THE FIFTH — AND LAST — PART OF OUR BROWNS 250 SERIES
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the last in a five-part series entitled, “250 for 250, Browns Style.” It includes items Nos. 201 through 250.
By STEVE KING
201) — When former Browns head coach Sam Rutigliano turned 95 on Wednesday, it did not go unnoticed by the rest of the world. His wife of over 72 years, Barbara, said their phone rang off the hook all day with people calling to wish him a happy birthday. One was from a Browns fan in Guam with whom Rutigluano had connected.
202) — Rutigluano is, of course, one of only two Browns head coaches of the original franchise era who are still alive. The other is Bill Belichick. They could not be more different from one another.
203) — Sam has some memory issues but is otherwise healthy, his wife points out. “We used to go for a ride in the car a lot, but now we mostly stay home and take walks around the yard,” she explained. “But that’s fine. We count our blessings from God, and there are many of them. There’s that line from General (Douglas) MacArthur, ‘Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.’ Well, it’s also true for old football coaches. They never die, either. They just fade away.” Now it’s Mrs. Rutigliano delivering the good lines.
204) — One of the things about which Sam is most proud is that the Browns, 45 years ago in the early 1980s, were the first NFL team to have any kind of anti-drug program for players dealing with addictions. Theirs was called the Inner Circle.
205) — Sam has never revealed which players were in the program. “If I told you the names, you would be surprised,” he once told me. “But I’m not going to tell you.” One time, I threw some names out there and Sam just looked at me without saying a word. Was i corrrct on some of my guesses? I don’t know, and even if I did, I wouldn’t say anything, either. That stuff should remain private. Those men don’t deserve to have their their lives disrupted by being connected to something that happened that long ago.
206) — In 1985, the season following his firing by the Browns, Rutigliano became a game analyst for NBC’s NFL telecasts. He did a great job and held held it down for several years. A coaches’ perspective is always great to listen to in any sport, but especially football, where there is so much strategy involved.
207) — Sam’s best call, at least as far as I am concerned, was in a 1987 Browns game against the Cincinnati Bengals in Cleveland. Linebacker Clay Matthews intercepted a Boomer Esiason pass and returned it down the sideline 36 yards, and when he was running out of gas, he lateraled it to defensive tackle “Big Daddy” Carl Hairston, who, for some reason, was able to trail the play. Hairston raced 40 more yards down the field until he also ran out of gas. It was one of the funniest plays in Browns history. Sam broke it down piece by piece how it happened and why it happened. It was really good stuff.
208) — The interesting thing about that play, and it’ll tell you just how good of an offensive coordinator Lindy Infante was, is that there was a photo that ran in the Cleveland Plain Dealet of Hairston barreling down the sideline in front of the Cleveland bench after taking the lateral. Everybody is hooting and hollering, but there in all the middle of it is Infante, who is already looking down at his play sheets to try to figure out some calls that he can make once Hairston is tackled.
209) — Just like the offensive production of Brian Sipe tailed off when quarterbacks coach Jim Shofner left after the 1980 season to become the offensive coordinator of the Houston Oilers, the Browns offense struggled in a lot of different ways in the 1988 season after Infante left to become head coach of the Green Bay Packers.
210) — The 1988 season was, of course, the one in which the Browns lost their starting quarterback to injury five different times. You have to wonder if Infante had stayed, would the Browns have gotten to the Super Bowl. When the 1988 season began, they were the odds-on favorite to come out of the AFC. The injuries and the struggles of the offense kept those dreams of from ever materializing.
211) — Following the season, when head coach Marty Schottenheimer, after turning in his best coaching performance, still getting the team into the playoffs as a wild card despite all the injuries at quarterback, parted ways with the Browns. That was where things started to go sideways for the Browns in the Bernie Kosar era of the last half of the 1980s.
212) — One of my all-time favorite Browns is wide receiver Keenan McCardell. He played for head coach Bill Belichick in the early 1990s. McCardell made play every day in practice, but Belichick didn’t believe in him and really wouldn’t give him a chance. He had great hands and was a very good individual. He never complained. When When McCardell left the Browns and went to the Jacksonville Jaguars, his stats went through the roof.
213) — McCardell ended up playing 17 seasons in the NFL and had 883 receptions. He is now the wide receivers coach for the Minnesota Vikings.
214) — Belichick is the best coach of all-time and is a tremendous evaluator of talent. But even those guys make mistakes. It is not an exact science.
