Jeffrey King lived for his orange and white weekends, but five minutes of football shook his faith in the team he loved.
by Andrew Reilly
The wind howls as the November cold attacks the souls hearty enough to make the trek here. Scores of men and women have arrived for their weekly ritual of self-sacrifice, gathered on another Sunday at the Cubby Bear to give what they can for the cause they so passionately believe in: the Cleveland Browns.
Clad in their tribe’s traditional orange and brown, they’ve spent the past week girding for battle. Their jerseys are their armor, their dog masks and hardhats their helmets.
From television sets blaring along the eastern and western walls, the Sunday sports pundits hold court while the crowd sneers at their so-called wisdom. The air reeks of last night’s stale cigarette smoke and this morning’s brunch buffet as the patrons steel themselves with platters of scrambled eggs and tumblers of Bloody Marys.
They each have different ways of pledging their allegiance but all came here to the Cubby Bear sports bar in Chicago for the same reason: In just a few hours, the Browns will take the field against the Cincinnati Bengals, and no one here has any intention of missing a second.
Especially the man at the center of the room. On the surface, he doesn’t look like anything more than a casual fan. Sure, he wears his trademark white Bernie Kosar jersey, its brown numerals the inspiration for the “19″ nickname given to him years ago by the folks in this room. But he bears no tattoos of the team logo, wears no giant foam fingers reading “We’re #1.” By appearances, he’s just another guy wearing Browns gear in a room full of guys wearing Browns gear.
In street clothes, his athletic build and nondescript fashion sense better reflect the weightlifting and running regimen that dominates his weeknights than the liquor and chicken wings that dominate his Sundays. Still, he woke early today and got to the bar as soon as he could. “Beer and Browns,” he tells those around him, “no better way to spend a day.”
Certainly not for him. For here is a man who knows the Browns’ history better than most people know their own. He knows the going rate of Browns memorabilia, like the 1995 Michael Dean Perry figurine atop his television. Or the framed aerial photograph of Cleveland Municipal Stadium that hangs on his living room wall. He can instantly recall where he was when someone was signed, drafted, injured, released or traded. He can go on at length about the civic betterment brought about by not selling the naming rights to Browns Stadium or how engineers turned 5,000 cubic yards’ worth of the old Cleveland Stadium into an artificial reef in Lake Erie, and can just as easily talk about fond boyhood memories of game day in Cleveland.
“There’s nothing like it,” he says with a smile. “You walk up that ramp and step out into the stands, and all you can see is orange and brown. Little kids holding signs, people who’ve been tailgating since 5 in the morning, everyone in the place screaming for the Brownies to come out and tear it up. You see the guys in the Dawg Pound getting the crowd worked up. It’s like a church, but better.”
His name is Jeffrey Dennis Timothy King – Jeff to his family, Dennis to some friends, Denny to others, The Browns Guy to his co-workers. And today he is more excited to watch football than he has been since he first started watching it thirty-one years ago as a newborn cradled in his mother’s arms or held upright in his father’s lap; more than when he went to his first Browns playoff game in 1994. He’s more excited than when the Browns returned to the league in 1999. Today, he’s certain, is going to be a good day.
It is an optimism based on little more than his own enduring faith, a sucker’s belief as trusting as Charlie Brown running to kick the ball one more time before Lucy’s inevitable betrayal.
Case in point: One week earlier, the Browns were hosting the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Steelers were playing terribly. It was a cold and rainy afternoon at Cleveland Browns Stadium, and with five minutes left in the game the Browns were up 20-10. It wasn’t the Super Bowl – there would be no Super Bowl this year for Cleveland Browns fans – but victory over the Steelers . . . that was almost as good.
“We had it,” King says. “I mean, we were going to win. No question, lock it up, put it down. Goodnight Pittspuke.”
