The Cleveland Browns Diary Is Back!
Browns 24, Bengals 3
I began the Cleveland Browns Diary several years ago for a simple reason: I wanted to watch sports the way I did as a kid. Sportswriters have a saying: We don’t root for teams, we root for stories. It’s true, for the most part; we, as a group, root for something to happen, something unusual, something remarkable, something inspiring, something touching, something controversial, something that will give us a chance to fill the space with something memorable.
I love watching sports that way, love watching it with an eye for history and drama and comedy and all the rest. But there is something about watching sports as a fan. The Cleveland Browns were everything to me until I was about 21 or 22 years old. I lost all of that as I got older and began covering other teams, and the Browns left Cleveland.
This was the whole point of the Browns Diary: to be an unabashed fan again. And, it was so fun. The Browns were absolutely awful, as bad as a team has ever been — 1-15 one year, 0-16 the next, and so on — and I allowed myself to feel all of it, the pain, the absurdity, the brief and illogical bursts of hope. I liked being a fan again.
Then, last year — and, no, I’m not going to go through all of that again — I didn’t find the Browns fun. The whole Deshaun Watson episode made me so absurdly sad. I was never quite able to put into words why it made me so sad, which is my failure … I’m supposed to be a writer. It just cut deeply into me. I think the best I can do is to say this: All my young life, I just wanted to see the Browns win. They broke my heart again and again: the Sipe interception, the drive, the fumble, the move, all of it, and I thought: Man, I’d give ANYTHING to see them win.
But, the truth is, I wasn’t willing to give ANYTHING. To watch the Browns so hungrily and desperately chase Watson, to see them give up their entire future, to see them pay him more money than any football player had ever been paid when he was facing dozens of accusers and was utterly unrepentant, it just felt like the quintessential deal with the devil, and I didn’t want any part of it.
Part of me still doesn’t want any part of it.
BUT … we are who we are, right? I grew up in Cleveland. The Browns are as embedded in me as my Great Lakes accent, my love of gray skies, and my taste for Slyman’s corned beef. I tried to root for other teams last year, and I had moderate success doing that, and it was wonderful to see the Kansas City Chiefs win it all, because my wife and oldest daughter are diehard Chiefs and Mahomes fans.
It didn’t feel like rooting for the Cleveland Browns, though,
And, I realize, it never could.
So I’m back doing the Browns Diary. I don’t know what it will feel like to try and actively root for this team again. The first game was an odd mixture of excitement and detachment. But I’m going to give it a shot, and we’ll see how it goes.
Browns 24, Bengals 3
What I’m excited about: Nick Chubb!
Let me tell you what I really missed last year while avoiding the Browns: