Give Browns owner Jimmy Haslam credit for taking the high road and not throwing the team’s former quarterback, Johnny Manziel, under the bus.
Also give Haslam credit for handing kudos to others – in this case, his wife, Dee, and Browns head coach Hue Jackson – for the idea.
Give Haslam credit, too, for his self-inflicted playful jab by saying, “ Like most ideas that I come up with, I got them from somebody else so that’s really where that came from.”
And finally – and perhaps most importantly — give Haslam credit for making us laugh.
Indeed, it’s never a bad thing to laugh.
It all happened Sunday during Haslam’s annual opening-of-training-camp press conference, in which the owner, as predicted here the other day, distinguished himself very well.
Haslam was asked how much the circus atmosphere that surrounded Manziel the past two years impacted the Haslams sharing a pre-camp message with the team to eliminate distractions:
“Almost none,” Haslam said. “There is no denying that (distractions) were there, but almost none.
“Like I said, this was Hue’s idea. He wanted us to talk to the team. That’s what drove us to do it. To be honest, Dee had listened to a talk and she said, ‘You ought to listen to it,’ on being prepared.”
Almost none?
Almost none?!
ALMOST NONE?!!
Really?! Are you kidding me?!
That’s funny. That’s really, truly funny.
To think that Manziel’s antics, which were off-the-charts stunning, criminal and seemingly straight out of some reality show, were not the reason why Haslam talked to the team about distractions, is just not factual. Not even close. That’s obvious. Common sense tells you that.
The Browns weren’t a football team the last two seasons. Rather, they were a feeding ground for TMZ and other sensationalistic news outlets. You can’t make up the stuff that was going on. You just can’t..
Johnny Football was out on the town every night doing all kinds of unbelievable things, from riding pink swans in swimming pools to apparently boozing it up to getting into messy situations with women. In between all that craziness, he took a few minutes every week or so – when there was time, of course – to prepare himself to play quarterback in the NFL.
It’s exactly what you expect out of a first-round choice in the NFL Draft, right?
But wait, there was more.
In addition the club’s general manager, Ray Farmer, and its head coach, Mike Pettine, absolutely hated each other and made no bones about it. Farmer did everything he could to cut the coach’s legs out from under him, and Pettine defiantly stood his ground and pushed back.
Then, too, Farmer refused to draft wide receivers for whatever reason. He did a press conference once in which he perspired so badly that he needed a bath towel to wipe off his head and face as he sat at the dais in front of the media. It were as if the GM, sitting under a heat lamp, were being questioned by police for some crime.
Actually, maybe he was, for impersonating an NFL GM.
How in the world can Haslam say with a straight face that Manziel’s goofiness – and all the other goofiness in the organization – had almost no bearing on his decision to talk to the team about distractions?
In reality, those weren’t distractions the Browns endured the last two years. They were more like nuclear explosions going off anytime, anywhere.
That the Browns were able to work through that and win any games at all in the last two years – they actually won 12 – is jaw-dropping in its own right.
Haslam would have been foolish not to speak to the club about keeping the focus on football. Doing anything else would have been a dereliction of duty.
Nonetheless, Haslam did absolutely, positively the right thing in saying he was asked to do it by the coach. As owner, his job is to stay in the background and prop up the coach whenever possible, which is exactly what he did Sunday.
Less – of Haslam, or of any pro sports owner – really is more.
But you still have to admit, Haslam’s “almost none” comment was funny.
