XXII. The Greatest Show in Football

There was another important sports development to gladden the hearts of Clevelanders as the city struggled to find itself after World War II-the emergence of the Cleveland Browns, the most successful football team of its time; a team that would come close to achieving in professional football the kind of consistent superiority that the New York Yankees had established in baseball.

Cleveland, only fifty miles from the birthplace of professional football in Canton, was one of the founding cities in the predecessor league of the National Professional Football League (NFL) in 1920. In that year, in Canton, the American Professional Football Association was formed, with Jim Thorpe, the famous Indian athlete, as president. Stan Cofall, a former Notre Dame grid star who in later years became a prominent Cleveland businessman, was vice president of -the new league. The member teams included the Canton Bulldogs, the Cleveland Indians, Dayton Triangles, Akron Professionals, Massillon Tigers, Decatur (Illinois) Staleys, Chicago Cardinals, and teams representing Rochester, New York, Rock Island, Illinois, Hammond, Indiana, and Muncie, Indiana.

All through the lean years of the 1920s and the 1930s, when the professional game was having so much difficulty establishing itself in the American scheme of things athletic, Cleveland was represented intermittently by play-for-pay teams, including the Indians, the Bulldogs, the Panthers, and the Rams. The 1924 club won the NFL championship (the league name was changed in 1921), and this aroused an enthusiastic response among football fanatics, but the followers of the professional game were few in number.

This failure of the Cleveland sporting public to embrace the pro game was enough to make a promoter cry out in anguish-and perhaps it did-because it was apparent that the city loved football. There was high enthusiasm for the game as it was played by the big universities, even though Cleveland itself was without representation among the collegiate grid powers. Once, in the early 1930s, Western Reserve University ventured into big-time football under the tutelage of Coach Sam Willamen, and the Red Cats did fairly well until somebody got carried away with their minor successes and booked a game with Ohio State University. The powerful Buckeyes, then the leading exponents of “razzle-dazzle” football as taught by Coach Francis Schmidt, won by a score of 81-0, leaving thousands of Clevelanders in a pensive mood.

After that debacle, Reserve settled for friendlier enemies close to home, like the John Carroll University Blue Streaks, the Case Tech Rough Riders, and the Baldwin-Wallace Yellow Jackets. These “Big Four” contests drew respectable crowds, but the city’s principal interest in football was attuned to the major colleges and universities, especially Ohio State and Notre Dame. There still are large rooting sections for those two institutions in Cleveland.

The modern era of professional football in Cleveland began in 1937, when the Cleveland Rams were organized, giving the city its first NFL team since 1931. The principal stockholder in the Rams was a businessman-attorney named Homer Marshman. The year of 1937 was not a good time, really, to begin a new enterprise. It was a year of recession within a depression, which would not be dissimilar to Winston Churchill’s riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma in terms of emphasis. The Rams struggled on the field and off, meeting with indifferent success in either place until 1945.

It was in 1945 that the Rams, led by glamorous Bob Waterfield at quarterback, won nine out of their ten games to win the NFL’s Western Division title. The championship game with the Washington Redskins was played in the lakefront stadium on a bitterly cold December day. Considering the weather conditions that prevailed that day, the turnout of 32,178 fans was quite sensational. The Cleveland Stadium is not the most comfortable place to be when the north winds are piercing in off the lake and the temperature is hovering around the zero mark. Fortunately, it was an exciting ball game with a gratifying conclusion. The hometown Rams eked out a 15-14 victory and Cleveland had a championship.

That achievement could have been the beginning of a new, profitable era for the Rams in Cleveland. There was, for the first time, a mass awareness of professional football. The colorful NFL champs had endeared themselves to the city by their heroics in the 1945 season-and it didn’t hurt one bit that Bob Waterfield’s wife was the gorgeous movie star, Jane Russell, and that she had moved to Cleveland to be near her husband. All of a sudden pro football was a much more interesting game to a lot of discerning Clevelanders.

