This fan never came back - Behind the Scenes

Football Digest, Feb, 2003 by Michael Azre

I SWORE OFF THE NFL IN NOVEMBER 1995, when Art Modell announced that he was moving his Browns to Baltimore. In the seven years since then, the league has ceased to exist for me as anything other than a bitter memory.

In the aftermath of Cleveland's 37-10 loss to the Houston Oilers on November 5 of that year--one day after Modell had stunned the city--Browns wide receiver Andre Rison taunted the hostile crowd at old Cleveland Stadium, including some fans who'd been foolish enough to buy his jersey to wear to the games.

As someone who grew up in Cleveland, that's how I remember the NFL.

I haven't watched a game since then, and I also have tried to ignore any other NFL-related coverage. I admit, I laughed at an e-mail that circulated after Browns fans "disgraced the city" by hurling beer bottles onto the field during a game last season. The e-mail contained a Photoshopped picture of Osama Bin Laden in the Dawg Pound, ready to toss his own MGD bottle at the refs. "They found Bin Laden," read the picture's caption.

This kind of smart-alecky, grim humor--and the throwing of beer bottles--is so Cleveland: hard-nosed and self-deprecating all at once. I almost tuned in to watch the Browns the following week. To check out the aftermath, I said to myself. What I really wanted to do was watch the game, but I couldn't. Modell had won his Super Bowl with the Baltimore Ravens in 2000, making me feel even more betrayed. No matter how much I miss the Browns and the NFL, I won't be back, period.

As far as I know, I'm one of the few Browns fans still nursing a grudge from '95. My older brother--a die-hard fan, one of those guys who's made his basement into a shrine to the team--came back when the "new" Browns arrived in 1999, as did most of the rest of the city. He embraced them again even though, thanks to PSLs, he no longer could afford the season tickets he'd bought the very season Modell decided to take up Baltimore on all that money.

Talk about hard luck, and coming back after a beating. If this story were about the relationship between a man and a woman--and not a team and its fans--I would compare my brother, and the thousands of Browns fans like him, to those battered women who sometimes show up in the chick-flicks that the other networks broadcast opposite the NFL.

When I asked my brother how he could stand to root for the new MBNA Browns--whose gleaming, taxpayer-funded stadium is adorned with a multitude of advertisements from that behemoth credit card company--he answered by ignoring the ugly economics, like so many other Clevelanders did. "We've got the name and the colors," he said. "We've got the history." That's only true, however, if the legacy of the Browns, from Otto Graham to Ozzie Newsome, somehow exists outside of the legacy of the NFL robbing a city of its dignity and selling that dignity back to it at a higher price.

"That stuff doesn't matter," my brother insisted. "What matters is what happens on the field." Actually, I'm sure the one thing he wanted more than anything else was simply the return of fall Sundays as he'd always known them.

In Cleveland, Sundays belonged to the Browns. It was as obvious and unassailable a fact as the city's rotten weather, rust-belt economy, classic-rock radio, and preference for beer over water. Where I grew up, in a working-class suburb on the city's east side, you were bred to love the Browns. Sure, some kids on the playground wore Dallas Cowboys jackets, believing they'd do better to identify with a winner, but these dreamers--like we'd later learn to say of Clevelanders who left for other cities in search of better lives--eventually would come back to the Browns. Why? Because.

My older brother, who looked out for me, made sure I understood. He'd come up to me, punch me in the arm--punch me so hard that it hurt--and ask, "How many yards did Jim Brown average per carry?" (The answer is 5.22.) If I got this or any other Browns trivia question wrong, he'd hit me again. I had bruises on my arms, but I'd studied the back of every football card in his and my collections. I even knew that Browns QB bust Mike Phipps had only one season in Cleveland with more touchdowns than interceptions: 1976.

All of those punches are at the heart of why I'm through with the NFL. For me, the Browns--and pro football in general--weren't a franchise or some business model to be replicated in a number of markets. They were something personal, a part of family, home, and growing up.

The boss at my first job used to call me and one of my fellow bus boys "Frank" and "Hanford," after Frank Minnifield and Hanford Dixon, the defensive backs who founded the Dawgs in the '80s. We knew why: We missed our coverage, leaving too many tables sloppy. Linebacker Eddie Johnson and a number of other Browns players used to dine at this same restaurant. The team was a real part of the community in those days. It might take the new incarnation of the Browns the rest of my life to earn that back.

People talk about how fans have turned to fantasy leagues thanks to technology--because you can play an entire season "for real" on PlayStation or because you can be a GM of 15 different clubs on the Internet. I say the explosion of interest in fantasy football has everything to do with what's happened to the real thing. It's no coincidence that fantasy leagues really hit hard around 1995, as the country was getting wired and the Browns left Cleveland, exposing the NFL for what it had become: a state-subsidized circus. The NFL now is no more than a chance to watch one conglomerate's millionaires crunch into another conglomerate's millionaires while the logos roll by. It's about sushi-gobbling pantywaists in the luxury boxes playing out their fantasies.