THE BASKETBALL BROWNS TAKE THE FLOOR

By STEVE KING

Because of the start of NFL free agency, the beginning of the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments and the continuing saga of something called the COVID-19 pandemic — perhaps you’ve heard of it — you might have missed the fact that the boys state high school basketball tournament is going on this weekend not in its usual home, Columbus, but rather in Dayton.
It is always a lot of fun, especially if, like me, you’re a big high school basketball fan.
The Browns have two very cool ties to the state tournament, and they occurred nearly simultaneously 80 years ago. And both involve men who are enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Lou Groza was nicknamed “The Toe” for his kicking prowess. Though he always wanted to be considered a left tackle who also kicked — and he was a great lineman, holding down the starting left tackle spot for the Browns from 1947-59 — he will always be better known as a great kicker who also was a great left tackle. After all, he is regarded as “The Father of Modern Kicking” for the way his excellence brought to light the importance of his craft to the game. The honor that goes to the top kicker in college football annually is the Lou Groza Award.
Groza was a great all-around athlete, meaning that he might have been the first to show that left tackles need to be athletic and light on their feet so as to be able to move quickly to protect the passer. As part of that, he was an outstanding high school basketball player, so much so, in fact, that he was a first-team All-Ohioan as a senior and led the Martins Ferry Purple Riders to the 1941 Class A (big-school) state championship with a 37-30 win over Lakewood, located not far from Cleveland, where Groza would play all of his pro football career from 1946-67. In the semifinals, the Riders topped Xenia Central 36-34.
In the other semifinal that year, Lakewood edged Massillon 34-31. It was the second year in a row that Massillon had made it to the semifinals and lost. We say that because the Tigers head coach for the first trip only was a man by the name of — get this — Paul Brown. Yes, that Paul Brown.
It was common back then in high schools for one person, a man, since there were only boys varsity sports then, to coach more than one sport. Brown was finishing up his storied football coaching career at Massillon, and would spend one more season there before moving on to Ohio State from 1941-43, guiding that school in 1942 to its first national championship, then the Great Lakes Naval Training Training Station outside Chicago in 1944 and ’45 and eventually the Browns from 1946-62.
But getting back to that 1940 trip to the state semifinals, the team that beat the Tigers handily, 46-14, was none other than their arch rival in football, Canton McKinley. Ouch. You just know that the loss really stung Brown. After losing to McKinley in football for the first three years (192-43) of his career at Massillon by a combined score of 61-6, Brown reeled off six straight wins over the Bulldogs in this storied rivalry by a combined score of 112-18 to close out his time at the school.
But Brown and Groza weren’t the only members of those early Browns teams to have had notable basketball careers. Two other Hall of Famers excelled in that sport prior to coming to the Browns in that first season of 1946, with quarterback Otto Graham having played some professionally and his favorite target, wide receiver Dante Lavelli, having starred at Hudson High School.
Also, in 1946 and ’47, the Browns had a center by the name of Mike “Mo” Scarry. In fact, he was the full-time starter in that first season and then shared the job the next year with another Hall of Famer, Frank “Gunner” Gatski, whose career was just beginning to flourish. Scarry doubled in the offseason as the head men’s basketball coach at Cleveland’s Western Reserve University (which has since merged with Case Tech to become Case Western Reserve University) for four seasons, from 1946-47 to 1949-50. In that final season, he directed the team to a 57-54 win at Michigan State, which was in its first season in the Big 10.
All pro football players back then had a side gig — a job they worked in the offseason — because they had to do so. Playing football didn’t earn them nearly enough money to pay the bills for an entire calendar year. For instance, Lavelli went into the appliance business and Groza sold insurance.
That need for players to earn money in the offseason continued into the 1980s, and a lot of the ones who had a basketball acumen played on the Cleveland Browns basketball team which came into existence not long after the football team did. The Browns would play pick-up teams in towns big and small all over Ohio and even into neighboring states on occasion. The box scores, with a small write-up, were printed the next day in the Cleveland newspapers. Really.
The basketball team really got popular in its final seasons, which came in the Kardiac Kids era. A lot of the players from that fan-favorite Browns football club played on the basketball team, which made for big crowds at every game. My friend who played for Akron Manchester’s state championship team six years earlier was on the local squad offering the opposition when the Browns played at the school following that magical 1980 season. He was guarding Doug Dieken. When the left tackle grabbed a rebound and cleared out, my friend’s nose got in the way of his elbow and it — the nose — was nearly broken.
I guess Dieken mistook my friend for then Pittsburgh Steelers defensive end Dwight White, whom he loathed.
Anyway, the basketball team lasted only a few more years. The Browns, along with other NFL teams, began strength and conditioning programs and players earned money for showing up in the offseason. They no longer needed the money from playing basketball, plus the teams were thrilled to get their players off the basketball floor so as to avoid injuries.