But even as the cheers of the fans were still resounding, the Rams were saying a final goodbye to the city. Daniel F. Reeves, who had become principal owner of the team, announced he had received permission from the league to shift his franchise and players to Los Angeles. Cleveland stood as a city scorned and more than one indignant fan cried perfidy, but the move took place.

As humiliating as this development clearly was, the departure of the Rams proved to be for the best. It cleared the Cleveland playing field for the debut of a new football club that had been assembling quietly on the sidelines for some two years. Reeves and Waterfield were gone, but in their places Arthur B. McBride and Paul Brown were suiting up and completing their last-minute plans to surprise not only the city but the entire sports world with a fantastic demonstration of instant success, football-style.

Of the two principals in the ownership and management of the new team, strangely, Brown, the non-Clevelander, was much better known in Cleveland than the longtime resident, McBride. The latter was known only by name-“Mickey” McBride-and little more. Yet, Mickey McBride rates as one of the most interesting and most influential of the city’s men of finance in the middle years of the twentieth century. He had come to Cleveland in 1913 at age twenty-three, a tough, smart, streetwise boy wonder of the newspaper business of Chicago, lured from his job as acting circulation manager of Hearst’s Chicago American to become circulation manager of the Cleveland News and the Leader at a reported salary of ten thousand dollars. It was a time of circulation wars in Cleveland newspaperdom and McBride knew how to fight. His salary was quickly upped to fifteen thousand dollars. One of his assistants at the News was an old friend, James Ragen, who some years later was murdered by Chicago gangsters in a fight over control of the race wire, Continental Press, then owned by Ragen and McBride.

McBride stayed with the News until 1932, when he resigned in a dispute over policy, shortly thereafter investing most of his ready cash in the Yellow Cab Company of Cleveland, becoming a partner of Daniel Sherby. Most of McBride’s money was tied up in real estate, the purchase of which had been his prime hobby through the years. It was said he spent his happiest weekends touring the city with Mrs. McBride, looking over likely real estate purchases.

“The town was growing,” he explained later. “Everything you bought was increasing in value. You didn’t have to be smart.”

Once, it is said, he owned every parcel of land on the north side of Lorain Avenue, a main thoroughfare, from West 117th Street to West 130th Street. He owned acreage in all parts of the city and outside of the city, especially in Miami and Coral Gables, Florida. He had a distinct Hair for acquiring unimportant real estate that insisted on becoming terribly valuable. Something of that instinct for scenting success must have guided him in his other business adventures. In time, his cornucopia was filled with a successful taxicab monopoly in Cleveland and several nearby cities, a profitable race wire service, a printing company, a radio station, and miscellaneous other goodies. Thanks to the happy confluence of profits that kept pouring into his coffers, he was in a position by 1944 to listen without blanching to a highly unlikely suggestion by Arch Ward, sports editor of the Chicago Tribune, that he, Mickey McBride, finance a Cleveland professional football team in a new league, the All-America Conference.

The Cleveland financier only a few years before that time probably could have claimed the distinction of being the city’s leading non-football fan. It is said he never saw a football game until 1940-the same year, significantly, in which his son, Arthur B., Jr., became a student at Notre Dame University. It is a fact that football is highly regarded at Notre Dame. It is also a fact that the father of any N.D. student who fails to take an interest in the football fortunes of the Fighting Irish stands in peril of being drummed out of the club. No doubt this fact, added to the urgings of young Arthur, spurred McBride into becoming a rooter. But he was not the kind of a man to do things halfway. He did become a fan, but rooting was not enough; the passive role of spectator was not satisfying. McBride became interested in gaining some kind of a proprietary role in the game, and it was toward that end, in 1942, that he made an unsuccessful bid to buy the Cleveland Rams.

Ward’s plans for a new team in a new league had McBride’s interest. Mickey was still a scrapper, and the turndown by Reeves of the Rams rankled. If he had his own football team, he could give the Rams a run for their money.

“O.K.,” McBride told Ward, “but if I’m going to field a team in Cleveland, it will have to be the best team in the country.”

There was plenty of time for him to plan his conquest. The All America Conference could not become a reality and begin its fight with the NFL team until another fight-World War II-was settled satisfactorily. McBride, however, saw no reason to wait until the war was over to put together an organization and do some long-range planning. To do this, he needed a top executive.

“Who’s the best football coach in the country?” he asked a veteran Plain Dealer sportswriter, John Dietrich.

“Paul Brown,” unhesitatingly replied Dietrich.

Thousands of football experts in the country probably would have argued with Dietrich’s choice, but few of them would have been Ohioans. Coach Paul Brown of Ohio State University, then on military leave and serving as coach of the Great Lakes Naval Training Station team, was only thirty-six years old, but he already had proved himself to be an authentic gridiron genius to Ohioans; first at Massillon (Ohio) High School and then at Ohio State. In his second year at OSU, admittedly one of the toughest, most demanding coaching jobs in collegiate football, Brown in 1942 had steered the Buckeyes to the Big Ten title and a national championship.

The Ohio State coaching post was one toward which Brown long had aspired during his years as a high school coach, and already he was the campus idol. He was reluctant to give up his budding college career to become general manager and coach of a club that did not exist, in a league that never had played a game. Mickey McBride could not compete with the romance or glamor of collegiate football, but Mickey’s financial oratory was overpowering. Among other inducements, he wanted Brown to go on his payroll immediately and draw a princely salary of one thousand dollars a month all the time he remained in service, no matter how long the duration.

There was a popular joke that enjoyed currency at that time. It seems Australian girls had proven to be very popular with American servicemen, and somebody asked a G.1. what it was that Australian girls had that American girls did not.

“Nothing,” answered the G.I., reasonably. “But they’ve got it here.”

It was that way with McBride and Brown. What the Cleveland mogul had to offer the servicebound Brown was present and tangible reward, plus the promise of twenty-five thousand dollars a year when the team came into being. The young coach capitulated and agreed to put together a professional football team in Cleveland. It wasn’t long before McBride learned that Brown, in his own way, was just as resolute and determined a man as he himself. Speaking at a civic luncheon in Cleveland, Brown turned to McBride and said, unsmilingly:

“We will build a winner and make it go here if it takes every cent you’ve got!”

Paul Brown was much more than just another good football coach. He was an organizational genius and an outstanding judge of football flesh. The first player he signed was a fellow serviceman named Otto Graham, former Northwestern University star. He also hired, as backfield and defensive coach, one of his own aides at Great Lakes, a Paris, Kentucky, high school mentor named Blanton Collier. And as the months passed and the war neared its end, Brown gradually added new names to the growing roster-Mac Speedie, Jim Daniell, Edgar (“Special Delivery”) Jones, Lou Rymkus, Dante Lavelli, Lou Saban, Eddie Ulinsld, Lin Houston, John Yonakor, Cliff Lewis, and Lou Groza, as well as some established NFL players on the Cleveland Rams squad who were reluctant to move to Los Angeles. They included Center Mike Scarry, Tackle Chet Adams, and three backfield men, Tom Colella, Galen Smith, and Don Greenwood.

Brown’s most significant player announcement, though, was that he had signed Marion Motley to play fullback and that he had invited to the team’s training camp a husky All-American named Bill Willis, who had played briefly for him at Ohio State. Motley and Willis were Negroes, and up to that time professional football was punctiliously observing the color line. The action of the Cleveland club’s management in signing Motley and Willis was something more than a violation of the agreement that had kept the racial doors closed in professional football; it was a repudiation of the discriminatory policy- a significant social milestone, as important as the breakthrough made possible in baseball by Branch Rickey and Bill Veeck.

Brown could not have cracked the color line, it’s worth pointing out, without Mickey McBride’s complete support. Even as some of the other club owners in the league a-borning were gasping in horror at Cleveland’s plan to open its ranks to Negro players, McBride quickly silenced any objections that may have been forming.

“I employ Negroes in all my other business ventures,” he said, “and if any competent Negroes want to compete for a job on my football team, I will not deny them that chance. If the All-America Conference doesn’t like what I am doing, it can have the Cleveland franchise back again.”

The All-America Conference (AAC) patently needed Mickey McBride more than Mickey McBride needed football. The other owners accepted the new racial ground rules laid down by Cleveland, and the league that never had played a game discovered that it already had passed a football milestone. And it wasn’t long before Motley and Willis were making Coach Brown look so good that the old-line prejudices soon were forgotten as the other teams hustled furiously about, searching for good Negro talent. So also, shortly, did the teams in the rival NFL.

Cleveland’s team took on the name of the “Browns” after the name of their coach, and thus borrowed a page from the history of the Indians, who, early in their history, had been named the “Naps” after their manager-star, Napoleon Lajoie.

The new football team’s first game was played in late summer of 1946. It was an exhibition contest in which the Brooklyn Dodgers were their opponents before a sensational crowd of 35,964 fans in Akron’s Rubber Bowl. It was a winning debut: Browns 35, Dodgers 20. It was the first victory of many. It quickly became apparent that the All-America Conference didn’t have a chance of surviving its infancy with the Browns as members of the league. Cleveland dominated the play so completely during the years the AAC was in existence, 1946 through 1949, that the statistics are almost unbelievable. In those four seasons, the Browns won fifty-two games and lost only four. They played three tie games.

That year of 1948, that glowing time for professional sports in Cleveland, was the high point for the Browns as it was for the Indians and the Barons. Paul Brown’s 1948 team played fourteen games and won fourteen games-the last professional football team to go through a full season undefeated and untied. The Cleveland club won the AAC championship in each of the leagues four years and when, weakened unto death by the domination of the Browns, the league folded at the end of the 1949 season, the Cleveland club was eagerly absorbed by the NFL.

There had been a lot of conjecture during the years the Browns were breezing along to one victory after another in the AAC over what would happen if ever they were pitted against a strong NFL team. Some devastating wit was employed by some of the officials in the older league to describe the carnage that would ensue when such a clash occurred. Now the stage was set for the football Armageddon at last; now was the time for the showdown battle that would decide the old argument and establish at last just how good the Cleveland Browns and Coach Paul Brown really were.

To make the test even more conclusive, the first opponents the Browns would face in their NFL debut in 1950 were the Philadelphia Eagles. The Eagles were the NFL champs of the previous season as the Browns were the AAC champs. It was like starting the season with a World Series battle, and the attention of the whole football world was fixed on Philadelphia’s Municipal Stadium when the teams clashed. Some eighty-five thousand fans, most of them Eagles rooters, crowded the great bowl that day and looked on in stunned disbelief as the Browns efficiently went about the job of proving that all their past achievements in football had been valid ones. The final score was Cleveland 35, Philadelphia 10.

One of the Philadelphia stars, Pete Pihos, was quoted after the game as saying: “I guess we finally met up with a team from the big league!”

It was a highly Significant victory and a highly encouraging one to fans seeking an augury. But a whole season of play against the best football players in the nation lay ahead and, as it turned out, it was such a rugged season that at the end the Browns had to meet the New York Giants in a playoff game to decide the American (Eastern) Conference title. The Browns won with a Lou (“The Toe”) Groza field goal and a safety in the closing seconds of play, 8-3.

The championship game of the 1950 season pitted the Browns against, of all teams, the Los Angeles Rams. The game was played in Cleveland Stadium and, at last, the prodigal Rams would come home again; this time as the enemy. If an amateur dramatist had tried to rig up a hokey situation like that, he’d have been hooted out of the theater. But there it was-the old Rams, still led by Bob Waterfield, still cheered on by Jane Russell, going against the new Browns, led by Otto Graham.

It wasn’t an easy victory. The Browns had to go down to the last few seconds of the game to win, and again it was Lou Groza who gave the team its 30-28 margin of victory by booting a field goal from the eleven-yard line at the very end, making the Cleveland team the undisputed champion of the football world at last. It was a most satisfying achievement and Cleveland hugged the Browns warmly to its civic bosom.

Years later, when the American Football League made its appearance and the old arguments sprang up over the relative and comparative strength of the teams in the new loop and those in the senior league, most spokesmen of the NFL clubs were understandably restrained in their comments. They remembered the Browns, no doubt, and they remembered especially that season of 1950 when Paul Brown and his men taught all the taunters and jibers a lasting lesson in humility.

Proof that the Browns’ opening season triumph in the NFL was no accident was provided in abundance in the years that followed. At the end of sixteen seasons of NFL play, 1950 through 1965, the Browns had won the Eastern Conference title nine times and had worn the crown of world champions four times. In that period, the team racked up the best won-and-lost record in professional football, winning 142 times against only 54 losses and six ties- a percentage of such class, one would guess, to insure all kinds of domestic tranquility, but it was not so.

The Browns dominated the NFL’s Eastern Conference in their first six years of membership as they had dominated the AAC. The genius of Paul Brown was freely, openly acknowledged by the football world, and his name gradually rose to the rarefied level on which you will find such names as Knute Rockne and Pop Warner. His star players- Otto Graham, Marion Motley, Lou Groza, and Jimmy Brown- were properly enshrined among the superstars of the game. But the Browns had their troubles. There was an undercurrent of protest among the players against Coach Brown’s aloofness; the coolly impersonal attitude he turned toward them most of the time. It was said, indeed, that he held this same aloof attitude in his dealings with Mickey McBride and shunted the owner out of direct and general participation in the team’s affairs, on and off the field, to such an extent that McBride gradually lost interest in the Browns. Whatever the reason, Mickey McBride in 1953 unloaded the club for six hundred thousand dollars to a syndicate headed by a Cleveland industrialist, Dave R. Jones.

Brown continued as coach and general manager with full authority under the new owners. His genius, meanwhile, had not gone unnoticed among the other coaches. As the Browns victoriously rolled along to one conference title after another, and three world championships in their first six years of NFL play, the imitative process set in. Competing teams borrowed Brown’s techniques; such characteristics as the Cleveland club’s high degree of organization and discipline, classroom schedules and homework demanded of the players and elaborate film review of team play, as well as intensive scouting procedures- all became standard league practice. The effect was that the margin of superiority that had enabled the Browns to dominate most of the league gradually shrank, and victories came harder.

Cleveland fans, accustomed to victory, were shocked in 1956 when their team lost the conference title to the New York Giants and dropped to a disgraceful, for them, won-and-lost record of five victories, seven defeats. It was the only time in the history of the team that the Browns had failed to play at least .500 football, and it was a sign of the trouble ahead. The team snapped back in 1957 to win the conference title, but the championship game with the Detroit Lions was a humiliating rout, with the Lions doing all the routing, 59-14.

For the next six years, the Browns played respectable football, placing second in their conference four times, but everybody expected something more than respectability from the orange-shirted invincibles. The fabulous past came back to reproach the team, and for the first time there was a questioning note when the conversation swung around to Paul Brown. They asked if the not-so-old master were too inflexible to meet the changing pattern of league play. They wondered if his personality were a hobbling influence on team morale and performance. The rest of the NFL apparently had caught up with the Browns by borrowing from Paul Brown’s book. Now many of his followers wondered if the great coach could reach out and open another new chapter that would again establish his mastery.

Early in 1961, after three consecutive second-place finishes, the Browns were purchased from the Cleveland syndicate by a group headed by a young (thirty-six) New York advertising executive, Arthur B. Modell. The price paid was $3,925,000, a considerable increase over the $600,000 that Mickey McBride had received only eight years earlier. Modell hastened to assure reporters of his respect and admiration for Paul Brown. The famous coach and general manager would remain in those posts, he said, and would continue as the boss of the team. For his part, Brown spoke in noncommittal terms of the change in ownership, emphasizing only that he was still in charge. By way of stressing the paint, late in that autumn of 1961, after the club’s third-place finish, Brown traded the star halfback, Bobby Mitchell, to the Washington Redskins for draft rights to the Syracuse University backfield star, Ernie Davis. Modell was not consulted on the deal.

The tragic story of Ernie Davis bad an important effect on the Paul Brown legend. The big halfback (six feet two inches), an All-American and winner of the Heisman Trophy given each year to collegiate football’s outstanding player, perhaps would have restored the Cleveland coach to a position of pre-eminence in the professional sport had things gone as expected. On the basis of his record at Syracuse, Davis gave promise of being an even better football player than another Syracuse grad, Jimmy Brown, the greatest pro footballer of his day- some say of any day.

In midsummer of 1962, Davis, while in the training ,camp of the College All-Stars, getting ready for the annual All-Star Game in Chicago against the NFL champs, developed a swelling in his neck. It was thought, at first, he had the mumps. Then an examination disclosed that the brilliant rookie had monocytic leukemia and the medical guess was that he had only about a year to live!

The estimate of the doctors proved to be optimistic. Ernie Davis, the Browns star who never played a game with the team, died in University Hospital in Cleveland early in the morning of May 18, 1963, and his uniform number, 45. was retired by the Browns. A city which had not known the player nevertheless sorrowed in the death of the man. There had not been such deep, heartfelt emotion over a fallen athlete since the death of Ray Chapman of the Indians.

The Davis tragedy came at a time when the Browns and all their followers already were in a state of shock over the dismissal of Paul Brown as coach and general manager of the Cleveland club that bore his name. Legends simply are not fired and Paul Brown, clearly, was a legendary figure in the world of football. He was in the record books to stay, and his achievements as coach of Massillon High School, Ohio State University, and the Cleveland Browns were beyond compare. But Paul Brown’s team had not won even a conference title since 1957. His last world championship had been won in 1955. So it was inevitable that in 1963 there should be raised the cynical question that has plagued men of achievement since the beginning of time: “What have you done lately?”

So long as his teams continued to dominate, Paul Brown did not need the approval or affection of others. Their respect for his genius was enough. But the Browns had not been winners for five years in a row. Unquestioning respect had given way to doubt, and some of the players were grumbling openly. Some of the experts began to say that the rival coaches were playing the Brown system better than its originator. Yet the great coach stood coldly and uncompromisingly in his lonely position of complete authority until finally, on January 7, 1963, Art Modell astonished everybody by announcing that Brown was through as coach and general manager of the team. He was invited to stay on as a vice president until the remaining six years of his ten-year contract expired, making him, surely, the best-paid vice president in all professional football history at $82,500 a year.

Blanton Collier, Brown’s coaching protege from Great Lakes Naval Training Station and a member of the Browns coaching staff for many years, took over as the new boss. Paul Brown was gone, but the Browns continued.

Whether the change in coaches came at just the climactic point in the rebuilding process that had been under way, or whether the warmly human touch of the fatherly Collier was the missing element in the Browns’ equation, none could say. It was a fact, though, that the faltering team seemed to take strength from the change. Cleveland that season again became a power in the Eastern Conference and achieved a good 10-4 record, fighting the New York Giants right down to the last whistle for the title.

In 1964, Collier’s charges went all the way. They won the Eastern title handily and then, to the surprise of all the experts, they annihilated the highly favored Baltimore Colts in the championship game, 27-0.

It was a thrilling comeback for the team-the vindication that Modell needed desperately to answer those who criticized him for firing the greatest coach in football. And if he needed further support for his action, the Browns won the Eastern title again in 1965, which was achievement enough, even if they did drop the title game to Green Bay’s Packers. Furthermore, the great lakefront stadium was filled almost to capacity at nearly all of the seven home games each season, an average of about eighty thousand persons a game.

The slogan of the Browns from the team’s beginning has been: “The Greatest Show in Football!”

It comes as close to being the truth as any slogan could.