As silly as it sounds — and it sounds extraordinarily silly, especially looking back on it now — but in covering the Browns all those years, first as the beat writer for two sister newspapers in the Medina County Gazette and Elyria Chronicle-Telegram and then for the team’s website, ClevelandBrowns.com — I was with most of the other media people in that we eventually got used to being around almost all of these well-known personalities, including past and present players and coaches.

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Notice I said “almost all,” for there were some exceptions — at least for me.

Most of them were the Browns from the past.

Jim Brown.

Otto Graham.

Lou Groza.

Dante Lavelli.

Bobby Mitchell.

Well, you get the picture.

I was in way over me head. I was intimidated. I was in awe.

Yeah, being around true greatness will do that to a person.

Bill Willis was a member of that select group. Oh, man, was he ever!

When I was working for the Browns, they invited back a lot of the former stars to do “Where are they now?”interviews. Willis was among them. In the fall of 2005, a couple years before he passed away, two of his sons drove him from his home in Columbus to a hotel in Downtown Cleveland where we set up in a conference room.

He and I were sitting 18 inches apart in bar stool-type chairs. He was a true gentlemen and one of the kindest people I’ve ever met, so if he noticed my extreme nervousness, he didn’t say anything about it. My knees were literally shaking. I was afraid I was going to fall off my chair. It was as if one of the statues in a museum had come to life, climbed down off the display stand and walked over to talk to me.

And he was the one who had just turned 84 years old. He looked to be in great shape, cool as a cucumber, as they say. Me? Maybe not so much.

I questioned Willis on a lot of things regarding his incredible and historic eight-year career with the Browns from 1946-53 and life thereafter, and he offered complete, well-thought-out and insightful responses.

Eventually, I got to the 1950 playoff game with the New York Giants that we’ve centered this series on, and his game-saving tackle of running back Gene “Choo-Choo” Roberts in which he somehow caught from behind the fastest player in the NFL.

He immediately sat up in his chair, his eyes now twinkling and a broad smile on his face. He had suddenly been energized, pumped with adrenaline. Now he was into the interview even more — a lot more, in fact. The sweet memories of the signature play of his career had flooded back into his head, and heart.

“You know about that play?!,” he exclaimed.

I said I did, and offered a few details that proved to him I was telling the truth.

Willis repeated his comment from the locker room following the game 55 years ago that he was able to make the play because he saw Roberts running away carrying not a football, but rather a bag of money he felt belonged to him.

What had been a delightful interview, became even more so.

Of all the interviews I’ve ever done, that one was one of the best, if not the very best.

When the intetview was over and he got ready to head back home, I had the distinct feeling that he had enjoyed the session as much as I and my Browns.com teammates did, and that he felt it had been well worth all his time and effort to do it.

I thought about all that on a bitterly cold, late November morning two years later as I sat in a big church on Broad Street in Downtown Columbus covering his funeral as part of a contingent from the Browns. I was so glad we had done that interview because now his big play — an optical illusion — would be frozen in time forever.

Steve King

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