The Whore of Akron: One Man's Search for the Soul of LeBron James

After 52 long years, the city of Cleveland finally has a new championship team, thanks to LeBron James and his Cavaliers. Scott Raab—Cleveland super-fan—has suffered for every one of those five decades of drought. In the tradition of Frederick Exley’s cult-classic sports book A Fan’s Notes, The Whore of Akron is Raab’s hilarious and unhinged plea for deliverance from all those years of pain. Traveling from Cleveland to Miami and back again, Raab heads out on an obsessive quest to uncover the soul of one of today’s greatest basketball players: LeBron James, the man who finally brought Cleveland out of sporting exile.

"If there was an opportunity for me to return to Cleveland and those fans welcomed me back, that'd be a great story."—Lebron James

Scott Raab is a last vestige of Gonzo Journalism in an era when sanitary decorum reigns. Crude but warmhearted, poetic but raving, Raab has chronicled—at GQ and Esquire—everything from nights out with the likes of Tupac and Mickey Rourke to a moral investigation into Holocaust death-camp guard Ivan the Terrible to the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, but the book you hold in your hands is neither a story nor a job: The Whore of Akron is the product of lifelong suffering, and a mission bound with the meaning of existence.

Raab sat in the lower bowl of Cleveland Stadium on December 27, 1964, when the Browns defeated the Colts for the NFL World Championship—the last sports title the declining city has won. He still carries his ticket stub wherever he goes, safely tucked within a Ziploc bag. The glory of that triumph is an easy thing to forget—each generation born in Cleveland is another generation removed from that victory; an entire fan base "whose daily bread has forever tasted of ash."

LeBron James was supposed to change all that. A native son of Akron, he was already world famous by the age of seventeen, had already graced the cover of Sports Illustrated, was already worth $90 million to Nike. He seemed like a miracle heaven-sent by God to transform Cleveland's losing ways. That the Cavaliers drafted him, the hometown prodigy, with the first pick of the 2003 draft, seemed nothing short of destiny. But after seven years—and still no parade down Euclid Avenue—he left. And he left in a way that seemed designed to twist the knife: announcing his move to South Beach on a nationally televised ESPN production with a sly title ("The Decision") that echoed fifty years of Cleveland sports futility.

Out of James's treachery grew a monster. Raab, a fifty-nine-year-old, 350-pound, Jewish Santa Claus with a Chief Wahoo tattoo, would bear witness to LeBron's every move, and in doing so would act as the eyes and ears of Cleveland itself. (He did not keep this intentions a secret and was promptly banned by the Miami Heat.)

The Whore of Akron is an indictment of a traitorous athlete and the story of Raab's hilarious, profane (and profound) quest to reveal the "wee jewel-box" of LeBron James's very soul.

“Indelicate and unhinged...The Whore of Akron soars because Raab is unflinchingly honest, naked with emotions and embarrassments most of us keep penned inside.....at its heart, this is a book about loyalty, and why attachments count. Basketball could use a little more of Raab’s disorderly passion.” - Jason Gay, Wall Street Journal

“A powerful storyteller in full command of his game...wonderfully immoderate.” - New York Times

“There is more passion, anger and sublime writing in Scott Raab’s The Whore of Akron than any 50 other books you’ll read this (or any other year) combined.” - New York Post

“[A] pleasure to read. Raab is an inspired, energetic writer. . . . . The Whore of Akron is a poignant exploration of sports fandom. It’s insane. . . . . And it’s also redeeming. . . . . After reading The Whore of Akron, you’ll be hard pressed to think sports don’t matter.” - Time

“The Whore of Akron reads like Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes on brown acid. Raab is a bastard, but he’s a funny bastard.” - The Onion

“With all due respect to Frederick Exley, Scott Raab has just written the smartest, funniest, most passionate, loving, hateful, bathetic, honest, and deeply personal sports jeremiad slash memoir of our time. Yeah, the guy doesn’t like LeBron James. Not the point. The Whore of Akron is about a basketball player the way Moby Dick is about a whale.” - Stefan Fatsis, author of Wordfreak and A Few Seconds of Panic

“With all due respect to Frederick Exley, Scott Raab has just written the smartest, funniest, most passionate, loving, hateful, bathetic, honest, and deeply personal sports jeremiad slash memoir of our time…The Whore of Akron is about a basketball player the way Moby-Dick is about a whale.” - Stefan Fatsis, author of Wordfreak and A Few Seconds of Panic

