This is the start of a rough, sad nearly two-month-long period for Cleveland sports fans, especially the longtime ones who renember black and white TV, rotary-dial phones and cars with big fins.
Tuesday is the 67th anniversary of the end, in essence, of Indians pitcher Herb Score’s promising career almost before it really got started. It was on May 7, 1957 — coincidentally so in a Tuesday night game at Cleveland Stadium — that he got hit in the eye by a line drive off the bat of New York Yankees shortstop Gil McDougald at Cleveland Stadium.
Score’s career was off to a blazing start — literally and figuratively. With possibly the best fast ball in the game, the left-handed strikeout machine was 36-19 in his first two seasons with Cleveland and might have been headed to the Hall of Fame. He was never the same.
Ten days from now will mark the 61st anniversary of one of the darkest days not just in Browns history, but that of the NFL as well. It was on May 17, 1963 that running back Ernie Davis passed away from leukemia without ever even practicing. He arrived in Cleveland in a trade with Washington after that team drafted him No. 1 overall in the 1962 NFL Draft. The Browns gave up another running back, Bobby Mitchell, to get him. Mitchell was switched to wide receiver by Washington and went on to be enshrined into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
How good would Davis have been with the Browns, being paired in the backfield with the greatest player in the game’s history in Jim Brown? That’s obviously impossible to say, exactly, but consider this: en route to become the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy when he did so as a senior in 1961, he broke all of Brown’s records at Syracuse.
So . . .
Davis was one of three members of the Browns who died between the 1962 and ‘63 seasons. There was also Tom Bloom, a back from Purdue who was a sixth-round draft choice in 1962. He died in a car accident on a stretch of icy pavement on I-70, near Dayton, on Jan. 18, 1963 while going back to school after visiting back home in Weir, W. Va. The other was safety Dan Fleming, who was electrocuted in a construction accident in Florida two weeks after Davis’s death, on June 4. A native of tiny Shadyside, Ohio, he was a real up-and-coming player for the Browns, having made some all pro teams in his third season of 1962.
Another talented Browns safety a generation later also tragically passed way before his time. It was nearly 38 years ago, on June 4, 1986, that Don Rogers died of a cocaine overdose at his bachelors party on the evening before he was to have been married. Rogers played only two seasons after being drafted in the first round in 1986, but he was able to display his all-around skills, being a real ballhawk while also hitting like a sledgehammer. Had he lived, then The Drive likely would never have happened because Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway would not have dared to throw, or run it himself, into the middle of the field, which he worked heavily on that 15-play, 98-yard touchdown march to tie the 1986 AFC Championship Game and force overtime, with the Browns finally losing 23-20.
Steve King
