It was 36 years ago today, on March 31, 1980, that the great Jesse Owens died.

The Cleveland East Tech High School and Ohio State track star, who made history with his hard-to-believe performance at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and was one of the country’s first African American sports standouts, was 66.

Owens was part of what made Cleveland a great city, and a great sports city, in the era from just before World War II through the 1950s and, in a lot of cases, beyond.

Bob Feller, Lou Boudreau, Larry Doby, Ken Keltner, Al Rosen, Luke Easter, Bob Lemon, Early Wynn and Mike Garcia were leading the Indians.

The Browns had Otto Graham, Lou Groza, Marion Motley, Bill Willis, Dante Lavelli, Frank Gatski, Mac Speedie, Dub Jones, Mike McCormack and Horace Gillom.

And then there were the Barons.

In fact, in 1948, Cleveland was crowned “The City of Champions” when all three teams won titles, the Browns in the NFL, the Indians in major league baseball and the Barons in the American Hockey League.

Yes, it was great to be a Clevelander, and a Cleveland sports fan, then

I bring all this up in reference to Browns owner Jimmy Haslam’s comments the other day about the team’s struggles both on the field during the expansion era and also in its national perception, saying that he fully understands that, “People are going to laugh at you until you start winning.”

First, let’s give credit to Haslam, a proud man and an astute businessman who has built Pilot Flying J into the leading travel center operation in the U.S., for recognizing that and admitting it in public. That’s not an easy thing to do when you sign everybody’s paychecks and the buck stops at your desk. So some of that – not really that much of it, since he acquired the team in October 2012, but still a portion of it — is on him.

This much we know about Haslam. But there’s a lot we don’t know for sure about him.

Haslam didn’t grow up here — he was weaned on University of Tennessee football – and while he says he understands the Browns’ rich tradition from the days of the original franchise and is not shy about making reference to it, you have to wonder if he really does. It would be easy to give lip service to all that. Like I said, he’s a good businessman, and a smart one, too, and from a business standpoint, that’s an extremely smart thing for the owner to say loudly enough and often enough so that his customers can hear it clear as a bell.

But if he doesn’t understand what the Browns and the region were like when they were winning – and with them, we’re talking about all the way through the 1980s with the Kardiac Kids and the Bernie Kosar era – he needs to know. And there are plenty of people who remember those times and would be only too happy to tell him.

The fans who have rooted for this team for all their lives – from the time they were kids to the time they had grandkids – aren’t one bit happy that the people who have run, coached and played for the Browns since the club returned to the field in 1999 have combined to turn something that was once great into a punch line. While people elsewhere are yukking it up, those fans are sad, mad and disappointed. This is their team. It represents them. And it’s embarrassing.

Indeed, it wasn’t always like this. In fact, far from it, 180 degrees the other way.

The fans want their team back – the team that was almost always a contender and, in many ways, helped make pro football what it is today. They don’t want this cheap rendition to continue to be … well, a cheap rendition.

It’s up to Haslam to get it done in changing that, to make it right.

Despite what’s happened the last 17 seasons, the bar is still set high for the older fans. They don’t want the Browns to get back to average. They want the team to get back to the top. Nothing short of that will do.

If Haslam gets all this, then great. It will put more pressure on him, which is exactly what it should do in creating a sense of urgency.

But if Haslam is clueless on most of this, then he had better get up to speed so he knows what he’s dealing with.

And there’s no better time to bring this up than today, when a great sports town lost one of its all-time greats.