From these and other sources I already knew that Art Modell, a 70-year-old man who had owned the team since I was 2 and a guy who had said he'd never move the Browns out of Cleveland, had made a deal to move the team to Baltimore.
I knew about the secret negotiations that had taken place in a corporate jet parked at the end of a runway at Baltimore-Washington International airport (everyone in Cleveland had been distracted, understandably, by the sight of the Cleveland Indians playing post-season baseball games for the first time in 41 years). I knew about Modell's press conference in Baltimore two days earlier, when he'd said there was nothing Cleveland could do to keep the team. I knew that the following day, election day, the extension of a county tax to finance renovation of Cleveland Stadium had passed in spite of -- or maybe because of -- Modell's announcement, with more than 70 percent approval.
I knew about the outraged mayor, the bewildered governor, the snarling sports talk-show hosts, the hundreds of thousands of stunned and furious Cleveland fans. My friend Martha summed up the mood as well as any reporter: "World leaders get assassinated, wars happen, earthquakes trash San Francisco, school buses get hit by trains, the Raiders leave L.A, but the Browns will always be there. Well, not anymore! The feeling of betrayal is palpable."
I could feel it, too, way out in Indiana. But it wasn't just betrayal. There was something else. I imagine it's like the feeling that comes when your sole surviving parent dies. You're faced with the reality that, from now on, all you're going to experience of something that has been with you for as long as you can remember is what remains in memory.
"Stop right there," you might sensibly interject. "You're talking about a football team here, not flesh and blood."
I'm well aware of that. And I guess I could explain it by asking Fighting Irish fans how they'd feel if the Holy Cross fathers went out and negotiated a more lucrative stadium deal with a group of well-heeled East Coast Jesuits.
But that wouldn't convey it exactly.
Maybe this does: Being a lifelong, die-hard fan of a team means more than wishing really, really hard that whatever players occupy this year's uniforms will outscore the current cast of characters in the other teams' colors. To invest that much time and emotion in something you have to feel something beyond fondness, a connection to the place the team represents.
To anyone who has never developed a fierce loyalty to a sports team, the whole idea may appear childish. Rightly so. Developing loyalties is part of being human, and we acquire them when we're young: loyalty to our family, to our friends, to our conscience, our values, our faith. So many of these are handed down to us by our parents.
It's the same way with sports.
Some of my earliest and most vivid memories are of going to Browns games with my dad in the 1960s and '70s. People have said that the Browns are like a religion in Cleveland. I wouldn't argue. I remember how awed I was the first time I heard the national anthem sung at a Browns game -- that deep, male, rumbling sound made by 80,000 football fans singing in unison. It was like being in some vast cathedral -- and not an empty pew in sight. I can still smell the odd, hearty aroma from a December game, a combination of cigar and cigarette smoke, spiced pork steam billowing from the hot dog vendors' battered silver containers, and sweet mist ascending from our own twin plaid thermos bottles of hot chocolate.
I remember one late-season game in particular. Dad couldn't go because he was in the hospital recovering from a mild heart attack. so I appealed to my mother Her interest in attending a professional football game more or less equaled my interest in attending a taping of The Lawrence Welk Show, but she eventually relented.
That Sunday the Browns were playing the hated Steelers, who were early into their years of Super Bowl victories. It figured to be a tough game for the home team. The Cleveland quarterback at the time was Mike Phipps, a former Purdue All-American who had already proven himself so inept that whenever he had to leave a game injured, people cheered -- and not in encouragement.
When my mom took me to the Steeler game on what turned out to be a blue-lip day, we witnessed what was probably Phipps' greatest moment as a pro. Late in the fourth quarter, the crowd growing pessimistic about either a win or Phipps sustaining a debilitating injury, the Browns' quarterback scrambled madly away from Pittsburgh's Steel Curtain defensive line, ducked under an airborne blitzer, and heaved a long pass downfield to sensational rookie tailback Greg Pruitt. Wide open (the only way Phipps could have hit him) Pruitt caught the ball and scrambled down to around the Steelers' 20. On the next play he raced around left end for the winning touchdown. The roaring and stomping of the crowd made the concrete under my numb feet quake.
When I went away to college in southeastern Ohio in 1977, my devotion didn't waver. Fortunately, Clevelanders and other Browns sympathizers predominated in the residence hall so we controlled the lobby TV set on Sunday afternoons.
