On Being Brown: What it Means to Be a Cleveland Browns Fan

by Scott Huler

Overview

Browns fans are … different.

Why are we the only fans in the nation who ever demanded their team back—and got it? Why did three seasons without football fail even to dampen the enthusiasm? Why have we endured years of heartache (The Fumble, The Drive, “Red Right 88” …) yet grown ever more attached to the experience?

These 33 essays hold the answer. Scott Huler’s nostalgic memoirs, and his interviews with Browns legends and other fans, uncover those essential, special elements of shared experience that define what being a Browns fan has meant for us all.

Includes interviews with …

• Jim Brown
• Bernie Kosar
• Otto Graham
• Lou Groza
• Paul Warfield
• Greg Pruitt
• Brian Sipe
• Ozzie Newsome
• Mike Phipps
• Earnest Byner
• Jerry Sherk

It’s about pride. It’s about desire, tempered by crushing disappointment. It’s about tradition, and learning how to root for the home team at your father’s side. It’s about rivalry and electrifying victory. It’s about longing—for a return to past championships, for future glory. It’s about heart. It’s about all that, and much more.

This odyssey takes Browns fans back to some wonderful places. It revives some truly heartbreaking moments. And it looks to the future with great hope. If you’re Brown, you’ll enjoy the ride.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781886228313
Publisher:	Gray & Company, Publishers
Publication date:	08/15/1999
Pages:	156
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.38(d)

About the Author

Scott Huler, a Cleveland native, currently roots for the Browns from Raleigh, North Carolina. He has written five books and has been a staff writer for the Raleigh News and Observer and the Philadelphia Daily News as well as an award-winning producer and reporter for Nashville Public Radio. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times and have been heard on such national radio shows as National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and Public Radio International’s Marketplace. Huler graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Washington University in St. Louis and was a 2002–2003 Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan.

Read an Excerpt

Brown

Brown is the color of my true love’s . . .

Start, naturally enough, with the ground. The ground on the field of Cleveland Municipal Stadium is as brown as dry, dead leaves, as brown as any ground has a right to be, as brown as any ground on which men play professional sports. On sunny days it is a yellow, sandy brown, but the first time I ever see it, during a dispirited 6–2 Browns loss to the Dallas Cowboys, it is a wet, muddy brown in a thick stripe down the middle of the field. The game is longtime coach Blanton Collier’s final home game, and the uneventful loss means more than I have any way of knowing at the time. Collier is the last man to guide the Browns to a championship, but to me this means little; I am only 10, and I know nothing of history. And this is, after all, the first time we meet.

Brown is the color of the milky coffee that my father pours out of his thermos, steaming into the damp November air, and sips to warm up. At home coffee is a bitter beverage, objectionable to my young tastes; at the stadium, coffee bespeaks halftime, the closeness of my father and my uncle, a momentary lessening of the tremendous pressure that fills the stadium while the game is in progress. The small, acrid coffee aroma mingles with the other rich stadium smells—of beer, of hot dogs, of liquor, of men’s breath. Above all, the coffee is brown.

Brown is the color of the crowd—a stadium Browns game is the first place that I experience the feeling of being in a crowd comprising many black people. To me they seem friendly, gentle, supportive in a deep, resonant way. They are brown; Jim Brown, something of a god in our household, is brown; the team is named the Browns. It all seems to go together in some inexplicable, mystical way, and I envy these brown people their more obvious identification with the team. In the distance, on the other side of the stadium, the crowd, a mixture of brown and white faces, gray and brown overcoats, and the white vapor of condensing breath, is the color of the coffee that comes out of my dad’s thermos, and so the crowd becomes in memory warm and steamy as well.

Brown is the color of the unfamiliar downtown buildings we pass as we drive in to the game, always arriving a half hour before kickoff. Brown is the color of the factories we can see in the distance under the low gray clouds beyond the bleachers. Brown is the color of the leaves by the side of the road, the mud at the schoolyard where my brother and I pretend we are football players. Brown is the color of autumn.

Brown is the color of my true love.

[Excerpted from On Being Brown, © Scott Huler. All rights reserved. Gray & Company, Publishers.]

Table of Contents

Introduction

Brown

Cleveland Stadium

Orange

Things My Father Saw

“We always traveled first class”: A Moment with Lou Groza

1964

“It can’t be just a bunch of guys in brown uniforms”: A Moment with Jim Brown

The Cincinnati Game

Brown on Brown: A Moment with Mike Brown

“We want Phipps!”

“I gave it my best”: A Moment with Mike Phipps

“I see what Paul Brown saw”: A Moment with Paul Warfield

The Pittsburgh Game

“For those four hours I hated my friends”: A Moment with Greg Pruitt

Red Right 88

Almostness: A Moment with Brian Sipe

Diaspora

Out of Town Brown: A Moment with Harold Manson

He Chose Us

“All I remember is being a Browns fan”: A Moment with Bernie Kosar

Browns Backers Everywhere

A Moment with Bob Grace and Jeff Wagner

Things Change

The Drive, the Fumble, and All That

“Three Disappointments”: A Moment with Ozzie Newsome

Autographed Picture

“No team will ever do that again”: A Moment with Otto Graham

Rumors of War and the Last Pittsburgh Game

Big Dawg and the Man in the Brown Suit

“Hundreds and hundreds of people openly weeping”: The Last Home Game

“It was just a spirit thing”: A Moment with Earnest Byner

Two Friends from Denver

I Have Raked My Last Leaf

The View from the Tunnel: A Few Words from Jerry Sherk

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

Not just another history lesson . . . this book is therapeutic.

SportsJam!

Consistently poignant and occasionally profound

Cleveland Scene

The 33 essays and interviews are as bite sized as pretzels, just as addictive . . . Each nostalgia cluster has a take on the relationship between team and town.

Free Times

Those who . . . want to renew the bittersweet relationship between team and fan will enjoy this book.

The Plain Dealer

Captures brilliantly the love affair between the city and the team.

Currents