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Terry's Talkin' with Terry Pluto

Welcome to this week's Terry Pluto Newsletter!

WHY I LOVE IT WHEN THE LOCAL TEAMS WIN

More than once, I’ve had an athlete tell me, “You guys love it when we lose.”

“Why is that?” I’d ask.

“Because it sells papers,” he’d say. “It creates controversy.” 

Or if you want to update it, “Because it creates more hits on the internet.”

“I’ll tell you what sells,” I’d say. “Winning!”

When the Cavs won the 2016 NBA title, we sold 530,000 copies of the Plain Dealer with those stories. For a week, cars were lined up at the Plain Dealer plant on Tiedeman Road waiting for a chance to buy papers with the title game and other papers from the week after.

It was a reminder that you can’t frame a website and put it up on your wall like many did with that front page of the Cavs championship.

Winning is more than good for business, it’s fun. It’s a tremendous diversion from real life for many of us.

I remember a discussion with cleveland.com editor Chris Quinn during the 2020 pandemic. The Browns were nearing a playoff berth. Quinn mentioned how he hoped the Browns would make the playoffs, even if most fans couldn’t watch it in person.

“After all we’ve been through this year, we can use this,” Quinn said.

Exactly. 

WHAT DOES MATTER? 

Remember those dismal days of dire medical reports, civil unrest and a sense of gloom and doom hanging over almost everything? Then remember how it was such a joy to watch the Browns knock off the Steelers in the final game of the 2020 season to make the playoffs – then beat Pittsburgh again a week later in the post-season? 

I grow very weary of some fans telling me, “The only thing that counts is winning a championship. Otherwise, it’s a failure.”

Really? 

That’s a little like saying, “If I don’t get the best meal served in the country tonight, then it wasn’t worth going out to eat.”

The 2020 Browns season was a lot of fun. So was the 2022 Guardians playoff season. And the 2023 Browns season. And yes, that’s also been true of this Cavs season. 

I came to this viewpoint from my father. Tom Pluto would work 10 to 12 hours at the old Fisher Fazio Foods warehouse. I worked there for four summers, so I had an idea of what he endured. 

That was work. That was a J-O-B! What I do takes work, but I never considered it a grueling existence done purely for money.

My father would come home exhausted. He’d sit on the couch, turn on the radio and listen to a Tribe or Cavs game. This was before most games were on TV.  A televised game on our old black & white TV was almost a reason for celebration.

My father also would read the sports pages of the P.D. and old Cleveland Press. We had both papers home delivered. As a kid, he was a P.D. paper boy. Later in high school, he drove a P.D. truck, dropping off papers on various street corners.

That’s why it means so much to me to write for the P.D. and Cleveland.com. I know that a lot of you are like my dad: The sports teams (even when they frustrate us) are a relief from the pressures of our daily life.

Plain Dealer file photo

Municipal Stadium in 1963.

SOME WORDS FROM FANS  

“My brother, Gary went to Boston to learn how to broadcast games at the age of 21. Unfortunately his eyesight was fading and he had to accept his fate and drop out. But he encouraged me over and over to learn the skill sets of players and various strategies of the game. He passed in 2017 and that is the year I became a REAL sports fan.”

– Carolyn Tewell

“I remember my Dad occasionally taking my brothers and me to Indians games at Municipal Stadium in the 1960s. We would sit in the upper deck behind home plate. I can still vividly remember that stroll up the narrow walkway to the seating area. When we reached the end of the walkway, it was then that we could see the entire field. The grass was so green and bright and the outfield was huge! One game Max Alvis hit an upper-deck home run to left. Great memories.”

- Kerry Gerdes

Advertisement

AP

Donovan Mitchell led the Cavs on Sunday and pushed them into the Eastern Conference semifinals.

HAPPY FOR THE CAVS

One of the few times, I had the right prediction: Cavs in seven games over Orlando. I knew the series would be hard, almost regardless of the opponent. Here is the prediction story.

J.B Bickerstaff was trying to win his first playoff series as a head coach. Donovan Mitchell had been knocked out of the first round in his last three seasons: Twice in Utah, once in Cleveland. Overall, the Cavs felt the weight of their 2023 playoff failure.

Yes, we are talking about the need to exorcise some basketball demons, and it was real. That’s what the Cavs did, coming back from 18 points down in the second quarter to make the Magic disappear late in the fourth quarter.

For the fans at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse to experience the dread of the second quarter when it seemed the Cavs were going to be embarrassed on their home court in a Game 7 … to the powerful finish … that is a great memory, something to savor.

That’s exactly what I wrote here,

Joshua Gunter, cleveland.com

Cavs coach J.B. Bickerstaff during Sunday's Game 7 win.

