The Cleveland Browns and a brand new NFL season

The Thursday night game between the Redskins and Giants notwithstanding, today marks the real kickoff to the 2008 National Football League season. In celebration, I took my natty corduroy Cleveland Browns cap out into the warm California sun for a morning portrait.

Classic Cleveland Browns corduroy cap

I call this a classic Browns cap because it dates not from the present franchise but from the last years of the old Browns, the team that the sinsister Art Modell carted off to Baltimore to become the dead-to-me Ravens.

The original Browns started in the All American Football Conference that was folded into the NFL in the early 1950s. My early childhood centered on baseball, and football didn’t enter my consciousness until early grade school. In fact, my earliest pro football memory is of the day of the 1964 championship game in which the Browns defeated the Baltimore Colts (another team that would ultimately and appallingly be wrenched from the hearts of its fans). The game was blacked out on television in Cleveland, so my dad sent me to the attic to move our antenna around so we could catch the game on a Toledo station.

The demise of the old Browns roughly coincided with my move to California, where I’ve since attached my primary allegiance to the San Francisco 49ers and, given a few beers and the right opponent, the Oakland Raiders. I have not bonded with the new Browns, but should they advance to the playoffs, I’ll be pulling for them hard. And yeah, I want them to crush the Dallas Cowboys today.

In the meantime, I reserve my Browns cap mainly for the winter months, always hoping for the delightful contrast of white snowflakes settling on its rich brown bill.

The Tris Speaker Baseball League cap

For those of us who grew up in Cleveland Heights and University Heights, Ohio, the intertwined “T” and “S” logo of the Tris Speaker Baseball League is a powerful icon. Everyone who played wore the same red and black wool cap.

Here, my Adam’s apple jutting prominently and skinny belt sagging,  I’m wearing my first uniform in 1968. I played for the Red Sox in the Junior American division, and we were one of the top teams. The league in the 1960s manifest the first stirrings of the “don’t hurt the kids’ self-esteem” fad that was to flourish two or three decades later. No official standings or statistics were kept (although I recorded every victory, loss, at bat and error in a small spiral-bound diary). The league’s idea was not to let the players get too big a head for winning or be wounded too much for losing. The season was rife with rumors that top players from the best teams would be traded to the lesser teams to balance things out, although no one was traded to or from our team.

I suspect the caps were uniform throughout the league to save money, but they were nice hats with a partial leather sweat band in front and elastic in the back to accommodate all head sizes.  We had to raise money to pay for the uniforms, and for many years a springtime ritual in Cleveland was for players in uniform to go knocking door to door and ask for donations into a canister emblazoned with the Tris Speaker logo. If you contributed, you’d receive a TS decal to affix in a door window so other players would know not to come begging.

There wasn’t a game when I didn’t dirty my uniform by sliding or sprawling in the dirt. My mother complained about always having to wash it, but I suspect doing so was a labor of love for her, knowing how much I loved to play.

I can’t swear that I thought so at the time, but I’ve long realized the significance of playing on the Red Sox in suburban Cleveland in a league named for the Hall of Fame outfielder who split his best years between the BoSox and Indians. Alas, the CH-UH recreational baseball league appears no longer to be named for the Gray Eagle. I can find no trace of the name on the Cleveland Heights municipal Web site.

I played one year in the junior divison as an infielder and pitcher, and made the all-star team. The next spring at tryouts, I made a spectacular diving catch at shortstop and knew right then that I’d clinched a spot in the senior division. I didn’t realize I was in for two straight years of misery, getting put on a team where the manager’s son played my position, shortstop. The first year I mostly sat the bench and played the late innings, much of it in the outfield. The second year wasn’t any different.

Forty years later, I still think back how much hinged on spearing that one line drive. If that ball were hit to me again today, I’d still go after it. That’s the only way to play the game.

My first cap

MLB replica caps were scarce when I was a kid in the 60’s. They weren’t mass-produced as they are today. I’ll have to comb through the hundreds of slides my father took to find the earliest evidence I can of my wearing a ballcap. I’m guessing I probably had a small-billed cap with a “little league” (pun on small) kiddie outfit when I was a toddler. At one point I had a “wishbone C” Indians’ cap when I was in grade school, but I can’t remember how I came by it.

I do, however, distinctly remember getting my first “real” baseball cap. It was handed down to me by Butch Lowrie, a neighbor and the father of my friend Bobby Lowrie, who lived down the street from us. Mr. Lowrie worked at the Cleveland Press and played on the company baseball team. He gave me one of his Press baseball caps, which quickly became one of my most treasured possessions.

It was the real deal: a fitted wool cap with a leather sweat band. The cap was black with a red block “P” on the front, similar to a Pittsburgh Pirates cap.

I wore the cap everywhere, all day long, so much so that I can remember adults and other kids warning me that if I kept wearing it, I’d go bald. (I did not.)

That cap presaged two of the great loves of my life: baseball and newspapers. I carried the Press for several years in my neighborhood, and I eventually would make newspapers a career. The industry is in lamentable straits today, and I see many troubling signs reminiscent of the last years of the Press. It gamely tried to innovate and then merely to survive before succumbing to The Plain Dealer and the reality of late 20th Century journalism, which pitilessly decreed that only one newspaper could survive in a market.

This 21st Century will likely determine whether any newspaper can survive in any town.