By STEVE KING

Perhaps it was because I was getting older, bigger and stronger.

Or perhaps it was because someone he knew had encountered a similar problem.

Or perhaps it was a combination of the two, or something else entirely.

I just don’t know. I never asked him at the time because the comment took me completely off-guard to the point that it absolutely stunned me.

“If you ever lay a finger on your mom, you’ll be in big trouble,” he said one day out of the clear blue when I was about 16. “And if you are too big for me to handle, I’ll first find some kind of equalizer to cut you down to size.”

He meant every word of it. He loved to laugh — he joked around a lot — but he didn’t joke about things like that.

That kind of act — harming a woman, let alone my mom — had never crossed my mind. I would never have done anything to hurt her in any way, shape or form. I loved my mom. My dad obviously loved her, too — they had gotten married eight months before World War II started and sent through a lot together over four decades — and it was his job, first and foremost, to protect her.

My dad loved sports, especially football, and he really loved the Browns, too. The players on those historic early Browns teams of head coach Paul Brown were about his age, so he closely identified with them.

In fact, my love for the Browns was because of his love for them. I thought so much of him that I wanted to be just like him. If he had been into third-century camel travel, I might be writing about that instead of this.

In fact, I used to pick his brain, and that of my uncle, also a big sports fan, about the Browns and Indians of years before. They knew a lot from having watched them play, and I was smart enough to just shut up and listen to what they had to say.

It seemed fitting, then, that one of the last things he and I did together in his hospital room in Barberton before he died in 1980 was watch a Browns game on TV. Yes, that’s right, the Kardiac Kids holding on for dear life to defeat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers early in that memorable season.

So, realizing all this, I wonder how my dad would handle — what he would say about — his Browns, my Browns, our Browns, your Browns trading away their heart and soul — both literally, in terms of high, valuable NFL Draft picks, and figuratively — for the foreseeable future to the Houston Texans in exchange for a quarterback in Deshaun Watson whose reputation as a human being is 100 times more sullied than any player they have ever had on their roster going all the way back to when my dad watched them in that first season in 1946.

Watson is accused of doing a lot more than laying a finger on a woman, as my dad put it, but rather sexually assaulting women — that’s plural, as in more than one, many more than one, 22 in all in fact, at last count.

How would he justify this, his two loves — his beloved wife and his beloved Browns — going head-to-head in a winner-take-all for his heart and soul as to who he was and what he was?

I know what he would have said.

And I know what I am saying.

It is that you can love sports — like my dad loved football and the Browns, like I love football and the Browns and I’m sure like all of you love football and the Browns — but all sports, while they are played and coached by people, are things, in essence. The real loves of your life — your significant other, your children, your family — are just that, the real loves of your life — and it’s hard — no, it’s totally impossible — to identify with anything that, or anybody who, would hurt them, or would aid and abet those who have.

For if you harm one woman like that, then you harm them all. They’re all in this together, a sisterhood. As such, if indeed Watson did what he was accused of to those 22 women, then he did it to all women, past and present.

And nobody lays a finger on my mom.

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