Brian Sipe is the ultimate Kardiac Kid.
He always will be.
He was the ringleader of the Kardiac Kids. And he still is when those guys get back together.
But unheralded Tom DeLeone, who finally succumbed to brain cancer on Sunday at the age of 65, was the special Kardiac Kid.
DeLeone was special, in part, in that he stood for what the Kardiac Kids were.
They were mutts. They weren’t supposed to do what they did.
DeLeone was a mutt if there ever was one. He was too small. The Browns picked him up off the scrap heap after the Cincinnati Bengals, the team that drafted DeLeone out of Ohio State, sent him packing.
But like all the other Kardiac Kids, he proved everybody wrong. He turned into a tremendous player, and a winner, through and through. He made the Pro Bowl following the 1980 season for the second straight year. It wasn’t just well-deserved. It was an absolute must.
Sipe passed a whopping 554 times in 1980, yet he was sacked just 23 times.
Much of the credit for that goes to DeLeone. As the center, he had two important responsibilities in protecting the middle of the pocket, the key part of it, and making the blocking calls.
Sipe was the quarterback of the offense, but DeLeone was the quarterback of the line.
Without DeLeone, his bodyguard, Sipe would not have been Sipe. He would not have been the first Brown to be named the NFL MVP in 15 years.
But the most special part of the special Kardiac Kid is that he was one of us. He was a native Northeast Ohioan.
DeLeone hailed from Kent and played at Roosevelt High School, a longtime tradition-rich program that has been led down through the years by well-known players with the last name of Boykin, Adamle, Campana and, yes, DeLeone.
The other Kardiac Kids came to Cleveland from all over the country. Sipe, in fact, was from California.
But DeLeone came from just down the road.
So these were Tom DeLeone’s Cleveland Browns in the truest sense. He represented them well all those years ago by fighting back against his doubters with everything he had, and then in recent years, he represented them well again by fighting back against his disease with everything he had.
Indeed, a special Kardiac Kid right down to the very end.
We expected nothing less.
And now we expect nothing less from the Browns. To honor their fallen Cleveland Browns Legend, they should wear his number on a shoulder patch on their jerseys this season.
It would be a wonderful – and a fitting – gesture.
So, what say you, Browns? Are you listening at 76 Lou Groza Boulevard?
We’ll find out.
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How odd – or coincidental – is it that about 24 hours after DeLeone passed away, the Browns waived another native Northeast Ohioan who played at Ohio State in wide receiver Brian Hartline, a product of GlenOak High School in suburban Canton?
Monday’s departure of Hartline, who played pretty well in 2015 in his only season with the Browns after signing in free agency, is disappointing but hardly surprising. The new Browns regime has already jettisoned a number of popular older veterans, and Hartline just falls in line with that group. There will be more to come. You can bet on it. We told you all this a long time ago, and it keeps coming to fruition. The new regime didn’t bring in those players, so there is no hesitancy in getting rid of them.
