Otto Graham likely never filled out a NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament bracket sheet.
Ditto for Lou Groza, Dante Lavelli, Horace Gillom and Mo Scarry.
But these players from the first Browns teams 70 years ago were tied to basketball as well as football.
It’s something fun and interesting to think about as the tourney begins in earnest on Thursday will a full slate of games.
Graham, a Pro Football Hall of Famer along with Groza and Lavelli, was an All-American in basketball at Northwestern. In fact, he attended college on a basketball scholarship.
Before giving up basketball to begin his pro football career with the Browns in fall 1946, he played the 1945-46 season with the Rochester Royals of the National Basketball League, a forerunner of the NBA. The Royals later became the Cincinnati Royals, the Kansas City Kings and finally the Sacramento Kings.
Groza was an All-Ohio player and led his Martins Ferry High School basketball team to the 1941 Class A (big-school) state title. Gillom was a Class A all-stater at Massillon High during that time.
The coach who guided Gillom and Massillon to the 1940 state tournament, where it lost to arch rival Canton McKinley in the semifinals? Some guy named Paul Brown.
Lavelli was starring at Hudson (Ohio) High School during that time.
Scarry was the Browns’ center before Hall of Famer Frank Gatski took over. In the offseason, he coached the Western Reserve (now Case Western Reserve) basketball team.
Players needed to find jobs in the offseason so as to make ends meet. That continued into the early 1980s. As such, for decades, a lot of the Browns were paid to play on the franchise’s basketball team, traveling around to communities big and small throughout Ohio and taking on squads of local players. There were even small articles about the games in newspapers throughout the region.
The teams went the way of the single-wing when the Browns hired Dave Redding as their first strength coach in 1982 and instituted an offseason strength and conditioning program. The players were paid to attend and that became their offseason job.
