Cleveland's Finest. Vince McKee

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СКАЧАТЬ In 1950, the Cleveland Browns moved into the NFL and remained dominant, winning the championship on Christmas Eve over the Los Angeles Rams 30–28. Paul Brown was proving he could win in any league at any level. DeLuca attended that game with hundreds of other rabid fans, freezing but winning! The irony was sweet, because they had just beaten the former Cleveland Rams.

      The Browns would go on to reach the championship finals for the next three years, but they did not win those championships. Changes for Coach Brown started before the 1953 season when McBride sold the team to a group of local businessmen led by David Jones for $600,000. Brown was upset that McBride did not consult him about the deal, even though the new owners assured him they would stay out of the picture and let Brown run the team. This was a vital issue for Brown, who needed full control over personnel decisions in order for his system to work successfully.

      Brown remained unfazed with the ownership change and led the Browns to back-to-back NFL championship wins over the Detroit Lions and the Los Angeles Rams in 1954 and 1955. The 1955 championship would be the last one for which Brown retained Otto Graham, who announced his retirement following that final game.

      In 1956, the Browns suffered their first losing season under Coach Brown as they struggled to go 5–7. It was their first season without Graham as quarterback, and the team had problems adjusting. In the following year’s draft, the team selected Jim Brown out of Syracuse University. Loaded with talent, Jim Brown was one of the greatest runners to ever play the game. The problem, however, was his lack of discipline, which he later used to misalign his teammates against Coach Brown. It didn’t help matters that Coach Brown was critical of some aspects of Jim Brown’s game, including his extreme lack of blocking. Where Jim Brown excelled was running, not blocking or being an all-around good teammate. In Brown’s first season, the team would reach the championship game but go on to lose 59–14.

      As Jim Brown rose as a star, players began to question Paul Brown’s leadership and play-calling. By the late 1950s, Jim had turned his teammates and the media against the proven coach. It was Jim Brown’s play on the field that allowed more people to side with him over the seasoned coach. Fans were in awe of Brown’s running ability, and they willingly looked past his off-the-field antics. Jim Brown later started a weekly radio show, which Coach Brown did not like as it undercut his control over the team. The team finished second in its division in 1959 and 1960, but these finishes didn’t bother Jim Brown because he continued to lead the league in rushing every season.

      A dark cloud soon rose over Cleveland in 1961 when Art Modell, a New York advertising executive, bought the Browns in 1961 for almost $4 million. At first it looked as if Modell would not be all that bad as an owner—he gave Paul Brown a new eight-year contract and stated that he and Brown would have a “working partnership.”

      It didn’t take long, however, for Modell to get in Brown’s way and start playing a heavy hand in the team’s field affairs. This upset Coach Brown, who was used to having total control in football matters. Only 35, Modell was close in age to many of the players, and he took it upon himself to try to buddy up to many of them. Modell became very close with Jim Brown, which was the kiss of death for the disciplinarian coach. Modell could be heard during games second-guessing Paul Brown’s play calling.

      Things finally came to a head between owner and coach when Paul Brown traded Bobby Mitchell for the rights to Ernie Davis, a Heisman Trophy–winning running back out of Syracuse. Davis was no stranger to the end zone, having broken all of Jim Brown’s rushing records at Syracuse. This was a trade that did not sit well with Jim Brown, and he was not happy to have Davis as a teammate. Sharing the spotlight was not something Jim Brown preferred. Sadly, Ernie Davis never played a single game as a Cleveland Brown—he was diagnosed with leukemia before the start of the 1962 season.

      Paul Brown was a methodical and disciplined coach who tolerated no deviation from his system. He ran a well-oiled machine, which was simply not the way Jim Brown wanted to be coached. In the end, Modell sided with Jim Brown and fired the legendary coach on January 7, 1963. This was right in the middle of a newspaper strike that allowed Modell to keep this move under the radar. It was the first of many shocking moves and disappointing decisions that Cleveland sports fans would have to endure by Modell that would occur over the next forty-plus years. Blanton Collier, Paul Brown’s longtime assistant, was later named as the team’s new head coach.

      Paul Brown would only stay away from the game for less than five years; he was quick to throw in his hat for team ownership of the AFL franchise that was starting in Cincinnati. Brown was the third-largest investor in the team and was given the title of coach and general manager, two roles he would succeed in. The Bengals joined the NFL in 1970 as a result of the AFL–NFL merger and were placed in the newly formed American Football Conference. In his years as the Bengals head coach, Brown took the team to the playoffs three times but was never able to win a championship for the Queen City.

      Coach Paul Brown was a great leader. Many of the men who worked directly underneath him continued on to amazing careers, including Don Shula, Blanton Collier, Weeb Ewbank, Bill Walsh, and Chuck Knoll, to name a few. Coach Brown finished with seven league championships during his tenure with Cleveland. He led the Browns to 11 straight title games in that stretch. It was the most dominant run of any head coach in the history of football. As one of the greatest head coach in the history of professional football, Paul Brown will forever be remembered as the man whose coaching ways, attention to detail, and discipline reshaped the landscape and model of pro football.

      CHAPTER TWO

      Richfield

      Richfield Coliseum was built in the early 1970s and first opened to the public in 1974 as home to the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers, the WHA’s Cleveland Crusaders, the NHL’s Cleveland Barons, and, in later years, the AFL’s Cleveland Thunderbolts, as well as indoor soccer teams the Cleveland Force and the Cleveland Crunch. The Coliseum hosted major sporting events, such as the 1981 NBA All-Star Game and showcased several professional-wrestling events seen worldwide on pay-per-view. It also served as a venue for music concerts by big names from Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder to U2 and Bruce Springsteen. Hall of Fame basketball star Larry Bird mentioned that Richfield Coliseum was his favorite place to play on the road.

      The building, in the middle of a large area of farmland, was 30 minutes south of downtown Cleveland and stuck out like a sore thumb. This massive structure held more than 20,000 seats and was one of the first arenas to include luxury boxes. Joe Tait, legendary announcer for the Cavaliers, remembered his first impression of the coliseum as “a beautiful building in comparison to the old Cleveland Arena—it was like going from the ghetto to the palace. The one question was if people would still show up because of the long distance many had to travel to get there. At the time, that part of Summit County was surrounded by farms. It was in the middle of nowhere, and there was a sheep ranch right next to it. I thought it was an absolutely beautiful building.”

      Vince McKee with the legendary voice of the Cavs, Joe Tait

      The Cavaliers had a new home; now they just needed to start winning. Owner Nick Mileti built Richfield Coliseum for his recently formed basketball team. Until then, they had been playing at the Cleveland Arena but hadn’t enjoyed much success. Since the team’s 1970 opening season, the Cavs hadn’t had a single winning season. Shortly after the move to Richfield in 1974, however, they record started to improve. The team won 40 games that year but fell just short of the playoffs. Tait recalled the 1974–75 season positively in that “things were changing because we were starting to get better ballplayers. We had not yet won a lot of ballgames in the history of the team, so the upgrade in the talent of the roster was crucial. The fact that we came within one game was frustrating but also encouraging because it showed you how close they were to bigger and better things.”

      During СКАЧАТЬ