One day that first semester, a bearded guy wearing a flannel shirt walked up to me in the dorm hallway and said, unblinking, "I hate you" then continued past. I later learned that this strange bird was a fellow journalism major who'd grown up in Shaker Heights, a famous fadingly aristocratic suburb east of Cleveland. His Browns attachment was almost as strong as mine --he'd say stronger -- and he'd had it up to here with my pompous and obnoxious expert analysis during games.
From this unlikeliest of starting points, William Jordan Thaler (aka Wet Willie, aka The Wet One), and I went on to become great friends. Though our career interests diverged, over the next four years we shared that exquisite agony that comes only with rooting for a team with an unstoppable offense and the kind of defense not witnessed since Poland hosted Germany in 1939.
It was frustrating. It was silly. It was fun. We invented solemn pregame rituals, like purchasing a bag of M&Ms peanut candies and then, just before kick-off, gobbling only the brown and orange pieces, which, importantly and mysteriously, matched perfectly the Browns' colors.
After college, newspaper jobs took me first to Virginia then to Delaware. It became more difficult to keep up with the Browns, but I persevered. When the Wet One became a social worker in Chicago, we often resorted to calling one another on Sundays and doing a telephone play-by-play if one of us had the game on in his area.
Absence from the Midwest only made my heart grow fonder for the Browns. One Saturday night when my wife and I were living in Delaware, I spent midnight and the early morning hours on the roof of our rowhouse turning a radio this way and that, trying to tune in the broadcast of a Browns game in San Diego. A preseason game.
I sometimes think I deserve a Ph.D. in the Browns. My brain has become such a Rolodex of player names and uniform numbers that I use them to memorize locker combinations, phone numbers and bank machine PINs. The security code at my previous employer was Frank Minnifield-Brian Brennan. My home phone number is 2-Walter Johnson, Webster Slaugther-Chris Rockins.
Most people don't know this, but there are hundreds of thousands of Browns fans like me from coast to coast, mainly children of Cleveland displaced by careers and marriages. The Dallas Cowboys are called America's Team because they win Super Bowls. The Browns have never even been to a Super Bow, yet they have -- or had -- fan clubs in nearly every major city in America. At last count the Southern California Browns Backers alone numbered nearly 2,000. Southern California! There weren't a hundred people who showed up to protest the move of the Los Angeles Rams to St. Louis in its 1995 season.
Browns News Illustrated, a publication started more than a decade ago to capitalize on the devotion of Cleveland expatriates, boasted a circulation of about 35,000. I used to get it myself. In the first week after the Baltimore move was announced, 500 readers called to cancel their subscriptions.
No one from Cleveland wants to read about something called the "Browns" unless they represent Cleveland. To us, the Browns will always be associated with the lawns we mowed, the driveways we shot hoops on, the parking lots where we practiced parallel parking. Call it fondness by association. Call it part of what's anchored in our memories as "home." Maybe you can't ever go back to that place, but that doesn't change the longing.
A lot of sports columnists took the announcement of the Browns move as the cue to declare cynically that fans could finally stop kidding themselves. Sports is business, and you're nuts if you think the owners or the players give a hoot about anything but the almighty dollar. What none of them ever noticed was that nothing ever generated so much corny, heartfelt emotion (and not just anger), nothing ever brought so many Clevelanders and ex-Clevelanders together, as the announcement that someone wanted to take away the Browns.
Early in 1996, the NFL agreed to reincarnate the Cleveland Browns, colors and all, in 1999. But I wonder if something irreplaceable won't be lost in the translation and hiatus.
On the night Modell first announced the move I stayed up to watch Monday Night Football. NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue was to be interviewed at halftime about the Browns situation. Sometime near the two-minute warning, the phone rang. It was the Wet One calling from New York City, where he now counsels people with AIDS.
"Is it going to happen for sure?" he asked without preamble, still inferior to me in his Browns knowledge.
"Looks like it," I reported tonelessly.
"Wow. I guess we can't be friends anymore. You realize we wouldn't even know each other if it weren't for the Browns."
I had to agree.
After I hung up I wondered how many other friends could have said the same thing that night. How many other people were feeling strangely orphaned.
Dad was right. It was THE END OF THE BROWNS, and it deserved capital letters.