Pittspuke. The enemy. The evil team in black and gold. Everything the Browns have always wanted to be: winners. Since 1950, the year the Browns entered the National Football League, these two teams have fought for supremacy in the American rust belt, and since then it’s usually been the Steelers atop the pile. Separated by a mere 134 miles, the two cities are remarkably similar in their histories and demographics. The fates of their football teams, however, could not be more different. The Steelers have won both times the two met in the playoffs and, more painfully for Browns fans, Pittsburgh’s five Super Bowl victories are five more than Cleveland’s.
“I’m not sure rivalry’s the right word any more,” The Browns Guy says with a laugh. “More like hate and…”
He pauses. His voice turns bitter. “Hate and envy. They’ve won. We haven’t.”
Growing up in Cleveland you learn to live with defeat. You spend your life surrounded by factories closing and people moving away. You learn your city’s population has been shrinking for the past seventy years, thanks in no small part to the mass exodus to the suburbs in the 1950s, the city’s race riots in the 1960s, and Mayor Dennis Kucinich defaulting on Cleveland’s debts in 1978. You read in the newspaper that your city has the highest poverty rate in America. You endure countless jokes from out-of-towners about how Lake Erie caught on fire, then suffer the embarrassment of having to explain that it wasn’t the lake but the Cuyahoga River. As if that’s somehow better. And if that’s not enough, your favorite teams, well, suck.
But you love them. More than anything. Companies come and go, but the team remains. Everything else may vanish, but the game is still on.
It’s no overstatement. Browns Backers Worldwide, Cleveland’s official football fan organization, boasts more than 48,000 active members – more than the New York Yankees, more than Manchester United, more than any other team in the world – with chapters established as far away as Branimirova, Croatia and Misawa, Japan. That the team has such a less-than-storied tradition speaks to the loyalty the team inspires.
“It’s the sports version of staying in an abusive relationship,” King says. “They knock us down more and we love them more.”
For people in most cities, the game ends and life goes on. For Browns fans and for people from Cleveland (which, the Browns Guy says, are one and the same), autumn Sundays run much deeper than that.
The problem, as King will readily tell you, is that one important being who is clearly not a fan. God, he will tell you, hates Cleveland sports.
To hear his version of it, there is no other possible explanation for the city’s long, sordid history of failures and near misses. Other teams get up and get better. Other fans are given something to cheer about. In Cleveland, you know better than to get your hopes up. When their teams take the field, it’s not a matter of hoping for victory; it’s a matter of hoping the natural order of the universe will somehow reverse itself.
Cleveland fans don’t romanticize this the way some other fanbases do. In Boston, they reveled in the Curse of the Bambino. Novelists and sportswriters around the country penned big wet kisses to Fenway Park. On the North Side of Chicago, Cubs fans will point with a defiant pride to the Curse of the Billy Goat, use it as a way to make losing lovable and to justify filling postcard-perfect Wrigley Field no matter how bad the team. But those cities have also experienced dynasties. From the Boston Bruins’ two Stanley Cups in the 1970s, to the Celtics’ three NBA championships in the 1980s, to the Chicago Bulls’ six NBA titles in the 1990s, to the New England Patriots’ three Super Bowl victories in this decade alone. A championship pennant now flaps over Fenway Park.
Yet somehow people still lavish sympathy on those cities and those “poor folks” who love those poor teams. Cleveland enjoys no such loving pity. The Cleveland fan is left to suffer in silence, penance for the sin of being born in a city whose history has earned it billing as “the mistake on the lake.”
No one pens poems about Jacobs Field and no one ever dreamed up a curse on which to blame the disappointments. God hates Cleveland sports, as The Browns Guy says, and history is all the evidence any Cleveland fan needs to prove it.
Ask and they shall tell you: About The Drive, where the Browns were five minutes away from going to the 1987 Super Bowl before the Denver Broncos pulled a “miraculous” come-from-behind victory.
About The Fumble, where this time those same Browns were one minute and two yards away from sending the 1988 AFC Championship game into overtime and watched it tumble away when Cleveland running back Ernest Byner fumbled, punching another Super Bowl ticket for the Broncos.