“Genius. . . . . Raab is Hunter S. Thompson, Wolfe, and Breslin; every bit as messed up, alienated, angry, bitchy, cruel, and angelic. . . . . The Whore of Akron is a masterpiece.” - Dan Klores, Huffington Post

“The book is both poem and polemic, a lyrical inventory of rage and appetite and loss.” - Jeff MacGregor, ESPN.com

“A hilarious and profane love letter to fandom, faith, loyalty, and sports in America.” - Parade

“A modern-day Portnoy’s Complaint. Standing in for the piece of liver is LeBron James.” - Slate

“As far as I know, a LeBron James is a hat worn by men in the 1920s.” - Philip Roth

“[A] splenetic wonder…For all of its rousing, air-clearing invective, The Whore of Akron is strangely celebratory, making a particuclarly Jewish-American case for family and place, and for waiting and hoping past the point of reason.” - Will Blythe, New York Magazine

“[A] splenetic wonder.For all of its rousing, air-clearing invective, The Whore of Akron is strangely celebratory, making a particularly Jewish-American case for family and place, and for waiting and hoping past the point of reason. In Scott Raab’s cosmos, where championship seasons seem about as likely as the arrival of the messiah, next year in Jerusalem might as well be next year in Cleveland. He suggests that there is nevertheless redemption to be had in grinding away at life, at parenthood, at work, and in loving something more than yourself until that longed-for day when victory arrives. Or doesn’t. Don’t hold a gaudy festival of self and flee to Miami, for instance. Stay in Cleveland and suffer.” - Will Blythe, New York Magazine

“[The Whore of Akron] is very funny. It is also wise...If you’ve a taste for the sort of overstatement Raab shares with the late, great Hunter S. Thompson, this is perhaps the sports book for you. Keep it on a shelf the kids can’t reach.” - NPR

“A searing manifesto that is impressively pointed and, in the end, even feels fair—not balanced, of course, but justified. . . . . Whether you’re convinced [of LeBron’s treachery] depends not on whether you care about Cleveland sports, but if you care about sports at all. . . . . Hilarious invective and smart commentary.” - Fortune

“[The Whore of Akron] is very funny. It is also wise. . . . . If you’ve a taste for the sort of overstatement Raab shares with the late, great Hunter S. Thompson, this is perhaps the sports book for you. Keep it on a shelf the kids can’t reach.” - Associated Press

“Visceral and raucously funny. . . . . Perhaps the best book ever written about the ragged world of sports obsession. . . . . Raab recounts, with electrifying insight, past and present instances of remorse, reconciliation, relapse, revulsion and, inevitably, a dare-not-to-mention-too-loud longing for simply the possibility of redemption.” - The Cleveland Leader

“The Whore of Akron isn’t really about basketball. It’s about addiction and sobriety, marriage and divorce, childhood and parenthood, loyalty and autonomy.” - The Awl.com

“Hilarious.” - Christian Science Monitor

“The Whore of Akron is hilarious, heartfelt and wincingly honest. This is the best kind of book, one that surprises.” - Buzz Bissinger

“A (very heated) Fan’s Notes. . . . . Rollicking and profane. . . . . Raab’s sustained attack on James is diverting, [but] it is the author’s self-portrait of a man and a fan of serious extremes, one who loves his wife and son as fiercely as he hates most of the rest of the world, that engrosses.” - Sports Illustrated

“Spellbinding. . . . . Compelling. . . . . Gleefully vulgar. . . . . Raab does not merely insert himself [into the narrative], he envelops it. The Whore of Akron bears little resemblance to any sports book I’ve ever read. It is far more similar to Charles Bukowski’s Hollywood than anything David Halberstam or John Feinstein has ever written.” - Cavs: The Blog

“Mr. Raab sure-footedly turns his monolithic hatred for Mr. James and devotion to Cleveland into a vehicle for exploring his struggles with drugs and alcohol, the mental illness and abandonment that have haunted his family, questions of faith and Jewish identity and the joy of fatherhood.” - Wall Street Journal

“In pursuing James pre- and post-‘Decision’ . . . . the author never does complete the subtitle’s mission to find James’ soul. Instead, Raab . . . . discovers his own. And, in some twisted sense, maybe ours, too.” - Cleveland Plain Dealer