Leo Murphy’s favorite – Did the Browns ever have a logo on their helmets?

By STEVE KING

So, then, what was on that special helmet that former longtime Browns trainer Leo Murphy brought out of a back room in the basement of his Medina area home to show me when I visited him one summer afternoon in 1996?

It wasn’t the famous helmet in which he installed a radio transmitter for a 1956 game.



It wasn’t the famous helmet, belonging to Otto Graham, to which he and equipment manager Morrie Kono installed a facemask at halftime of a 1953 contest against the San Francisco 49ers to allow the Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback to play the remainder off the day and, with 286 yards passing and a touchdown, help the Browns to a hard-fought, important 23-21 win.

Yes, with the first “radio” helmet ever and the first facemask, respectively, those were second and third in some order of Murphy’s favorite helmets.

But his No. 1 favorite helmet – I could tell by the fact that he hid it from everyone for years and I might well have been the first person outside of members of his immediate family who had seen it – was the one that had the Brownie elf on one side of it.

The Brownie elf?

On the helmet?

Yes.

Aside from several years in the late 1950s when the players’ jersey numbers were featured, the Browns have never had anything on the side of their helmets. It’s what has made the team’s helmet unique in the NFL.

Murphy, who passed away last weekend at the age of 94, saw the stunned look on my face and proceeded to tell me the story.

It was 1953 – gee, that was a great year for historic Browns helmets – and, according to Murphy, who was honest and forthright as the day is long, HOF head coach Paul Brown told him that he wanted to see what the Brownie elf would look like on the side of the helmet and asked him to put the caricature – the little fella, as he has sometimes been called — on there so he could take a look at it.

A year before, in 1952, the Browns had gone from their plain white helmets, which they had worn from their inception in 1946, to an orange one, with brown-and-white striping down the middle from front to back, that is still used today. With the newness of the orange helmet, Brown wanted to make sure that their helmets would look the best that they could be.

Anyway, Murphy set about doing as his boss, Brown, had asked. A trainer’s job is already long and tedious, but now he had a rush order from the very top to handle as well.

Murphy didn’t want to do it – he didn’t really have the time – but he did it anyway.

“I worked night and day on it – anytime I had a minute or two, I spent time on it,” Murphy said. “Then at the end of the day, when all my other work was done, I worked on it some more before I went home for the night.

“It wasn’t easy. I had to trace it by hand. It took a lot of time.

“But I finally got it done. So at the first opportunity, I took it into Paul’s office to show it to him.”

Murphy was a great storyteller. He knew how to build up the ending of his tales. That’s why he stopped, looked at me and waited for me to ask the question he knew full well that I was going to ask: “So what did Paul Brown say?”

“I had put the helmet on his desk.” Murphy replied. “He took one look at it and said, ‘I don’t like it. Get it out of here.’ ”

I said to him, “You mean all that work for about 10 seconds?”

“Yup,” Murphy said with a laugh.

He would never bad-mouth Brown, Art Modell or any of his bosses or coaches he worked for, or with, during his 40 years with the Browns. He was ultra-faithful to the very end.

Then Murphy said something that cemented to me just how important was – just how much it mean to Murphy.

“Now, you can’t write about this or tell anyone about it,” he stipulated.

And, just as faithfully – I, like everyone else, thought so much of Leo Murphy — I kept quiet – until now.

With, unfortunately, his passing, the statute of limitations has expired.

In my next post, I will have one more thing on this special man. I’ve saved the best – and most important – for last.