They’ll tell you about former Browns owner Art Modell shutting down the team in 1995, setting up shop in Baltimore, and giving that city a Super Bowl champion after only five years.
And they’re just getting started.
They’ll tell you how the Cavs have never won the NBA Championship. How twenty-eight other teams have won a World Series since the Indians did it last in 1948; about Super Joe’s bad back, John Smiley breaking his arm in the bullpen, or Jack McDowell’s elbow giving out once the Indians got ahold of him. Mark Price’s ACL. Red Right 88. Keith Foulke. Atlanta 1995. Ray Chapman. Kellen Winslow II. The Shot. Game 7 at the Palace.
And they’ll defy you to claim sports disasters of this magnitude happen this regularly to other cities. In the eye of the Clevelander.
And yet … for a few glorious hours that Sunday at the Cubby Bear, when the Browns had their foot on the Steelers’ neck, none of that mattered to King. Browns 20, Steelers 10. Five minutes to go. Start celebrating, he thought. He saw the happy looks and the high-fives, felt the warm feeling of good will spread through the room. People smiled, laughed. Chants erupted. One side of the room: “Here we go Brownies, here we go”; the other side responding: “Woof! Woof!” They knew they were going to win. Nothing, not even God Himself could ruin this one.
Well, it might not have been God — who knows? But something told the Browns defense to suddenly quit. Something lifted the Steelers and carried them 79 yards down the field. Something put that ball in Willie Parker’s hands and shoved him into the end zone.
Browns 20, Steelers 17.
Okay, King thought. No big deal. Four minutes left. Just run the clock and keep the damn ball and we’ve got this. He looked around. Doubt darkened faces that shined with delight only moments earlier. They had seen this movie before.
“Don’t worry,” he said, trying to rally them, “not even we can blow this one.”
Browns ball. Quarterback Charlie Frye is sacked. A short pass. An incompletion. A decent punt return. Suddenly, the Steelers’ had the ball again. Seventy-seven yards to the end zone. Three minutes to go.
King fell silent. Other fans held their head in their hands. A few prayed. Please God spare us thy divine wrath just this once.
Incomplete. Relief. Short pass. Incomplete. yes! Long pass. Oh God. Short pass. Oh please. Run. Pass. Pass. Run. Touchdown.
Twenty-seven seconds on the clock.
Browns 20, Steelers 24.
Un-friggin believable.
But fate wasn’t done twisting the knife. A few short passes put the Browns 22 yards away from a miracle victory of their own. Three seconds left. Charlie Frye took the snap, ran back, threw left to Braylon Edwards . . . and . . .
Game over.
Browns lose.
Browns lose.
The Browns Guy stood numbly, looking helplessly at the other fans. Tears filled the eyes of some. Others simply stood up and walked out. More than a few headed straight to the bar downstairs.
How? Why? Against this team, in this game?
The Browns Guy sat down without saying a word. His friends left him alone to contemplate the agony of what had happened. The Browns had blown it in the worst way possible. To the goddamned Steelers.
King had always defended his team, no matter how painful the loss. And he had always come back for more. Charlie Brown. But this time, this was it. No more. “I couldn’t stand the thought that this was what the rest of my life was going to be like if I stuck with this team,” he says.
He half-watched the rest of the afternoon’s games, then decided it was time to go. Enough was enough. As dusk gathered, he bid goodbye to a few friends. He decided to walk home. His mind flashed to the pictures and souvenirs there, the books and T-shirts and all the other reminders of a life spent devoted to heartbreak. No reason to hurry back to that, he thought.
Walking down Clark Street, he saw a young man with his arm around a young woman. Both wore Cleveland Browns sweatshirts. Both had obviously been crying. King and the couple stopped, exchanged a knowing glance, and kept moving.
Any other day running across a Browns fan and he would have stopped and chatted. But not after that. What was there to say? ‘Wow, we sure fucked it up today.’ No thanks,” King says.
