It was a little over an hour before the start of what turned out to be the original Browns franchise’s last preseason opener, on Aug. 6, 1995 at Cleveland Stadium.
It was a rare Sunday afternoon game in an era when preseason contests were played almost exclusively at night.
The opponent was, accidentally but incredibly fittingly so, the New York Football Giants, who were the Browns’ biggest rivals for the first decade and a half after they moved to the NFL in 1950 after the All-America Football Conference. It was best rivalry in pro football at the time — by far; it wasn’t even close — and one of the best all-time in the history of the sport.
Longtime Browns communications director Kevin Byrne turned to me in the tight-fit press box at the top of the upper deck on the south stands and asked if I’d be interested in going up to the Giants radio booth — the home and visitor radio booths were both on the roof in the old place; the view was incredible, as you coujd see for miles out onto Lake Erie toward Canada in being 150 feet up — and do an interview for their pregame show.
“Sure,” I said without hesitation. That sounded fun, and it was.
There was not a lot of room in that booth — like the press box, it was really close quarters in there — and the members of the crew had to find me a seat. So, Dick Lynch, the color analyst on the broadcasts and a former standout cornerback on those great Giants defenses throughout the 1950s and into early ‘60s, volunteered to give me his chair.
“I am so happy that it was you who had to get up,” I joked with Lynch and the rest of the guys. “It’s a little bit of revenge for all the plays you made against the Browns in this stadium.”
Everybody laughed. They knew it to be true.
When New York, 30 years later, visits the new stadium built on the footprint of the old place to play Cleveland on Sept. 22 in Week 3, hardly anyone in the stands, only those longtime Cleveland fans who were around for black and white TV, President Kennedy’s assassination and the early years of the interstate highway system — and no one on the Browns — will have any special feeling for the Giants. The rivalry is ancient history, and that’s a shame.
In 15 of the 16 seasons from 1950-65, either the Browns or Giants won the Eastern Conference title (the only exception was 1960 when the Philadelphia Eagles took the championship and then the NFL crown as well). In 1950 and ‘58, Cleveland and New York finished the regular season tied for first place and had to have a special playoff game to decide who would advance to the league title contest, the Browns winning the first one and the Giants the second one.
Indeed, each game between them was a war. They knew their chances of winning the conference would be determined almost exclusively by how they fared against each others.
Now, Browns-Giants is just another game, having started to become so in 1966 when the teams were first split up as divisions were created and then altogether four years later when they were placed into different conferences as part of the completion of the NFL-AFL merger. The Browns’ now longtime rivals are the Pittsburgh Steelers, Cincinnati Bengals and Baltimore Ravens, while the Giants focus on the Dallas Cowboys, Eagles and Washington Commanders.
And somewhere, the late great Dick Lynch and all of his former teammates on the Football Giants (to differentiate the team from the Baseball Giants, who moved out of New York to San Francisco 67 years ago), along with all those long-ago Browns, are smiling and shaking their heads, recalling those many great memories of great games in a truly great rivalry.
Steve King
