It was near the miserable, nightmarish end of that miserable, nightmarish 1995 season when the original Browns franchise was wrapping up its time in Cleveland before heading to Baltimore in the offseason.

It was the morning of Sunday, Dec. 3 and I was minding my own business as I browsed through the gift store in a hotel in San Diego before the Browns played the then San Diego Chargers that afternoon. All of a sudden, like a hurricane blowing through, Browns General Mike Lombardi stormer into the little store. He quickly located me, which was the purpose of his mission, got up into my face and took his right index finger and began poking it into my chest, as if pounding away on a typewriter (it was a long time ago), as he lit into me about a story I had written in the Medina County Gazette and its sister paper, The Elyria Chronicle-Telegram, that he did not like in the least bit.

If he was trying to scare me, then I can tell you that it didn’t work. And likewise, if he was trying to intimidate me, then that was also unsuccessful. I knew the story, which put Lombardi and the Browns into a bad light, was right as rain. He was upset that I had discovered it. It was, looking back on it now, kind of funny. It was not the first time that Lombardi had been caught red-handed doing something wrong, something he shouldn’t have been doing, nor would it be the last. It was simply one act in a long pattern of such that, I am guessing, still exists today.

Eighteen years later, in 2013, when the expansion-era Browns hired him
to be their GM, Lombardi stood at the podium at his re-introductory press conference and admitted that he had done some things, and said some things, over the years that he regretted while his wife, sitting off to the side, quietly nodded in agreement. He said he had changed. My good friend, a fellow beat writer, and I looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders. Everybody makes mistakes. And everybody deserves a second chance. A year later, when he — er, left, against his will — the Browns, it was evident he had regressed.

Oh, well.

And perhaps he still has not yet recovered, for now, after all these years, Lombardi, reunited with his boss in Cleveland, Bill Belichick, and working as the general manager for the University of North Carolina football team, earning the princely sum of well over $1 million per year, was placed onto paid administrative leave by the school, not the athletic department. Who knows what he allegedly did, but it can’t be good, right?

I hope it’s all just a big misunderstanding. I wish harm on no one.

In the meantime, Belichick, working without his right-hand man while trying to erase the memory of the 4-8 finish in his first season of coaching college football in 2025, has a huge challenge ahead of him. I am rooting for him to succeed.

And as for Lombardi, I am rooting for him to change, this time for good.

I wonder which one of them has the tougher job.

Steve King