When he reached his apartment, King did not turn on the TV. He did not call any of his friends or his family. He made himself dinner, then sat alone in the quiet of his apartment. The questions continued to torment him. How could this be? How did the Browns manage to lose a game that even the Browns couldn’t lose? Why did it have to be against Pittsburgh? Does anything good ever happen?
And the big one: now what? “It was just like ‘is there any point in this? What am I getting out of this any more?’ You root, you cheer, you believe and you spend your life just wanting to see this team win and instead all you get is people crying in the streets!”
He went to bed early that night, too weary to do much of anything else.The next morning, he called his boss.
“I’m not coming in today,” he said. “Personal reasons.” He turned over and went back to sleep, wrapped tightly in the bedding he had received for his last birthday – brown, orange and white.
That day he watched old NFL Films videos about the Browns. He flipped through books about the teams and players he grew up loving. He read the flaming posts on Browns message boards.
“I’m burning my jerseys,” one person wrote, words that resonated. He himself had thought about torching his beloved Bernie Kosar jersey.
He tried to find something positive in all of this. He wanted to think that it would get better, that this was just an isolated incident. But then he thought back to those previous disasters and realized it was pointless. No good could come from sticking with this team, he thought. They were going to keep letting him down and only a sucker would keep going back for more. Charlie Brown. He was done.
Wednesday morning, he called in sick again as he sank into another day of wallowing in grief and pain. Friends and relatives kept calling and e-mailing. He ignored them.
And suddenly, like a bolt of orange and brown lightning, the answer hit him.
“I started thinking about everyone who wanted to talk. They wanted to talk about what happened and make sure [I was] okay,” King says. “I mean, I’m sitting in my apartment hurting so bad over this, but guess what? So is everyone else. It’s not just me. Everyone felt that game. Everyone hurt from it.” Like any great loss in life, he says, you get through with the support of your loved ones, of your family and of your friends. Like the ones he’d been ignoring, forgetting he was not alone in his misery.
The family and friends that were looking for him were the same family and friends he had spent his entire Browns-backing life with. Family members he had little else in common with but blood and football. Friends he would go on vacations with to watch their favorite team hit the field. The people he had built a life with based around the one passion at the center.
The Browns were the link between King and his loved ones, and suddenly he understood that it wasn’t about the game (well, maybe just a little) but about what the game brought to those watching. Joy. Heartbreak. Bonding. Shared good times and cherished memories. The Browns were his connection to the people and the city he had once called home.
“My mom and dad, my grandpa and grandma, my uncles and aunts,” he adds later, “all Browns fans all the way. Everyone in town is.”
He went into his kitchen, sat down at his computer, and started getting back to those e-mails. No, he hadn’t disappeared. No, he hadn’t done something unspeakable. No, he hadn’t given up on the Browns.
Later that evening he called his father in Ohio. “I’m fine dad,” King recalls telling him. Then “Dad, how are you doing?” They talked into the night about the team, about the game, about the hated Steelers. By the time he hung up the phone, it all made sense to him. Don’t worry about the game; worry about everyone watching it with you. He wondered why it took him so long to realize this.
And no, he didn’t believe in the team anymore, at least not this year, not when they had just fallen into a distant last place with five games left. But that didn’t matter because yes, he would be at the Cubby Bear next Sunday. Big game against the Bengals. The Battle of Ohio, they called it. He wouldn’t miss it for the world.
“Besides,” he says, “what was I going to do? Root for the Dolphins?”
And, true to his word, he got here bright and early today, back in his trusty Bernie Kosar jersey and already making bold statements as to what would happen on the field this afternoon.
“We’re gonna win,” he announces brazenly at kickoff. As the afternoon progresses, he and the Browns Backers watch as the Bengals hand their beloved team a brutal 30-0 loss, but this time King knows he’ll be okay. No need to cry, he tells everyone. We’ll get ‘em next time.
And eventually, he still insists, they will. Until then, it’s a matter not of looking back but instead looking forward. To next week. To next year. To the next time one fan’s faith in their favorite team is finally rewarded.
