All the world is Browns Wednesday, May 23, 2007
BUD POLIQUIN
POST-STANDARD COLUMNIST
He enlisted with the Cleveland Browns 45 years ago. In the same spring as Ernie Davis, as a matter of fact. And after playing for 10 seasons in front of those 80,000 Sunday roarers at the old stadium just off Lake Erie, and after watching Browns mania spread like a happy rash from Cleveland to Canada to Croatia and beyond, Gary Collins long ago accepted the truth of his universe.
"Browns fans are everywhere," he said the other day. "Everywhere. And they're all the same. They're crazy. I think they get up in the morning, raise a Browns flag and salute it. And then they go on with their day."
Well, Collins would know.
He did, after all, suit up with Jim Brown and Lou "The Toe" Groza and Paul Warfield and Frank Ryan and Leroy Kelly and
Gene Hickerson and all the rest. He did catch 331 passes and score 70 touchdowns for a decade of Cleveland teams, none of which had a losing record. He did get named the MVP of the 1964 NFL championship game for grabbing three TD passes during the contest that yielded the one and only title ever won by the Browns.
And all this time later, so long after running his last post pattern back in '71, Collins is still being asked to stand before the believers and preach that Cleveland gospel - a duty that will bring him to our town for a dinner on June 9 when he will address the Onondawga Browns Backers Club at LeMoyne Manor in Liverpool.
He'll be joined on the dais by Bob Golic, the old Cleveland defensive tackle who might still be suffering from the shakes inspired back in 1987 by John Elway, who engineered that 98-yard, fourth-quarter nightmare called "The Drive" that helped Denver defeat the Browns in the AFC title affair.
Once at that head table, of course, the two of them - Collins and Golic - will gaze at the faces before them and realize once again that being a former Cleveland Brown, if played right, pretty much means never having to pay for another meal.
Remarkably, there are 296 officially-sanctioned Browns Backers groups (including the Onondawga bunch) - stuffed with 69,868 registered members, most of whom know Marion Motley's hat size - scattered around the globe.
Each of the 50 states is represented, as are Antarctica, Australia, Egypt, El Salvador, England, Israel, Japan, Puerto Rico, Sri Lanka and the West Indies, along with the previously-mentioned Canada and Croatia.
So, if you were ever wondering what Central New York has had in common with, oh, Judea and Saint Kitts all these years, wonder no more. Because the answer is simple: There are dwellers in all those places who still sigh when reminded that the Browns drafted Tim Couch in '99 when they could have picked Donovan McNabb or Edgerrin James or Champ Bailey or Torry Holt or Jevon Kearse or . . . you get the idea.
Truth is, Collins - who'll be 67 in August - isn't much into the sighing business. Rather, the ol' wide receiver just watches, and muses, from a distance. That is, from his home in Hershey, Pa. And from there, he offered some words of caution regarding the second (and sexier) of Cleveland's two first-round choices made just last month.
"No matter how you cut it, Brady Quinn is going to be a rookie," said Collins. "You can't expect him to come in and do much of anything. He's certainly a specimen and he seems like a good kid. But, come on. He's a rookie. And, if you ask me, the NFL's last good rookie quarterback was Dan Marino.
"They say Quinn ran a 'pro offense' at Notre Dame. Well, that was college.
"And in college, of the 22 guys on the field, maybe seven of them are good.
"In the NFL, of the 22 guys on the field, 22 are good. That's a big difference. So, remember all of that stuff when you're talking about Brady Quinn and what he's going to do for the Browns this year."
Get the drift here? When Collins does come to town 17 days from now, he'll do so without a mute button. And he'll do what he can to right what he believes has been a wrong perpetrated for going on a half-century now, or ever since Jim Brown arrived in Cleveland from Syracuse in 1957.
"When you say, 'New York Yankees,' you can go right down the list," Collins declared. "Babe Ruth . . . Lou Gehrig . . . Joe DiMaggio . . . Yogi Berra . . . Mickey Mantle . . . the whole bunch. But when you say, 'Cleveland Browns,' you get Jim Brown and that's it.
"Apparently, Jim Brown was the only guy who ever played for the Cleveland Browns. And I'm not saying that because I'm jealous of him. But there is an identity crisis with that franchise. You can't deny that. So, I'm gonna talk about the '64 team. We had a lot of talent. Jim was on that team, but it wasn't just him."
Let the record show that Collins was, once upon a time, a running back at Williamstown High School in south/central Pennsylvania. And, in homage to Brown, he wore No. 44 for those long-ago Rams. So, he's understood for a long, long time just how immense a figure was that former Orangeman. And he'll no doubt share all of this after the dessert is served on June 9.
But Gary Collins will mention, too, the names of Dick Schafrath and Ernie Green and John Wooten and Johnny Brewer and certain other Cleveland forgottens. And a fair portion of the Onondawga faithful will nod. They will, remember, have run up their Browns flag . . . they will have saluted it . . . and they will be ready to absorb the Cleveland gospel as preached by the fella who used to catch a lot of passes on Sunday afternoons.
"I could," Collins said, "talk for hours."
The flock would be only too happy to listen.
Bud Poliquin's column and his "To The Point" observations appear regularly in The Post-Standard, and his blog is freshly written every weekday at syracuse.com. He can be heard on Sports Radio 620 WHEN (AM 620) Mondays through Thursdays between 3-5 p.m. Telephone: 315-470-2213; e-mail:
bpoliquin@syracuse.com.
