I forget who I was going back and forth with on Oldtopia about Dan Gilbert and his letter, but here's an interview from a few days ago about it.
Q: I can’t sit down with the owner of the Cavaliers and not ask a LeBron question. What kind of relationship do you have with him now, if any, and have you had any communication with him since he left?
A: I just can’t get into that because he’s under contract to another team.
Q: How about The Letter? As a whole, do you regret sending it?
A: I would’ve reworded the language in The Letter, but I don’t regret sending a letter out to our fan base. People forget the letter was not to LeBron, it was to our fan base. If I had to do it again, for sure, I would’ve reworded several parts of it. But I think it definitely needed a strong statement from me at that time. I keep a couple binders on my desk and I have a binder of the responses to The Letter from the people of Cleveland. There’s thousands, maybe 2,000 from every facet of life, from CEOs of big companies to hand-written letters from 94-year-old ladies, from street sweepers to policemen and firemen. The response went way beyond. For some reason, it appealed to this generational Cleveland thing. If you want to talk about books, someone should publish all the responses to The Letter. It was like, ‘We’re from Cleveland and we’ve been rejected.’
Q: Were you surprised by the reaction? Did you know it would cause that type of firestorm?
A: No, not to the extent that it did. I didn’t think it would. Going back now and looking, yeah probably. But at the time? I didn’t think it would become sort of the thing that it did.
Q: Has it had any negative impact on your organization over the last four years?
A: You never know for sure, but I haven’t felt it or been aware of it. People said nobody would come here, that’s not true. Do I think any players are going to not come here because Dan wrote a letter three or four years ago? I don’t think so.
Full interview is here btw:
http://www.ohio.com/sports/cavs/cav...lse&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed