EDITOR’S NOTE: We’ve been looking recently at Browns history in years ending in 5. Here’s another part of that series.

Arthur B. Modell would have celebrated his 100th birthday last Monday.

The former Browns owner was born on June 23, 1925 in Brooklyn.

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You can’t talk about Browns founding head coach Paul Brown without also discussing Modell. They will forever be joined at the hip, although just the thought of that would have made both men physically ill.

This was a partnership that never had any chance to survive. Their personalities, which were like oil and water, tell us that.

Modell, who had made his money in New York in TV advertising, arrived on the scene when he purchased the Browns in March 1961, three months short of his 36th birthday, for the princely sum of $4 million. Unlike previous Browns owners, first Arthur B. “Micky” McBride, who got the Cleveland franchise when the All-America Football Conference was formed in 1944, and then David Jones, who purchased the team in 1953, both of whom let Brown have full run of the organization, Modell was determined from the outset to be a hands-on owner. He didn’t care that the team was named for Brown. He had paid for the team, and he was going to get his money’s worth. Brown was only too happy to be in complete charge of the Browns. The last thing he wanted was to have to take orders from some whippersnapper in a suit who had never played the game. It was doomed to fail from the start.

Really, that their professional relationship lasted as long as it did — a year and 10 months before Modell fired Brown on Jan. 9, 1963, a little over three weeks after the 1962 season, the coach’s 17th, had ended — is truly remarkable.

Steve King

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Steve King

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