Seasons end for Browns supporters, but hope endures: Ted Diadiun
Cleveland: I’m sitting at my brother’s house in Houston as you read this, either licking my wounds from yet another heartbreaking playoff loss or celebrating yesterday’s Browns victory over the Texans and wondering where the team and I are going to be next week.
Since the game hasn’t been played as of the time I’m writing this, I can’t tell you which. The section that publishes this column runs off the presses on Friday nights, and deadlines don’t wait.
But since I’m obsessed with football and can’t stop thinking about it, that won’t stop me from writing about it. Additionally, it’s a lot more enjoyable than writing about Donald Trump. It’s even more enjoyable to write about Browns football. It’s more fun to write about them even though everyone knows what happened except for me.
Still, there are things to say whether you win or lose. I purchased a season ticket back in 1986. I worked as a sportswriter before that, so I doubt I missed more than a dozen home games since 1972. I therefore feel qualified—even obligated—to make those statements.
First off, I did wish that everyone would just quiet down a little before the game started.
Although they are not a Super Bowl team, the current Browns are a lot of fun to watch. It was a blessing for them to even qualify for the playoffs, made possible only by good fortune, Joe Flacco’s arrival, and Dustin Hopkins’ powerful right leg as a kicker. In a year when so many of the Browns’ best players were lost to injury, I found it absurd that sportswriters and other people who ought to know better were talking about the Super Bowl. That only serves to raise everyone’s expectations, which are then again dashed.
That being said, why am I in Houston? A valid query.
Hope, prayer, a gut feeling, and the unwavering conviction that, since I witnessed the Browns’ two most devastating playoff defeats at home, maybe our fortunes would turn in hostile territory. That’s why I’m a combination naive optimist and crash course expert on broken dreams.
Red Right 88 and The Drive.
I was not only present on January 4, 1981, when quarterback Brian Sipe threw that well-intended pass toward Ozzie Newsome, but I also had a ringside seat when Coach Sam Rutigliano called the fateful Red Right 88 play. That’s the field, exactly twenty yards away. I am able to demonstrate it.
When there were only a few minutes remaining in the game, we sportswriters would leave the press box, ride the elevator to the ground floor, and then walk through a tunnel to the baseball dugouts and out onto the field to watch the final few minutes of play in the old stadium, all to avoid getting sucked into the post-game crowds. We would track the players through the tunnel after the game to be prepared for when the locker rooms opened for interviews.
And so it was that when Sipe threw that pass, I was there on the sidelines, right up against the goal line.
The Browns had come back from behind to win game after game during the incredible Kardiac Kids season. As the game was coming to a close, the Browns were behind, 14–12. The crowd erupted in excitement, certain that we would see yet another game-winning touchdown, this time against the Oakland Raiders, to advance the Browns to the next round of the playoffs.
When Mike Davis of the Raiders moved in front of Newsome in the end zone to intercept the pass and end the Browns season, I had the best view in the house. The sudden stunned silence was even more deafening than the previous loudness. It was unsettling. It was as though the bowl’s air had been forced out, leaving no noise in its wake. There was not even a moan.
Most of the replays of that play are from the Browns side of the field, but I happened to see one from the other side a long time later, and I saw myself in a short tan jacket, looking uncharacteristically underdressed for the one-degree temperature. I’m the guy who makes the small leap of dismay as Davis makes the interception at 2:16 on a YouTube video about the play (tinyurl.com/redright88). I’m about three yards to the left of the goal line marker.
Then, for the post-mortem, we all trudged somberly up the tunnel.
Six years and seven days later, I was back at the stadium, this time in the stands behind the end zone at the closed end of the field, with a perfect view of John Elway leading his Denver Broncos on a 98-yard drive in the final seconds of regulation that tied the game at 20-20.
This contest was for the AFC title in 1986. Winner traveled to Pasadena for the Super Bowl, where I, along with a few friends, had purchased tickets and booked a seat on a westbound train, imagining ourselves shoving New York Giants supporters off the train as it crossed the Rockies.
After winning the coin toss, the Browns had to punt in order to get the ball in overtime. With our bird’s-eye view, we were
