The recent car accident involving Browns star defensive end Myles Garrett shows — again — just how quickly an off-the-field situation can affect a football team.

It was 59 years ago, in 1963, that two Browns players, two-way back Tom Bloom and safety Don Fleming, were killed.

Bloom, a sixth-round choice of the club in the 1963 NFL Draft, died in a car accident on an icy stretch of I-71 near Dayton on Jan. 18 as he was driving back to Purdue with two college teammates from his home in Weir, W. Va. He never got to meet his new teammates and coaches in Cleveland.

Fleming, from tiny Shadyside, Ohio, located not that far from Weir, was electrocuted on June 4 while working his offseason construction job when the boom he was operating struck a power line. He was one of the up-and-coming safeties in pro football after having been named All-NFL in 1962.

They were part of the tragic 1963 offseason during which three Browns died.

The other victim was running back Ernie Davis, who passed away from leukemia on May 17, 1963. He never played a down for the Browns after being acquired in a trade with Washington for Bobby Mitchell.

About 2 1/2 decades later, on June 27, 1986, another up-and-coming Browns safety, Don Rogers, died from a cocaine overdose at his bachelor party the night before he was to be married. Without Rogers, the team’s first-round draft choice, patrolling the back end of the defense, Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway was able to direct The Drive on the way to edging the Browns in overtime in the 1986 AFC Championship Game.

Steve King