The recent deaths of former Cleveland Indians infielder Andy Marte and Kansas City Royals pitcher Yordano Ventura, both last Sunday in the Dominican Republic, are a stark reminder that pro athletes, while they perform some seemingly superhuman feats, are not superhuman. They’re not immortal.

Instead, they’re just like the rest of us.

They get hurt. They bleed. They even die.

Longtime followers of the Browns know that.

In one of the major tragic offseasons that any team in any pro sport has ever had, the Browns in 1963 lost three players.

It started on Jan. 18 of that year when Tom Bloom, a two-way back from Purdue who was taken in the sixth round of the 1963 NFL Draft, was killed along with his two passengers in an auto accident on Interstate 70 near Dayton while returning to school after a trip to his home in Weirton, WV. The 21-year-old, who was the Boilermakers’ most valuable player as a senior, never played a down for the Browns. Moreover, he never got to meet any of his new teammates.

Four months later – to the day – on May 18, 1963, the most celebrated of the trio, running back Ernie Davis, succumbed to leukemia. He was 22.

The Browns had traded future Pro Football Hall of Famer Bobby Mitchell to Washington for the rights to Davis, a bruising runner from Syracuse who had been drafted by the Redskins at No. 1 overall in 1962. He never played a down for the Browns, either. He became ill in the 1962 training camp and missed all of that season, then kept getting progressively worse.

Davis, who became the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy, had broken most of Jim Brown’s rushing records at Syracuse. He would have been paired with Brown in the Cleveland backfield.

Then only 17 days later, on June 4, 1963 Don Fleming, an up-and-coming safety who had played three seasons (1960-62) for the Browns after being acquired in a trade with the Chicago Cardinals, died in a construction accident in Florida. He was just seven days short of his 26th birthday.

Fleming was an Ohio kid, having played at tiny Shadyside High School along the Ohio River in Belmont County. His brother, Ty Fleming, played basketball at Kent State and was the boys basketball coach at Woodridge High School in Cuyahoga Falls for a time.

Fleming’s No. 46 and the No. 45 that had been assigned to Davis, are two of the five jersey numbers retired by the Browns.