The All-America Football Conference-era Browns beat – and mostly beat up as well – any and all comers from 1946-49.
But what – or, in this case, who – they couldn’t beat was Art Modell.
The former Browns owner brazenly fired Brown, the man for whom the team is named, in January 1963, just 22 months after he purchased the team. And after he did it, Modell began distancing himself from the success Brown had with the old Browns. With that, then, came the systematic and calculated shortchanging of the AAFC-era Browns from not just the record books, but also from the recognition they so richly deserve.
Here’s a story that underscores that.
Dino Lucarelli, the longtime Browns public relations aide who worked five years for Modell’s Cleveland Stadium Corp. before moving over to the team in 1980, did everything he could to further the Browns’ cause in his nearly 40 years on the job. When the Browns were re-born in 1999, Lucarelli came up with the idea to contact Mary Brown, Brown’s widow, to see if she would like to take a tour of the club’s headquarters/training facility in Berea.
She agreed, and Lucarelli showed her every nook and cranny of the place one afternoon. As with everything Lucarelli did, it was indeed a splendid tour.
When they were done, Lucarelli looked Brown right in the eye and, in his typical positive and welcoming tone, asked her, “So, what do you think of the place?”
“I think it’s great! I really love it!” Brown said enthusiastically.
Then she added, “There’s just one problem?”
“What’s that?” Lucarelli said.
“There are no photos of my husband anywhere,” she said.
Lucarelli stood there for a minute, almost frozen, and thought about it.
There were photos of the club’s other inductees into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. There were all kinds of other photos, too.
But there were none of Paul Brown.
When Modell planned the building, which opened in August 1991, he did so with the explicit directive not to have any photos of the iconic coach.
After Mrs. Brown’s visit, it wasn’t long before the situation was rectified.
But the bigger problem – that the AAFC-era Browns still get slighted in out and out of the Cleveland area in a multitude of ways – will probably never be solved.
And that’s a shame.
More in my next post.
