Sundays in the Pound

Jonathan Knight

Description

The essential guide to every game in Browns history Every Sunday in autumn, a new chapter is written in the long and storied history of the Cleveland Browns. Win or lose, with each contest, the mythos of this beloved franchise is extended and enriched in the hearts of the sport's most loyal fans. The team has played nearly one thousand games over the past eight decades, and The Browns Bible tells the tale of each one. Through individual game stories and box scores, it encapsulates every victory, every defeat, every touchdown from 1946 to the present. The most comprehensive account of the Cleveland Browns ever written, The Browns Bible narrates the legend of this cherished franchise season by season and week by week as it gradually wove itself into the fabric of the city's culture-starting with its dominance of the All-America Football Conference and continuing through the glory years of the 1950s, the Kardiac Kids and Dog Pound eras, and the franchise's rebirth in the twenty-first century.Within these pages are snapshots of the drama inherent in each contest, from crisp clashes under the bright autumn sun to gridiron wars fought in the bitter cold of winter. Readers will relive the ultimate highs and the heartbreaking lows, the moments quickly forgotten and those remembered forever. Through these vignettes, the heroics of celebrated players of the past unfold: the achievements of Otto Graham, Lou Groza, Jim Brown, Leroy Kelly, Brian Sipe, Bernie Kosar, and countless others who created and strengthened this team's legacy through the generations.From Sunday-afternoon spectacles to Monday-night madness, from the Shamrock Bowl to the Playoff Bowl, The Browns Bible is the definitive guide to one of the most enduring teams in professional sports.

Sujets

• Fútbol americano
• American football
• Ohio

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 14 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612774725
• Langue: English

Extrait

SUNDAYS IN THE POUND  
SUNDAYS
IN THE POUND:
The Heroics and Heartbreak of the 1985-89 Cleveland Browns

