Since I’m home in Northeast Ohio and it's the first Sunday of the NFL season, today felt like a good time to share this story about passing your love for your city and your team on to your children. This originally appeared in the Sports issue of The Print Edition.
When you hold your child for the first time, you start to understand love in its fullest form. You tell yourself in that moment that you will do anything to make that child’s life the best that it can be. That means sleepless nights, juggling schedules to make sure you are there for the school performance and give them everything they could possibly need. In my case, there was one other insidious threat I would never let my son be exposed to: the Cleveland Browns.
My childhood sports memories are exclusively filled with anguish. My freshman basketball team went an entire season without a win, and that wasn’t even the worst sports-related thing that happened to me as a kid. The Indians (as they were known then) were playing in a 74,000-seat stadium built in 1931, to only a few thousand fans. The Cavaliers had solid teams that would inevitably run into the buzzsaw of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in the 1989 Eastern Conference Finals.
But this was all minor in comparison to the Cleveland Browns. In Cleveland, NFL football is about as important as God. You can’t overstate just how much that team means to the city. It’s too bad because the Browns are one of the most disappointing organizations in all of professional sports. During my childhood, the Browns were so close to actually being good that the hope permeated the entirety of Northeast Ohio. We all shared it, and it was a buoy and a connector for a struggling city.
