On Wednesday, my hometown of Cleveland hosted a once-in-a-lifetime celebration for our beloved Cavaliers who, led by native son LeBron James, had just stunned the sports world and won the NBA championship. I was there in spirit. But I no longer live in Cleveland and the realities of everyday life precluded witnessing it in person with 1.5 million fellow fans.
By now the narrative is familiar. James, the prodigal son, returned home and willed his underdog team to the title. Clevelanders, who had not celebrated a major professional sports championship in 52 years, rejoiced in the streets, in bars and restaurants, on the internet, and everywhere else, having finally experienced victory after so many years of heartbreaking defeats.
As the clock struck zero on the Cavaliers historic win and my wife and I finished hugging and generally losing our minds, my phone initially received and produced a feverish rush of text messages. In this day and age where phone calls are no longer a baseline form of communication but signal something more personal, I then chose to call my cousin. We grew up together in Cleveland and had shared a lifetime of sports heartbreak. As I was doing this, my parents and my aunt (my cousin's mother) also called me. Eventually, I spoke with all of them and we shared our disbelief and unbridled joy at this miraculous outcome that was a lifetime in the making. I went to bed that night and woke up the next morning happier than I'd ever been because of any sporting event.
The next morning, the news was filled with scenes of celebration in Cleveland. People hugged, they cried, they smiled, they took pictures. As I watched this and as I continued to feel overjoyed by the Cavaliers victory, I realized that Cleveland sports had given me something extraordinarily unique. It had me feel that me and my family were truly American in a way that nothing else ever had.
When my parents came to Cleveland from India in the early 70s, the Indian- and South Asian-American community in the United States was relatively small. In a mid-size city like Cleveland, where nearly everyone was either Caucasian or African-American, it felt tiny. My parents' entire social life was centered around that community and there was never any doubt that all of us were outsiders.
Cleveland is a sports-crazed town and growing up there my Indian-American peers and I, like all the other kids in Cleveland, learned to live and die with our sports teams. For me, talking about sports was about the only time my sense of otherness dissipated. I could talk about the Browns or the Cavaliers and, in that moment, I was just an average American kid, no different than anyone else.
Over time, as we the kids grew to follow Cleveland sports, our parents did as well. When your children and everyone else around you shows so much interest in something, you're bound to eventually get pulled in as well. We ritualistically watched the Cleveland teams on television, we explained the finer details of the rules and strategy to our parents, they took us to games every so often, and they bought us Cleveland sports teams' merchandise for our birthdays. And if the game was important enough, we'd gather together at someone's house and watch as a small community. The fathers would yell at the referees and the mothers would bring out gameday foods to snack on. Sure, the yelling was in Hindi or maybe accented English and often mixed terminology from different sports ("penalty" instead of "foul" or vice-versa). And the gameday foods were pakoras or samosas rather than hamburgers, hot dogs, or french fries. But in those moments, we did what all other Clevelanders did and Cleveland sports became one of our traditions.
As decades have passed, Indian-Americans and our culture have become an unmistakable part of the cultural tapestry in many large cities. Other Americans eat our food regularly, they travel to India for pleasure, they've danced Banghra at weddings. Given the sense of otherness and alienation I frequently felt growing up, I marvel at how well accepted we and our traditions are now in certain places, including where I live. I think of how nice it might have been for my father not to have always had to repeat himself even though he was speaking English because people were not used to hearing an Indian accent. Or for my mother not to have been stared at while wearing a sari for an event because people had not seen that style of clothing before. Or for me not to be asked time and time again why my mother wears that red dot on her head.
Because our culture was so foreign and our community relatively small, my parents and their peers, and to a lesser extent me and my peers, effectively had no choice but to try and become a part of the culture that surrounded us. In Cleveland, that meant religiously following sports teams. Had we lived somewhere else or in a different time, we might not have needed to do that. My parents might not have learned the rules of unfamiliar sports like football and baseball that they never wanted their children to play. They might not have known about Bernie Kosar or Brad Daugherty or now LeBron James in attempting to connect with the non-Indian-Americans around us.
But had they not, we all would have missed a truly special moment on Sunday night after the Cavaliers victory. Clevelanders everywhere, present and past, called their parents or children or uncles or nieces basking in the excitement of our long-awaited championship. My family and I were no different. Had we grown up somewhere else and my parents or I never been forced to immerse ourselves into the dominant sports culture, we never would have had that moment. We never would have shared a singular joy that left us feeling as American as every other person from our city.