By Mark Winegardner, published 8/9/12 in the NY Times
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On a bright, yet metaphorically dark day in 1995 — temperature in the high 30s, balmy for Cleveland in December — my 6-year-old son and I trudged down toward the lake to witness the real Cleveland Browns’ dying day.
We threaded our way though a throng of angry tailgaters chanting “Go to hell, Art Modell.” Actually, Modell, the Browns’ owner, was taking one of the best-supported teams in N.F.L. history not to hell but to Baltimore.
This and other profane slogans could also be found emblazoned on unlicensed T-shirts. My son, Sam, begged me for one.
I strongly considered it.
Even though the N.F.L. would award Cleveland an expansion team that was allowed to keep the Browns’ name, colors and records, Sam would never have the relationship with the team that a half-century’s worth of Clevelanders had enjoyed — and righteously suffered for.
From the time the team was founded in 1946 until Modell bought it in 1961 — a prosperous era in which Cleveland was nobody’s laughingstock — the Browns were the best team in American sports. They had a record of 143-37-6. They were the only champion the All-American Football Conference ever had, and, in 1950, their first year in the N.F.L., they won that league’s title, too. They returned to the championship game for each of the next five years, winning twice.
Cleveland loved these guys, but not just because they won.
The coach, Paul Brown, was from Massillon, right down the road. He had built Massillon High School into a prep powerhouse and won a national championship at Ohio State. He created the modern passing game. He helped integrate professional football, bringing in the future Hall of Famers Marion Motley and Bill Willis, both Ohio kids. The team’s other big stars had names that sounded like the guy next to you on the assembly line — and nicknames that were sublimely cool. Dante "Glue-Fingers" Lavelli. "Automatic" Otto Graham. Frank "Gunner" Gatski. Lou "The Toe" Groza.
When, in 1956, the Browns finally had a losing season, they used the sixth pick in the draft to select perhaps the greatest player ever: Jim Brown.
I missed all this.
I was born in 1961, eight months after Modell bought the team. Obviously, I have no memory of the next year, when Modell got into a power struggle with Paul Brown and fired him, or of 1964, when the Browns won the only championship by any major Cleveland sports team in my lifetime. I was oblivious when, after the ’65 season, Jim Brown, in London filming “The Dirty Dozen,” asked to report late to training camp. Modell refused. Insulted, Brown — barely 30, having led the league in rushing the previous year by almost 700 yards — retired from football.
My first Browns were the Bill Nelsen/Leroy Kelly teams, which, in 1968 and 1969, came up one game short of the Super Bowl. By then, Cleveland had become the scene of riots, of blocks of burning buildings. Our river had burned, too, somehow. This became a running joke, first on the television show “Laugh-In,” then pretty much everywhere else.
For most of the ’70s, the Browns hugged .500. Not until 1980, about halfway through the Modell years, did the team start to feel accursed.
The so-called Kardiac Kids, led by quarterback Brian Sipe, after a year’s worth of late-game heroics, were in the playoffs, at home, in subzero weather with a gale-force wind, down, 14-12, to Oakland with less than a minute to play and on the Raiders’ 13. Sipe threw the ball into the wind. It was intercepted.
The name of the play was Red Right 88. Some now call it the Pass.
Later in the ’80s, as Cleveland’s attempts to repair its image and economy came to seem futile, in came a new hero, quarterback Bernie Kosar — from Youngstown, right down the road. In both ’86 and ’87, the Browns came within a game of the Super Bowl. Both times, they lost, in the final moments and to Denver, undone once by the Drive and the next year by the Fumble, the details of which are too painful to explain.
In the ’90s, as the city had a short-lived economic comeback, the Browns struggled. In 1991, Modell hired Bill Belichick, and said with confidence that if Belichick didn’t work out, he would leave town.
In fact, Modell’s departure was already on the horizon. When the city built a new stadium for the Indians, and the Browns had the chance to share it, Modell told the city he was O.K. waiting for a renovation to Cleveland Stadium. When he reconsidered, Cleveland put an initiative on the ballot for that renovation. On the eve of Election Day, Modell announced that he was moving to Baltimore. The next day, the initiative passed, with 72 percent of the vote.
A month later, my son and I entered the stadium for the last game. All around us were fans passing through the gates with wrenches, hacksaws and crowbars.
Inside, all the advertising had been blacked out. Modell watched on TV from his home in West Palm Beach, Fla. — something that, because the game was not a sellout, unlike hundreds of games in a row before that season, and was thus not shown locally, the people of Cleveland could not do.
The Browns beat Cincinnati, 26-10. There was no booing. Nobody blamed the players. Afterward, people sawed and pried out the seats families had had for generations. The Browns ran over to the hard-core fans in the north end zone, the Dawg Pound, shaking hands and saying thank you.
After the season, Modell fired Belichick.
An expansion team called the Browns made its debut in 1999, but the connection with the team’s past will probably, like Cleveland itself, never be the same.
In the fake Browns’ second season, Baltimore won the Super Bowl. When Modell hoisted that trophy, he might as well have kneecapped us with it.
The year after, it was Belichick, then with New England, who was a Super Bowl champion.
The fake Browns are 68-141 and expected, again, to be awful. Yet on Sunday, three days after Modell’s death, Sam and I will each be watching the first game of the season*, me in Tallahassee, Fla., Sam an adult living in Chicago, wondering if we will live to see a champion in the city our hearts call home.
(*Final score: Philadelphia 17, Cleveland 16)
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Mark Winegardner is the author of four novels, including “Crooked River Burning.”
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