215) — The loudest visiting stadium I was ever in while covering the Browns? That’s easy, it was the Houston Astrodome during Oilers games. The place was so loud that you couldn’t hear yourself think. And with the roof on the place, that sound had nowhere to go. It just kept reverberating and bouncing around.
216) — The worst stadium I was ever in while covering the Browns? The Kingdome in Seattle. The place had absolutely no personality at all. It was as if the Seahawks were playing in a big huge warehouse. It was really drab.
217) — The coolest stadium I was ever in while on Browns beat was the Los Angeles Memorial Coluseum when the Raiders were there. There was so much history in that place. You could just feel it and sense it as you walked in. The facility was built for the 1932 Summer Olympics.
218) — It was interesting during games at Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. Riverfront Stadium and Three Rivers Stadium both opened in 1970. They were basically the same stadium. The Rooneys kept up Three Rivers right until the day they left it for the new place. It was still in pretty good shape. Meanwhile, the Brown family just let its stadium deteriorate to the point that when it rained hard, it leaked like a sieve into the press box.
219) — The origjnal Browns had only two trainers during their 50-year existence. The first was Leo Murphy and the man who succeeded him was Bill Tessendorf. Both were great guys. One time in Philadelphia, my glasses just broke apart. I wouldn’t have been able to see the field without having them fixed, and Publicist Kevin Byrne was able to get them fixed through Tessendorf, who took time out of his game preparation and use medical tape to fix them up. I doubt that anything like that would happen today, but the league was different then. I owe Tessendorf and Byrne a great deal of thanks.
220) — The Browns’ first equipment man was Morrie Kono. He and Leo Murphy would help each other, Kono assisting with the training duties and Murphy assisting with the equipment duties. Murphy would tell some incredible stories about the early days.
221) — When Dick MacPherdon left his job as a Browns assistant coach to become the head coach at Syracuse, he did a really cool thing. Syracuse’s colors are orange and blue. He designed the Syracuse uniforms to look like those of the Kardiac Kids, only with a blue tint to them instead of a brown tint. Those remained the uniforms for a long time, with that plain orange helmet.
222) — When the Browns started 80 years ago, in 1946, I would have to believe that even the most optimistic of people in the organization, including those such as head coach Paul Brown and owner Mickey McBride, never thought in their wildest dreams that the team would still be active in 2026. The Browns and the other teans in the All-American Football Conference were just trying to get through 1946, and if they could do that, then they would look to 1947. And after that, they would concentrate on 1948. Nothing was guaranteed, absolutely nothing.
223) — The 80th anniversary of the Browns’ first preseason game will come in a little less than two months. It occurred Aug. 30, 1946, when the Browns defeated the Brooklyn Dodgers 35-20 at the Rubber Bowl in Akron.
224) — The Browns had a strong tie to Akron and the Rubber Bowl for a great portion of those early years. Akron was the second-biggest market other than Cleveland, and the Browns wanted to make sure to be able to promote themselves in that area.
225) — In fact, the first Browns game I ever saw in person was in the preseason at the Runber Bowl on Sept. 22, 1964 when the eventual NFL champions routed the Pittsburgh Steelers 42-7. The highlight of the game was when Frank Ryan threw a 99-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Clifton “Sticks” McNeil..
226) — Toledo was also a prime market for the Browns in those early days, and they played several games there in the preseason.
227) — To this day, Akron and Toledo remain very much a part of the Browns’ marketing area. Canton is in there as well.
228) — The Browns played six preseason games for much of the time in those first couple of decades, and in fact, for one year, 1956, they played seven preseason games that included the annual contest against the College All-Stars, as the Browns were the defending NFL champions.
229) — The doubleheader preseason games, in which two other teams would play in the first game and the Browns would face an opponent in the second game, lasted throughout the 1960s. It was an ingenious idea at the time and worked very well for a number of years. Give credit to Art Modell. Really. At least in that respect.
230) — I have said this once, and I will say it again and again and again, that when it comes to Modell, he did a lot of things very well, but when you move the team in a sneaky way, it just ruins all the good that you ever did. I got along with him fine, but I will never forgive him for moving that team. And I will never forgive the officials in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County who sat back and did nothing so that it created an atmosphere for it all to happen.
231) — Before the move was announced midway through the 1995 season, the owners of the rest of the teams in the league were advised by Modell that something like this was in the works. One of those teams was the Seattle Seahawks who had a top executive by the name of Mike McCormack, who was a Pro Foitball Hall of Fame right tackle for the Browns. He gets this unbelievable news, and he can’t tell anyone about it. He was sick to his stomach. His Browns were moving, but there was nothing that he could do to stop it. He called it a low point in his front-office career.
