One of my bosses when I worked for the Browns, whose name I won’t disclose so as to not embarrass him (you would recognize Vic Carucci’s name immediately even though he is no longer employed by the team), chided me in front of my fellow reporters one afternoon in the Dino Lucarelli Media Room at Browns Headquarters in Berea.
“You wrote a story about a Browns home game and stated that it was played at Cleveland Browns Stadium,” he said in an exasperated tone as if he were the father and I were some six-year-old, despite the fact that I am 10 years older than him. “You do this all the time. I keep having to correct it, and I am tired of correcting it. Don’t do it again.”
If he had admonished me in a professional fashion, then I would have kept my mouth shut. He didn’t, however, so I didn’t, either.
“But that game was in 2002, and the place was then known as Cleveland Browns Stadium,” I countered. “So for me to have to called it anything else would have been factually incorrect.”
Right away he came back with, “I don’t care about any of that (and if you have read any of his stories, you know that being factually incorrect is who he is and what he does). Anytime you refer to the stadium, no matter what year you’re talking about, it is FirstEnergy Stadium.”
What I wanted to also tell him – but didn’t – is that in having lived in the Greater Akron area, the home of FirstEnergy, all of my life, I had forgotten more about that company in the last 10 minutes than he would know in 10 lifetimes. So for a guy from Buffalo, N.Y. to tell me when I could, and couldn’t, use the term FirstEnergy Stadium, especially when it was factually incorrect, which, again, is a term with which he is indelibly linked, was like giving me a Stooge slap. And I don’t like Stooge slaps, unless, of course, I’m watching them on TV.
Furthermore – and this is where the story really gets good – my former boss was not in Cleveland when the originally Browns franchise left, nor was he there when the Browns fans successfully, and historically, fought Art Modell and the NFL to get back a new team with the Browns’ name, colors and history, or when the first owner of the new Browns, Al Lerner, named the new facility Cleveland Browns Stadium as a tribute to that effort from the fans. It was a classy move by Lerner, who understood the Browns fans’ pain in not having a team on the field for three seasons. But my former boss does not understand classy. It is a term with which he has never been familiar.
Instead, my former boss was doing everything he could to cozy up to his bosses in an effort to enhance his standing with them, no matter how many people he had to disrespect, or step over, along the way to do it. FirstEnergy had just purchased the naming rights to the stadium, and my former boss was taking full advantage of every opportunity to publicly demonstrate that he was all in with the move. If I had written a story about the 1950 NFL Championship Game, then he probably would have made me refer to the venue as FirstEnergy Stadium.
Naming rights are a big part of the NFL, or any pro sports league today, for the obscene amount of revenue it generates. And I totally get that. It’s part of the fact that pro sports, while being entertainment, are, at the end of day, really a business. Call them an entertainment business if you want to ride the fence.
On Sunday the Browns play the host Cincinnati Bengals at Paul Brown Stadium.
Bengals owner Mike Brown, Paul’s son and a guy who spent his growing-up years in Shaker Heights while his dad was serving as the first head coach of the Browns, could get a king’s ransom by selling the naming rights to his team’s stadium to Cincinnati-based mega-businesses. It could just as easily be called Procter & Gamble Stadium or Kroger Stadium.
But Brown, a classy – there’s that word again – man who has a great understanding of NFL history, especially as it pertains to his dad, known as “The Father of Modern Football” for all the many innovations he brought to the game, prefers to join the Green Bay Packers (Lambeau Field) as being the only teams in the league to have their stadium named for legendary football men, not legendary businesses. Mike Brown has put right about revenue.
I don’t disrespect the owners of the NFL’s 30 other franchises for selling their stadium’s naming rights – again, I get it — but I have great respect for Brown and the community-owned Packers for not doing it, for having the courage of their convictions.
By the way, when the funeral was held for Pro Football Hall of Famer Bill Willis, the ex-Ohio State and Columbus East High School middle guard who, along with Canton McKinley High product Marion Motley, helped permanently break pro football’s color barrier coming out of World War II when they for played for Paul Brown’s first Browns teams, Mike Brown made it a point to be there at the big church in Downtown Columbus. On a bitterly cold late November morning, he drove from Pittsburgh, where the Bengals had played the Steelers on Monday Night Football in a game that had ended less than 12 hours earlier, and gave a stirring eulogy, talking about how he idolized Willis while hanging around the Browns locker room.
Conversely, there were no members of the Browns hierarchy on hand. They were too busy being busy. Instead, they sent to represent them Browns HOF wife receiver Dante Lavelli and his wife, two members of their Alumni Dept. and myself, who had the distinct honor and privilege of covering the funeral and writing a story for the team’s website.
By the way, one of the members of the Alumni Dept. making the trip was Dino Lucarelli, who in 1946 as a 12-year-old boy attended the Browns’ first regular-season game. There’s enough symbolism there to choke an elephant.