J.B. BICKERSTAFF AND RUMORS

The Coach has been on the dismiss list of many of my readers, dating back to the Cavs flop in the 2023 playoffs against New York. It was an awful series, the Cavs losing in five games and seemingly overwhelmed too often.

Before the 2024 Cavs playoffs opened, I kept hearing from fans wanting to know if Bickerstaff would be fired if they lost in the first round of the playoffs.

After the Cavs were wiped out in two games in Orlando to tie the best of 7 series at 2-2, I received a lot of emails from fans who wanted Bickerstaff gone. They sent names of coaches the Cavs should hire.

The fans were angry at the coach. I get the frustration, the Cavs lost those two games in Orlando by a combined 61 points. 

But can we wait until the end of the Cavs season? I wrote that to some fans. After a while, I wrote, “Do you really want to change coaches between Game 4 & 5?” 

After the Cavs lost in Game 6, I was very critical of Bickerstaff for the stagnant offense. Why watch Donovan Mitchell take on the entire Orlando team? How about running a play? 

Here’s what I wrote.

A BIG POINT

Just because I criticize a coach, it doesn’t mean I want him fired. The same is true when it comes to Kevin Stefanski. In the last four years, there have been times when his play-calling drove me nuts … and I wrote that. But I didn’t want him replaced. 

Being a coach means making a lot of pressure-packed decisions quickly. Lots of room for errors, or simply for things not to work out. Patience often is in order. 

But we live in a media world where calling for people to be canned is standard business practice. I find that deplorable. 

Had the Cavs lost to Orlando … and been blown out at home … I’d have given serious consideration to replacing Bickerstaff.

But they won, and they clearly rallied around Mitchell and Bickerstaff in the second half of Game 7. I still haven’t full decided about Bickerstaff for next season. I want to see how all this ends. Why rush to judgment? 


https://www.cleveland.com/cavs/2024/05/upon-further-review-how-does-cavs-coach-jb-bickerstaff-look-today-terry-pluto.html

Jimmy Dudley in 1979 (Cleveland Press photo)

BASEBALL RADIO VOICES

“Walking home from school on a mid-April day in 1952, I suddenly began feeling very weak.  Mom took my temperature, and sent me to bed.  I spent the next three weeks in bed with measles, followed by complications (double pneumonia).  In those days, measles meant lying in a darkened room, no TV, no reading or puzzles.  But fortunately there was the radio, and the Tribe games, broadcast by Jimmy Dudley and Jack Graney.  I'm told that penicillin shots in my rear every day pulled me through, but listening to their superb play-by-play each night sure helped.”

– Elliot Tramer

HEY TERRY TIME

I can use some Hey Terry Browns questions. I need your full name.

Send them here: TerryPlutoInsiders@cleveland.com 


A LITTLE FAITH

We call fall down in life. What do we do next? Here's My Faith & You column.

I recently  wrote stories about people having near death experiences. That brought in a strong response from readers. You can check them out here:

https://www.cleveland.com/news/2024/04/readers-share-visions-of-life-death-and-maybe-even-heaven-terry-plutos-faith-you.html

https://www.cleveland.com/news/2024/04/visions-of-heaven-stories-of-life-after-death-is-it-real-terry-plutos-faith-you.html

This older faith column will help some people with troubled children:

The last two weeks I wrote stories about people having near-death experiences. That brought in a strong response from readers. You can check them out here:

https://www.cleveland.com/news/2024/04/readers-share-visions-of-life-death-and-maybe-even-heaven-terry-plutos-faith-you.html

https://www.cleveland.com/news/2024/04/visions-of-heaven-stories-of-life-after-death-is-it-real-terry-plutos-faith-you.html

This older faith column will help some people with troubled children:

https://www.cleveland.com/news/2024/04/going-around-around-same-frustrating-mountain-with-your-adult-child-terry-pluto.html

MY BOOKS

In addition to my columns for Cleveland.com, I also write books, including 28 books on sports so far. As much as there is to say about Cleveland football, baseball and basketball on a daily basis, there’s usually more to a story than can fit in a column. 


I’ve written books about baseball (“The Curse of Rocky Colavito,” “Our Tribe”), football (“Browns Town 1964,” “Things I’ve Learned from Watching the Browns,”), and basketball (“The Comeback” – about the Cavs 2016 NBA championship, “Joe Tait”).


Inspiration for a book sometimes comes from readers’ responses to a column. A few years ago I wrote about the death of former Cavaliers star John “Hot Rod” Williams. I covered him as a Cavs beat writer during his career. After the column was published, I heard from a lot of readers who also remembered him fondly. That led me to write “Vintage Cavs,” a book of stories about players like Hot Rod who left a lasting impression on Cleveland fans.

You can check out my books at www.terrypluto.com

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