Browns cornerback Joe Haden is a little jealous, but he’s also inspired.
Haden wrote a first-person account of what it was like watching the Cavaliers win the NBA title last night for TheMMQB.com, and blatantly adopted their win for the Browns and the city of Cleveland.
“The Cleveland curse is over. We’ve finally got a champion in northeast Ohio,” he wrote. “Over my seven years as a Brown, I got so tired of hearing about the curse, about no team in the city winning a championship since the Browns won in 1964. But you’ve got to go out and end it, not just talk about ending it. And that’s what the Cavaliers did. The emotion in the streets downtown, . . . just unbelievable. People flooding the streets, throwing toilet paper and celebrating, screaming. Insane. I’ve never seen anything like it. Never anything close.
“But that’s probably to be expected when you haven’t won a title for so long.”
Haden watched Game Six in Cleveland from floor seats (noting he and his wife were five seats away from Jay Z and Beyonce), and said he was watching in a room downstairs from a downtown bar — afraid at times people were coming through the ceiling.
But more than anything, Haden said the hope the Cavs created by coming back from a 3-1 deficit would be the thing he remembered and hoped to apply.
“There’s a lesson in that for all of us in Cleveland. I know it’s a lesson that’s going to help me,” he said. “So the Curse is dead. The Cavaliers are champs. Now we’ve got to work like LeBron and the Cavs to get ours. This is motivation for our city, and motivation for our team. I am just so ready to go win a championship right now.”
It would help if the Browns could acquire the best individual player in the game sometime between now and the start of the season. But Haden said the atmosphere being created by new coach Hue Jackson left him convinced success was coming this time.
And now, he has something tangible to point to as evidence it can happen.