JONATHAN KNIGHT
T HE K ENT S TATE U NIVERSITY P RESS Kent, Ohio
© 2006 by The Kent State University Press,
Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2005037574
ISBN -10: 0-87338-866-6
ISBN -13: 978-0-87338-866-5
Manufactured in the United States of America
10  09  08  07  06    5  4  3  2  1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Knight, Jonathan.
Sundays in the pound : the heroics and heartbreak of the 1985–89
Cleveland Browns / Jonathan Knight.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN -13: 978-0-87338-866-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) ∞
ISBN -10: 0-87338-866-6 (pbk.: alk. paper) ∞
1. Cleveland Browns (Football team : 1946–1995)—History.
I. Title.
GV 956. C 6 K 66     2006
796.332'640977132—dc22
2005037574
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.
To my dad, for all those Sundays in the living room.
Success is counted sweetest By those who never succeed.     —E MILY D ICKINSON
Contents   Preface and Acknowledgments Prologue The Final Play 1 Bleed Before You Heal 2 Bernie Comes Home 3 Like Dogs Chasing a Cat 4 The Die Is Cast 5 Backing In 6 Party Crashers 7 Identity Crisis 8 Lemons Into Lemonade 9 Storming In 10 One Play at a Time 11 Alfred Hitchcock Time 12 Strike Two 13 Game On 14 Three for Three 15 Breathless 16 By Their Wits 17 Plan D 18 The Coming Storm 19 The Old Man and the Snow 20 Silent Night 21 This Bud’s for You 22 Reality 23 Gathering Clouds 24 Last Stand 25 One More Time Epilogue Fall of the Canine Empire   Bibliographic Essay   Index
Preface and Acknowledgments
I imagine to everyone but writers, the following can sound cliché. But without a doubt, this book never would have been possible without the love and support of my ever-beautiful wife, Sara, who never protested the countless hours I spent either away from home or in front of a computer. Babe, I promise to someday publish something you’ll want to read.
I’m also indebted to Mike Baab, Bob Golic, and Marty Schottenheimer, who took time out of their busy schedules to talk with me about their memories of those wonderful days. And thanks to Dino Lucarelli of the Browns for helping me get in touch with them.
Special thanks to the Kent State University Press and its crackerjack staff for providing another downright wonderful collaborative experience.
Tom Cammett came through in a big way, providing some top-notch pictures. Also thanks to Ray Yannucci, not only for directing me to Mr. Cammett but also for doing such a great job on Browns News/Illustrated through those years. BN/I essentially became the backbone of my research, and I’m not sure if this project would have been possible without it.
Joining Yannucci’s wise words in BN/I were those of John Delcos, Frank Derry, the legendary Pete Franklin, and Jim Mueller.
Also kudos to the many talented writers who filled the pages of the Plain Dealer during this era, primarily Bob Dolgan, Tony Grossi, Bob Kravitz, Bill Livingston, and editor Gene Williams.
And, perhaps most of all, I must acknowledge two men who played such large roles in my life during the time frame covered in this book: my father, Dale Knight, with whom I watched or listened to almost every single one of these games, and Jack Suter, my first “editor,” who, thanks to these Browns teams, became a lifelong friend.
Finally, unlike my previous two books, I really can’t acknowledge one specific moment when the idea for this one struck me. All I can do is point to a memory that fueled the entire project and I’m sure reflects the emotional involvement of so many at that time.
After Earnest Byner’s fumble that lost the 1987 AFC Championship in Denver, my father and I went for an aimless drive into the winter night. Not knowing why and unable to talk about it, we drove country roads and highways, wandered the aisles of a grocery store, and wound up silently eating hot-fudge sundaes at a McDonald’s far from home.
Now as an adult, a husband, and a father, I look back and can’t imagine being so devastated by something so trivial. It was, after all, just a football game, not life or death. My life would go on just the same as before. So why does that night—as well as all the raucous Sunday-night celebrations in our house after a Browns’ victory—burn so brightly in my memory?
Perhaps the answer is also why the following is a story that needs to be told.
Hard as it may seem to believe, the Cleveland Browns used to be fun to watch. You didn’t turn on the game and keep a thumb on the remote, ready to flip it off at the first nincompoop play, knowing many, many more would follow. The primary intrigue in following the team didn’t surround who was going to get hurt next or who would get arrested for lighting up a police breathalyzer as if it were a party favor.
Now, I don’t mean to suggest that football is no longer exciting, nor am I intimating that 73,000 fans don’t pack into Cleveland Browns Stadium eight times a year and have a great time.
Still, if you’ve followed the team at all in the past fifteen years, you know what I’m talking about. While they’ve still got a long way to go, the new Browns are doing a wonderful job of becoming the old Indians—who, if you remember, went forty-one years between World Series in the second half of the twentieth century.
I write that and sort of feel like an old man telling his grandkids about a time before iPods and the Internet, when men were men and you’d go outside to use the bathroom. In fact, I can envision many folks rolling their eyes just like the kids at their grandfather. In a way, I don’t blame you. The cranky-old-man, world-is-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket shtick makes me crazy, too. Plus, I’m not even thirty yet. I’m too young to be old.
That being said, bear with me for a moment.
Before Carmen Policy, Dwight Clark, and Butch Davis and their decidedly un-Midas touch, before corporate sponsorship all but emasculated the game, the Cleveland Browns, while still a business enterprise, actually resembled a football team. And for a five-year period in the 1980s, they were the most beloved on the planet. No city clung to a football team more than Cleveland clung to the Browns. And perhaps more importantly, no team better represented the growing, changing nature of its city. In a few short years, as Cleveland transformed from a rust-belt hole into a gleaming renaissance town, the Browns mirrored it with a never-say-die, “Yeah-you-want-to-make-something-of-it?” attitude that stood up to the city’s critics.
That was twenty years ago. In the past ten years the roles have reversed. As the Browns try and try again to become an elite NFL team (failing dazzlingly at every turn), it’s the city that patiently stands by like the two hopeless tramps in Waiting for Godot . But instead of sharing a rugged work ethic and gritty personality that tied them together in the 1980s, the Browns and Cleveland now seem to be pantomimed by the antiseptic glass-and-brass palace the team now calls home.
Before artificial crowd noise was pumped through the stadium speakers before key plays, before the team spin machine started patronizing the fans by calling them the “World’s Greatest” while not allowing them to hang up signs or banners in the stadium, there was the friendly old sump pump we knew as Cleveland Municipal Stadium. It was there that the teams of the 1980s and the city merged to become one entity. You see clips of games from that era now and can’t help but wince. The playing surface was made up of painted dirt, not gourmet Kentucky Bluegrass with a sand-soil root zone and an underground heating system containing nine boilers and forty miles of underground piping. The stands were farther back from the field yet seemed ten times closer. The sight lines were terrible, but somehow you’d still see more. Fans would fork over hard-earned, blue-collar money to sit on long, cracked, wooden bleachers with no backs and scream themselves hoarse (and perhaps throw a few snowballs and batteries) in support of their team. The idea of paying money simply for the right to pay more for tickets or talking on a cell phone during the game while sitting in a fifty-yard-line seat seemed like something out of an apocalyptic Ray Bradbury yarn of the future. Twenty years ago, going to a Browns’ game was uncomfortable, inconvenient, and unattractive—none of which is true today. But it didn’t matter. You were among family.
Before Tim Couch set a new standard for disappointment, before Kellen Winslow Jr. and his motorbike adventures, the Browns consisted of players that Cleveland adored—players that, while perhaps not saints, certainly weren’t public embarrassments. And they were players that represented their team and city, not merely themselves and their agents.
This is not meant to reflect that cranky-old-man tone I alluded to earlier, waxing nostalgic for a simpler time that wasn’t really that much simpler, cursing everything modern and all the changes made along the way. Nor is it meant to be a rebuke of the current Browns and their cunning public-relations machinations. Rather, think of this as a celebration of what has come before—the memories of happier days that may well be the only thing standing between today’s fans and outright apathy.
Since the 1989 season, the final year covered in the journey you’re about to embark on, the Cleveland Browns have made the postseason a grand total of twice. After winning four division titles in five years, they haven’t won a single one since. They’ve posted two winning seasons and eleven losing ones. They’ve gone through seven head coaches and fifteen starting quarterbacks, missed on countless draft picks, and—oh yeah—lost the team to Baltimore.
Can the team find its way back? I certainly hope so. Will it ever be the same as it was back in those—gulp!—“good old days” of the 1980s?