Browns Scrapbook
Chuck Heaton
Gray & Company, Publishers

The subtitle tells it all: A Fond Look Back at Five Decades of Football, from a Legendary Cleveland Sportswriter. Shortly into the book, you’ll find this line: “It was different back then.” Indeed, it was. I’m probably not alone in thinking it was better back then, as well.

Chuck Heaton joined the Plain Dealer as a sportswriter in 1946. His first beat was baseball, and his timing was excellent. The Indians won it all in 1948 and challenged again in 1954. Just before the end of that season, he was switched over to football, and from then until another switch 24 years later, he was the main writer of and about the Browns. It was a few more years before he retired (almost) completely, giving him 51 years of writing about sports.

In the early days of football, before the NFL became the marketing-obsessed entity it is today, teams didn’t have their own year-round training/office complexes like they do today—it was after all, only a part-time ‘game’. Most teams trained at a local college or university, which had a field and dormitories for the players, coaches and media. Yes, indeed, you read that correctly! In those early days, reporters lived with the players. Can you imagine that happening these days? Of course, that was also in the days before the ever-present television/media obsession, too.

Fans of football (or any other sport, for that matter) as it used to be will particularly enjoy the piece on page 157, titled “The Year Sports Lost Its Innocence”. It’s enough to make a grown person cry!

Heaton observed the greats and the not-so-greats among players and coaches, many of whom became life-long friends. He attended (and wrote about) the big games and the forgettable ones, as well, including the first Monday Night Football, Superbowls and championship games before the era of Superbowls. And yes, there was once such a thing!

In the early 90s –before the great ‘defection’—he compiled a personal sort of history about the Browns, in a series that ran in the Plain Dealer, under the same title as this book. For the most part, the pieces fall easily into six categories: Places, On and Off the Field, Rivals, Big Moments, The Game and Hall of Famers. A postcript lists the All-Time Greatest Browns Team.

Some of the individual pieces here carry the date they were originally printed, which helps to place them in the proper context of one’s memory. The date on which Paul Brown died or the day the team was moved to Baltimore merit this attention. There are also eight pages of photos.

It’s entirely appropriate that one of those photos is of Mr. Heaton at the Pro Football Hall of Fame holding the Dick McCann Memorial Award he received in 1980. Who says nice guys can’t finish first?

Any football fan in your life would love to find this book in his Christmas stocking! Or at least in advance of this weekend's Browns/Steelers game.

For more information, visit Gray & Company's page about the book http://www.grayco.com/cleveland/books/10436.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Kelly Ferjutz artswriterATadelphia.net
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