WHEN ALL THE WORLD WAS BROWNS TOWN
By Terry Pluto
Simon & Schuster, 316 pages, $25
Pro football began to enter the mass consciousness of the American sports fan sometime about the early ’60s, which means that football fans are just now old enough to be nostalgic about Jim Brown, Johnny Unitas and Paul Hornung the way baseball fans were about Mickey, Willie and the Duke about 20 years ago. Terry Pluto, perhaps the best American writer of sports books (“Loose Balls,” about the American Basketball Association, “The Curse of Rocky Colavito,” “Falling From Grace”), has picked the right team to get nostalgic about: The 1964 NFL champion Cleveland Browns were sort of a combination of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers and the mid-’60s St. Louis Cardinals–the former because it was the only championship won by a team that was expected to be a dynasty, and the latter because it featured so many players who were as interesting off the field as on.
The big difference between the mid-’50s Dodgers and the mid-’60s Browns is that the Browns franchise already had a storied reputation as winners in an earlier incarnation. Coming out of the old All-American Conference in the early ’50s, the Browns, led by their legendary quarterback, Otto Graham, and even more legendary coach, Paul Brown, won four NFL championships and turned the modern game of pro football around. Some say they invented it.
No coach, not Chicago’s George Halas or Green Bay’s Vince Lombardi, had more of an effect on the modern game than Paul Brown. How great a coach was Paul Brown? Consider that, as Pluto points out, he invented the face mask, the playbook, the taxi squad and film sessions. Put it another way: For all his achievements, no one renamed the Green Bay franchise “the Lombardis.”
One strong point of comparison between the Dodgers and Browns was their impact on sports integration. Paul Brown was the first pro coach to consistently use black athletes, the most prominent of which was Jim Brown. Brown was no Jackie Robinson, but his opinions on race and society were radical for his time, at least for athletes, and as one of the first two pro football players (along with Unitas) to achieve the nationwide fame of baseball stars, Brown was in a position to attract controversy.
Paul Brown was a football man from an earlier, more innocent time. If the game itself wasn’t passing him by, the social and political climate that surrounded him was. For instance, he refused to promote Jim Brown, perhaps the greatest player the game has ever seen, because that would place a player ahead of the team–and perhaps the coach?–in the eyes of the public. For another instance, he couldn’t get along with the brash, intense young owner from Brooklyn, Art Modell, who thought the team owner should be let in on team decisions. It would be easy for Pluto to jump in here and turn Modell into the villain, but Pluto doesn’t damn Modell for his eventual firing of the Browns’ greatest coach, as a generation of fans have done. Besides, if Modell hadn’t fired Brown, the brilliant Blanton Collier couldn’t have come on board, Jim Brown wouldn’t have had his greatest season, the Browns wouldn’t have scored one of the greatest upsets in pro football history, and we wouldn’t have this book.
Whatever their respect for the old coach, many players felt, after his departure, that they had been released from prison. In the more congenial atmosphere of Collier’s reign, several players whose names football fans might not otherwise remember became perhaps the greatest group of overachievers in modern NFL history. There was quarterback Frank Ryan, or “Dr. Frank Ryan,” as his detractors caustically referred to him, the math professor from Rice who wasn’t supposed to throw well enough and who took the Browns to two championship games. And Bernie Parrish, the volatile cornerback, the Curt Flood of football, who later wrote a book intended, in his own words, “to drive Peter Rozelle, Art Modell” and others “out of professional football.” And there was the star-crossed young tackle Jim Kanicki, one of the stars of the 1965 upset over the Baltimore Colts in the title game, who got hurt, took pain-killing drugs, played and found himself traded to the hated New York Giants for his trouble.
They all came together on a windy Sunday afternoon in January of ’65 to shock the football world by not only beating the Don Shula-Johnny Unitas-led Colts, but thrashing them, 27-0. Cleveland fans didn’t see the game on TV till it was broadcast the next day; Modell had had it blacked out to ensure a sellout. He also didn’t have champagne ready or championship T-shirts made for the players; he wasn’t sure the Browns would win and wanted to save the money.
This is the part of the book where you can start hating Modell. Within two years he had succeeded in squeezing Jim Brown out, angering Brown when he wouldn’t give him time off to make a movie. The new Browns dynasty never materialized, and a couple of years later Blanton Collier, plagued by a hearing defect, retired.
If you weren’t there to see the Jim-Brown Browns, Terry Pluto will make you feel as if you were. In resurrecting for one brief moment the memories of his hometown team, he’s reviving the memories for every fan of a time when we watched football games with the wonderful illusion that they were our hometown team.