232) — To this day, the people in Baltimore can’t understand why Browns fans were so upset with them. I find that unfathomable. Browns fans were supportive and did nothing that would cause Modell to move. What were they supposed to do, just stand there and take it?Not hardly!
233) — Goodness, that was 31 years ago. Hss it really been that long? That is hard to believe.
234) — What would’ve happened if the move was never made and the original franchise had stayed in Cleveland? In what condition would the Browns be now? I really don’t know.
235) — Would Bill Belichick had remained coach of the Browns if the team had stayed in Cleveland? Who knows?
236) — For years and years and years, the Browns played their home games at 1 o’clock on Sunday and the Ohio State Buckeyes played their home games at 1:30 on Saturday. The NFL is doing everything it can to eliminate as many of the 1 o’clock games as possible because it wants to get more games into primetime. And the Buckeyes may never again play a home game at 1:30. The powers that be want to move those games to primetime, too. It just shows you how much both college and pro football have changed.
237) — Do you think the Browns, or any other NFL team,’for that matter, will ever have a female head coach? At some point, I think it will happen for both the Browns and other teams in the league, but I don’t think that will be for quite a while.
238) — Think about it, what better way for women to get interested in the game than to have a woman as a head coach? But they will have to work their way up the ladder before that happens. Women are going to have to serve in a lot of assistant coaching capacities.
239) — I wonder how ppmany countries with teams in the World Cup will someday have NFL franchises? That, too, will come, but it’s just going to take time to get to that point. The groundwork has been laid for some time niow. That movement is in full swing.
240) — I absolutely love Brownie the elf. I hope they never remove him as a logo for the team. I’m glad they brought him back. He is really cool.
241) — Brownie the elf is a lot like Obie, the Massillon High School mascot dating back to the 1930s. That’s the coolest high school mascot I’ve ever seen, a tiger with a letter sweater running with a football while wearing a leather helmet. It doesn’t get any better than that.
242) — One of the sad things is that most of the players off the 1964 NFL championship team have passed on. When that happens, you know that it’s been way too long since you won a championship. It is something that the Browns are going to have to deal with until they actually do it.
243) — Just think, in 1995 Modell and the city fathers couldn’t agree on getting a new stadium. Now, just 31 years later, the Browns are going to be moving into a dome. Wow, talk about the landscape changing relatively quickly.
244) — I wonder how much history about the Browns head coach Todd Monken knows. I guess I could also ask how much does he care about Browns history. If he delivers a championship, then it won’t matter, but I think with him being in his early 60s, he probably knows quite a bit of it. That will serve him well at press conferences and such with talking intelligently about things long-term with the Browns.
245) — The country was 170 years old when the Browns came into existence. I wonder if that thought crossed anybody’s mind at the time. I seriously doubt it. Why would it?
246) — Going back to Monken, if he delivers that title, as mentioned, then they ought to build a statue of him outside the stadium. I say that more seriously than jokingly, for that would obviously be huge.
247) — There were so many World War II veterans on those early Browns teams. Their efforts in risking their lives to defend this country are why the Browns and the NFL exist. Those men are looked upon by Browns fans as being heroes for what they did on the football field, but their bigger role as heroes is what they did on the ill battlefield.
248) — I hope in that new stadium that there is plenty of attention given to Browns history through the years and all those players and coaches who built this franchise. If there is not, then they are going to be a lot of people upset about it. I would be in that group. I will
just tell you that right now.
249) — The worst years for, perhaps many of you as well, were 1996, 1997 and 1998 when the Browns existed only on a piece of paper. That they came back in 1999 is wonderful, and I will take that and even all the rotten stuff that has happened since then, in terms of them not winning, over not having a team at all. You can always make a team better if it exists, but if you’re not in the league, then what are you going to do?
250) — Well, here we are at the end. The country is 250 years old and the Browns are 80 years old. Experience comes with age. A lot of great stories can be told about both. These are just some of the stories, and I know all of you have your own. I hope you appreciated reading mine and that you got something out of this series. More importantly, I’m just glad that you’re in this country and enjoying all the freedom it offers. The country is not perfect, but it’s the most perfect thing out there. Thank you for your continued support of this website. We will take some time off for a little bit, and we will be back soon. Enjoy the Fourth of July.
Steve King
