blogger interrupted

Like Cleveland itself, Cleveland State is a missed opportunity for greatness.  Its predecessor, Fenn College, once could have been the beneficiary of John D. Rockefeller’s largesse, which instead went to other places and other colleges which now look down their noses at places like CSU.  Why Rockefeller didn’t endow the college in his hometown is a mystery, but he didn’t.  And the destiny was written.

Thus, CSU is the last chance saloon.  Like Clevelanders themselves, its student body isn’t there because they want to be there.   Students default to CSU because they have no money (as I did), or they have no direction (as I didn’t), or they are just doing what is necessary to get a degree, any degree. Like Cleveland itself, Cleveland State is filled with kids who are clinging onto a life raft.  Students are at Cleveland State because they have to be.  If you can’t get a degree at CSU, you might as well just forget about things like career, upward mobility, a future. 

No one really advertises that they graduated from Cleveland State.   It is the precise opposite of the stereotypical image of an American “college experiece”.  You attend, you get the paper, you get the hell out of there, and you hope you get into a better grad school so you (a) don’t have to tell people you went there, and (b) re-attempt the “college experience”.

If any reporters went to “campus” to “cover” the “celebrations” after the Vikings beat Wake Forest in the first round of the NCAA tournament, they found an empty labyrinth of concrete canyons defined largely by well lit, and empty, parking lots.  Cleveland State isn’t a commuter school, it’s a commuter school on steroids.  There are a few scattered frat houses which seem out of place in the urban decay.  You drive through Cleveland State wondering if you’ve missed it, bordered as it is by one highway onramp after another.  At night, it is ghostly.

The cheerleaders at courtside Friday night all drive in from Parma or Willoughby Hills or North Olmsted, then drive home after the game.  The one bar near campus, Becky’s, is a dive to end all dives, more likely to host a lone drunk from the old Slovenian hood nearby, lamenting the decline of the “old days”, than a seething crowd of students watching their team stun the basketball world.  

CSU is 20,000 dreams deferred.  But every so often, those dreams become reality, and not even the rot of the city around them that has landed them into those green uniforms can stop it.  Cleveland State students aren’t worthy of their lot, they know it, and when they get a chance to prove it, they usually do.

No basketball player wants to play at Cleveland State.  No kid on a playground in Hough or East Cleveland thinks he’ll end up a Viking.  Just as no student at CSU thinks they belong there.  Similarly, those kids on the Wake Forest basketball team, an ACC powerhouse, all believe they belong at Duke, or North Carolina.  They went to Wake because they just weren’t good enough for the NCAA top tier on Tobacco Road.  

Well, a bunch of scrubs from a city dying slowly just showed Wake Forest basketball players why Coach K didn’t offer their asses a scholarship.  Suck on that.  And those Vikings will return to a city and a campus that makes Wake Forest look like paradise.  

After this tournament, Cleveland State will return to the obscurity it will never escape.  The students know they can escape the obscurity, though.  It is, after all, why they are there.  And sometimes they escape it, in spectacular fashion.