Fleming was on his way to being a star with the Browns

By STEVE KING

When it comes to three Browns players who died in a 4 1/2-month period in 1963 in the worst offseason for any team in sports history, everybody — or most everybody, anyway — knows all about running back Ernie Davis.
And that’s certainly understandable.
Davis, whose passing on May 17 due to complications from leukemia made his the middle death of the three players. During his senior season at Syracuse in 1961, he became the first African American to win the Heisman Trophy. He broke most of Jim Brown’s rushing records at the school — which is incredible in its own right since Brown was recently ranked as the greatest college football player of all-time — and was the No. 1 overall pick in the 1962 NFL Draft, hand-picked by what is now the Washington Football Team to break the color barrier and be its first Black player. 
Indeed, there was a reason why the Elmira, N.Y. native was nicknamed “The Elmira Express.”
Davis, all these decades later, still has such a high profile that there was a movie made about him back in 2008, appropriately named “The Express.”
Davis never played a down for the Browns, and neither did the first of the three players to die, Tom Bloom, a back from Purdue who was drafted by the club in the sixth round in 1963. Bloom passed away when the car he was driving crashed on an icy stretch of Interstate71 near Dayton on Jan. 18.
But safety Don Fleming, the third and final player to die that offseason, did have a history — a short though notable and very promising one — with the Browns. And he had strong Ohio ties.
Friday is the 58th anniversary of his death. It was on June 4, 1963, just 2 1/2 weeks after the passing of Davis and but a week short of his 26th birthday, that Fleming was killed when a cable of the crane he was operating while on a construction job in Winter Park, Fla. touched a power line. He and a co-worker were electrocuted.
Ironically, the Browns had announced earlier that day that Fleming, a Shadyside, Ohio native who had played three seasons with the Browns since arriving from the Chicago Cardinals in a 1960 trade, and his close friend and former teammate at the University of Florida, cornerback Bernie Parrish, had signed their 1963 contracts with the club.
It was Parrish who went to Browns head coach Paul Brown and urged him to make a trade to get Fleming, an obscure 28th-round draft pick in 1959, at No. 327 overall, who refused to report to the Cardinals and had no intention of playing for them. Brown listened and made the trade, and he was glad he did, for Fleming went on to become the starter at left safety as a rookie in 1960, intercepting five passes, the third-highest total on the Browns. He had a combined total of five picks the next two years, and made the All-NFL team, as selected by The Sporting News, in what turned out to be his final season of 1963. He was on track to become a great player.
Years later, in an emotional interview with Parrish while I was working for the Browns, he admitted he never got over Fleming’s passing.
Fleming and his wife, Rosalie, a native of Wheeling, W. Va., just across the Ohio River from Shadyside, had a one-year-old son.
“Don certainly was a good football player, but beyond that, he was a fine man,” Browns General Manager Harold Sauerbrei said. “His devotion to his family and his teammates was a wonderful thing to see.”
The Browns sent a large contingent to Fleming’s funeral in Shadyside, where, on a steamy-hot late- spring day, a huge crowd braved the conditions to line the route to the cemetery.
The football field at Shadyside High School, where Don starred in the early 1950s, is named Fleming Field in his honor. His younger brother, Ty, worked in Northeast Ohio for a while, serving as the head boys basketball coach at Woodridge High School in what is now Cuyahoga Falls in the 1980s before resigning to go back to Shadyside to become head football coach.
During the time that Fleming played for the Browns, in 1961, another Shadyside native and a man fans have certainly heard of, Gib Shanley, was hired to be the team’s radio play-by-play voice and the sports director at Cleveland’s WEWS (Channel 5). He called Browns games for 24 seasons.
One other note is that Tom Bloom grew up not far from Fleming in Weirton, W. Va.,playing at Weirton High School. He had been home and was on his way back to the Purdue campus when he was killed.