Just like pro baseball and pro basketball, pro football has become a worldwide sport in every respect.

 

One of those aspects is the fact that NFL teams now look beyond the borders of the U.S. for players. And, using all of today’s technological advances that enable us to communicate with anybody and everybody, no matter where they live, they find them. It’s not uncommon at all for clubs to have players who are far from being “home” grown.

 

That’s a far cry from the way things were back in the day. When every facet of our lives was regional because that’s all the farther the scope of our communication abilities went, pro football teams’ ability to scout players was limited, too.

 

Keep in mind that teams used to bring to the NFL Draft a copy of Street & Smith’s College Football Guide to acquaint themselves with players of other parts of the country. They had never seen those players, let alone scouted them. Some of them were at colleges three time zones away, for goodness sakes.

 

As such, most, if not all, teams had many players who lived in the region in which the team was based. The coaches were from that region, too – the owners had seen them coach, so that’s why they hired them – and they drafted and signed the players they knew, or had watched play. It was a tightknit circle.

 

The early Browns – the teams beginning at the very beginning in 1946 when they were formed and began play in the All-America Football Conference and continuing all the way up until at late as the early 1960s, ending in 1964 with the capturing of the last of the franchise’s eight league championships– were right at the forefront of that, just as they were right in the forefront of most of the trends in the game back then.

 

So the coaches from places like Massillon (head coach Paul Brown), Canal Fulton and Louisville, were signing players from Cleveland, Columbus, Akron, Massillon, Canton, Cuyahoga Falls, Hudson, Martins Ferry and Shadyside.

 

So they really were the Cleveland Browns, and in fact they could have been the Ohio Browns.

 

But the heart of it was within a short distance of Brown’s hometown of Massillon, located about 70 minutes south of Cleveland. Brown’s family moved to Massillon early in his life and he quarterbacked the Massillon High School teams in the early 1920s. He returned there in 1932 to begin a nine-year stint as head coach, turning the Tigers into the dominant prep program in the country and establishing an iconic tradition that still exists today.

 

Canton, located adjacent to Massillon to the east, was – and remains — the Tigers’ arch rival in the person of the McKinley Bulldogs. About 15 minutes southeast of Canton was Magnolia, a tiny, pin-dot of a town. Despite its size, it produced middle linebacker Vince Costello, a great player in what could be called the second wave of “Paul’s Boys,” those who came to the team in the era from about 1954-60 as those from the first clubs were retiring and Brown was replentishing and restocking the cupboard.

 

Costello played six-man football (a center, a quarterback, two halfbacks and two ends) at Magnolia High School, which is now part of the Sandy Valley school system that straddles Stark and Tuscarawas counties. Even though he didn’t have the perfect resume for college football in coming from a small high school and playing an unconventional type of game, he went on to star at Ohio University. He caught Brown’s eye – guys who played at out-of the-way high schools and then at colleges in Ohio always caught Brown’s eye – and was signed by the coach when he graduated in 1956.

 

Costello reported to training camp that summer but wasn’t able to participate much. He was a great baseball player, too, and had signed with the Cincinnati Reds in 1953. He suffered a hamstring injury in baseball that really limited him in football.

 

But Brown believed strongly in Costello and wasn’t going to let something relatively minor like an injury he knew would heal just fine in time, dissuade him from making him a defensive focal point on the “new” Browns” he was building. So Brown told Costello to come back to camp in 1957, which he did, and when healthy, he made the kind of impression the coach knew he would. Brown installed him as a starter as a rookie – something the coach, who greatly valued experience, was always hesitant to do – and that allowed Walt Michaels, a Cleveland Browns Legend (the team’s hall of fame), just like Costello, to move back back to his natural position of right linebacker after a one-year stint in the middle.

 

Costello wasted no time in proving to everyone that Brown made the right move. Along with Michaels and the rest of the defense, the Browns opened the 1957 season at home by shutting down the offense of arch rival New York Giants, winning 6-3 over a team that had won the NFL Championship Game just nine months before with a 47-7 pounding of the Chicago Bears. The Browns beat the Giants twice that year, in fact, en route to advancing to the league title game.

 

Costello remained as the starter at middle linebacker for 10 seasons, through 1966, and was a key member of that 1964 club that overwhelmed the powerful – and heavily-favored – Baltimore Colts 27-0 to claim the championship.

 

It is not a coincidence that Costello played in both of those games, once at the start of his career and one near the end.

 

To this day, when you ask Costello about that Colts game, he gets emotional. He insists the better team won that day, and said there was never any doubt in his and his teammates’ minds that they would win.

 

And, not surprisingly, Costello remains a big Paul Brown guy.

 

Magnolia is no bigger than a neighborhood in Massillon. So while Brown plucked a plum from a tiny town, he was able to pluck three from the much bigger Massillon – cornerback/safety Tommy James, left linebacker/left defensive end Jim Houston and punter/tight end Horace Gillom, all of whom are Browns Legends.

 

There was a time when the football gold standard in Ohio was playing for Massillon High School, then Ohio State and finally the Browns. All of them were at the top of their game then. Championships were attainable, and turned into a reality.

 

James and Gillom played for Brown at Massillon, Ohio State and the Browns. They both won state championships with the Tigers, James was on the 1942 Ohio State team that captured the first of the school’s seven national titles (Gillom played on the freshman team in 1941 but had to drop out because of grades and ended up going to Nevada-Reno) and both earned pro championships in Cleveland (Gillom and James from 1947-50 and 1954 and ’55, while Gillom also won in 1947).

 

James was a 125-pounder – soaking wet – who earned a spot on Brown’s Massillon teams because of his speed, toughness and smarts, the three qualities that were found in most of the coach’s players throughout his career. He took great pride in beating the odds at each level, proving that despite his size, he had what it took to play well and become a champion.

 

James admitted in later years that he was hurt – really hurt – when, in his final two pro seasons in 1954 and ’55, Brown contended that he had slowed down and as such moved him to safety. James didn’t agree. He thought he was still fast enough to play cornerback. He felt betrayed by his lifetime coach.

 

But he still loved Brown and was so proud to have played for him at three different stops.

 

When James, who was a Massillon guy through and through in being a lifelong resident of the community, passed away in 2007, his funeral was held just a mile from where he had played at what is now known at Paul Brown Tiger Stadium. Hanging next to his casket were his uniforms from Massillon, Ohio State and Cleveland. That said volumes.

 

Houston didn’t play for Brown at either Massillon or Ohio State, but his older brother, Lin, did. In fact, Lin Houston went on to be a right guard on Brown’s first eight Cleveland teams.

 

Jim Houston was fiercely proud of what his brother did, and of the fact he was able to follow in his footsteps at all three stops, making the Houstons the only brother combination to have played for the Browns. Jim Houston, Cleveland’s first-round choice, at No. 8 overall, in the 1960 NFL Draft, was a much better player than his brother. But he will never admit it. His brother was – and still is — his hero.

 

Just as Jim and Lin Houston, Horace Gillom and Tommy James are forever heroes in Massillon, showing generations of Tigers that they can get where they want to go in their careers if they work hard enough and the stars are aligned in the right way, and just as Vince Costello is the same kind of hero for kids in Magnolia.

 

And all these years later, they remain heroes – legends, and Legends – in Cleveland.