We know that the Celtics are stronger on paper, and that our Cavs have problems; and the fact that the Cavs are whopping 5-1 underdogs despite LeBron’s playoff chops and the Celtics problems with the Hawks shows that the experts feel strongly about a Boston victory here. Of course, we’ve come to believe that anything is possible with LeBron. And this Celtics team is a little too contrived for our taste - it just seems like too much, metaphysically speaking, for the Boston organization to go from the cellar to the penthouse with just a few personnel moves in one off-season. But as our teams progress in the playoffs, the Curse of Wahoo grows stronger and stronger. Too strong for us to play the Cavs here. We’ll watch, and we’ll root for Cavs, but we're through banging our heads into the Curse of Wahoo. Until it lifts, we’re forced to keep our distance in circumstances like this.
The weather has been beautiful this week and we’re still salty. The curse of Chief Wahoo is really wrecking sh*t these days.
Our friends at the Boston Red Sox blog, Me and Pedro Down by the Ballpark, have asked us to share our thoughts on our Cleveland Indians as part of a team-by-team season preview feature called "Know Thy Enemy" that they have been running at their fine site. Given that our last baseball season ended at the hands of the Red Sox, thinking about the Indians in view of the team from Boston seems to be as good a way as any to start thinking about our team on opening day, so check out our preliminary thoughts on the 2008 Tribe here, at Me and Pedro.
The Fumble: 1987-88 AFC Championship Game -- With 1:12 left in the game, Earnest Byner appears to be heading into the endzone for a game-tying touchdown when he is stripped by Denver's Jeremiah Castille. The Broncos recover the fumble and win the game. In fairness to Byner, he played an outstanding game before fumbling, totalling 67 yards rushing, 7 receptions for 120 yards, and 2 touchdowns. The Fumble is often attributed to Browns receiver Webster Slaughter's failure to block Castille.
The Shot: 1989 Eastern Conference Finals, Game 5 -- With 3.2 seconds left in the deciding game of the series the Bulls inbound the ball to Michael Jordan who hits the game winner over Craig Ehlo, setting off the Bulls dynasty and sending home what was perhaps the best Cavaliers squad in team history. The Bulls were winless in six games against the Cavaliers in the 1988-89 regular season.
The Move: Coming off a playoff season when the Browns lost to rival Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC Divisional Playoffs, hopes were high entering the 1995 season, until Browns owner Art Modell announced his plans to move the beloved Browns to Baltimore. Modell moved the Browns, who became the Baltimore Ravens, despite constant sellout crowds and rabid fan support in Cleveland. The Ravens won Superbowl XXXV in 2001.
Game Seven: 1997 World Series, Game Seven -- Leading 2-1 entering the bottom half of the 9th inning, Jose Mesa surrenders the tying run on a Craig Counsell sacrifice fly. Counsell reaches base in the 11th inning when Tony Fernandez misplays his slow rolling ground ball, and eventually scores the winning run for the Florida Marlins, who become World Series Champions in their fifth year of existence.
There is also Red Right 88, losing a 3-1 lead over the Red Sox in the '07 ALCS, the Buckeyes' embarrassing losses to SEC teams in the last two BCS Championship games, and a whole lot more.
It’s certainly worth a good pensive frown in wondering why we continue to allow our hearts to be broken by ballplayers in this way. It's also worth wondering what effect the results on the ballfields have had on the way both locals and outsiders feel about our city, which is repeatedly sh*t on by the national media, celebrities, and random average joes, many of whom have never been here. It seems that many who live in the area fail to appreciate what it has to offer. Its tragic sports history aside, our city has surely been through challenging times in recent decades, and there will be struggles ahead. But Cleveland served our country well in its former role as a global manufacturing hub and way-station between the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. A bit of common courtesy and patience is in order as we make the transition with the rest of America from a manufacturing to a service economy -- a transition that's more difficult for Cleveland than most of America due to the unique role that it played in the old economy. It will be interesting to see how our local sports teams and figures will figure into this transition, and as we make it, we at Cleveland Frowns will continue to love our town, our teams, our river valley, our neighbors, our beer, and all four of our seasons -- and like Brownie up there, who knows that sometimes sh*t happens, we'll do our best to see our way through it.
