When Friendship Faded: The Rift Between Blanton Collier and Paul Brown

As good of a football coach as he was, Blanton Collier was an even better man.

A kind, compassionate, friendly and soft-spoken gentleman from Kentucky who would do anything for anybody, Collier was a beloved figure in and out of the sport, especially in Cleveland, where he spent the entirety of his 18-year pro coaching career.

His big break was also one of the saddest days of his life. It occurred when his best friend, the man he had served as his top assistant for nine years, Paul Brown, was stunningly fired as head coach of the Browns about 3-1/2 weeks after the 1962 regular season ended. Wow! The man for whom the team was named had been summarily dismissed after 17 seasons by a brash, young owner by the name of Art Modell.

Modell immediately came to Collier and asked him to take the job. Collier thought about it for a bit and told Modell he would do it — on one condition. That is, if Brown gave him his blessing. Otherwise, Collier, a man who valued friendship much more than professional gain, could not and would not do it.

According to Collier, Brown gave him the OK to accept the position.

“I’ll be fine with it,” Brown supposedly said. “You have to take it. This is a big opportunity for you.”

So, just like that, Collier agreed to become only the second head coach in Cleveland Browns history. It was a win-win for him in that he got a head-coaching job with one of pro football’s foundational franchises, and he was able to do without betraying his best buddy.

But as the years went by, Brown slowly, and quietly, began telling a different story, that he had never given Collier his blessing to take the job. He said Collier had gone behind his back to do it.

Collier tried to phone Brown to
discuss the situation, but he supposedly wouldn’t take his call.

In 1968, as Collier was guiding the Browns to the first of two straight NFL Championship Game appearances, Brown was getting back into pro football as the owner, general manager and head coach of an expansion franchise in the American Football League, the downstate Cincinnati Bengals. Two years after that, in 1970, the NFL-AFL merger was completed and, in the new NFL going forward, the Browns were placed into the Central Division of the remade AFL, the American Football Conference, with the Houston Oilers, their old turnpike rivals in the Pittsburgh Steelers and . . . the Bengals. For obvious reasons, Cleveland-Cincinnati was a heated rivalry before the teams ever met on the field, as Brown got a chance, twice a season, to get back at the two men he despised, Modell for firing him and Collier for backstabbing him.

There was, not surprisingly, even in those long-ago times without the fuel provided by a media that was much less dramatized than the media of today, a tremendous buildup to the first meeting of the teams, in Week 4 of the 1970 season, on Oct. 18 at Cleveland, in which the Browns prevailed 30-27. After the game ended, Collier hurried to the middle of the field to shake hands with Brown, but the Bengals boss was nowhere to be found, waving toward Collier without even looking at him as he raced to the strange confines of the visitors locker room at Cleveland Stadium for the first time in his life. Collier was greatly disappointed.

The teams collided in the rematch five weeks later, on Nov. 15, and the Bengals won 14-10 before 60,007 fans in brand-new Riverfront Stadium, which stood as the biggest home crowd for the three-decade life of the building. Brown was once again nowhere to be found afterward as Collier waited at midfield, a jubilant Brown being carried off the field by his players. The victory gave the Bengals a big boost down the stretch while the Browns faded and Cincinnati, in just its third season of existence, snared the division crown with an 8-6 mark, edging out 7-7 Cleveland.

It was the last time the men got a good look at one another. Collier retired after that 1970 season. He kept trying to contact Brown, to no avail, for the last 13 years of his life before passing away in 1983.

Lamented Collier’s daughter, Kay Collier Slone, who wrote the book (Available on Amazon), “Football’s Gentle Giant: The Blanton Collier Story,”, “It so very disappointed and hurt Daddy that he never got to talk to Paul and mend fences.”

Steve King

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