I should divorce the Cleveland Browns
This is the year I should divorce the Cleveland Browns.
But can I? I didn’t choose Browns fandom, after all. It came looking for me before I understood it, before I understood myself.
Like so many important things.
In Field of Dreams, Moonlight Graham says he can never leave Chisholm, Minnesota because:
This is my most special place in all the world, Ray. Once a place touches you like this, the wind never blows so cold again. You feel for it, like it was your child.
Some of our deepest loves are like this. They slip past our rationality and touch us so that “the wind never blows so cold again”. These include home, family, country, football teams…and religion.
The Browns have never been good to me: So much losing (1–31 in 2016–17), so many draft busts (54 different quarterbacks since 1999), plus the three years (1996–98) when they left me (I should have been grateful). Worse, there are the times they raised my hopes only to crush them in epic style (Red Right 88, The Drive, The Fumble). The Browns home fields have collectively been a factory of sadness for generations.
So why do I stick with them? Admittedly it’s not rational. It’s part of my identity that lies beneath the strata of thinking and analysis, much like family, nationality, and (yes) religion. I’m a Browns fan because fandom links me to a time and place, to friends, to an identity. It stakes out territory within me and says that, no matter who I am today, I am still this too.
This is the first year, though, that I’ve seriously considered dropping the Browns. During the off-season, in a move both desperate and unprincipled, the Browns signed QB Deshaun Watson to an enormous $230 million fully guaranteed five-year contract, knowing that Watson would likely be suspended most of this year (it turned out to be 11 games) because he has been accused by 25 women of sexual misconduct. Watson maintains his innocence. Few even in the Browns organization seem to believe him.
If I can’t count on the Browns to win and I can’t count on them to do the right thing, I really should break up with them. But it’s hard. Because I didn’t choose Browns fandom. It chose me.
I was seven and hadn’t yet noticed sports when we moved to our farm, so I didn’t have a team. That was the last year of my free-agency though, because that summer we made an historic and tragic mistake. Our farmhouse was about halfway between Cleveland and Columbus. Because my parents were from Akron, when we put our TV antenna on a tall pole and fastened it to our chimney, my dad aimed it north instead of south. Had we pointed it toward Columbus, my heart probably would have been pulled to Cincinnati, to Ken Anderson and Cris Collinsworth and the Bengals (who have at least been to some Super Bowls), not to mention Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, and the Big Red Machine.
This is not just speculation. Some of the kids we went to church with lived just a few miles south, but went to different schools in a different county and watched Columbus news, and they were indeed Cincinnati fans. The line of my destiny was just that close.
Once a team has set its hook, you’re done for — especially if it happens when you’re young. Years ago, my brother and his young son, both Browns fans, were disgusted and appalled by another infamous season. So my brother said, “Let’s think about picking another team to follow. We’ll sleep on it tonight and tomorrow we’ll decide.” The next day, his son asked what the decision was. My brother said: “I could no more choose to not be a Browns fan than I could choose to not be your father. It’s just who I am”. If that sounds like crazy talk to you, I know you don’t have a team of your own. I pity you. I also envy you.
I have come to realize that I “chose” my religion in just the same way.
At about the same age as I found football, we started attending church as a family. My parents followed a common path — they received some religious exposure as kids, drifted away from any overt practice of it as young adults, then returned to a version of it as parents, probably due to the fearsome responsibility of raising children.
Shortly thereafter, I responded to an “altar call” (an emotionally-based appeal to repent of sin and accept Christ as savior) and became part of the church family. From then on, Christianity became part of my identity. I absorbed the Sunday School lessons as truth. Everyone around me held the same faith, especially my family and closest friends. I learned to see the world through Christian eyes without realizing that I was doing so.
Did I look at evidence for faith? Did I check to see if there was any objective reason to believe the stuff I was taught? That came much, much later. And by then, I had plenty of motivation to cling to whatever evidence allowed me to continue to believe.
I have described that process in other articles. My point here is that many of the things that shape us the most are things that chose us, and then became us. Only later do we learn how to rewrite the story with ourselves as the rational agent, the hero-detective who digs in and finds the true path hidden among the falsehood.
Sports fandom gives us a way to see this in action within ourselves. No one would claim that their team loyalty was based on truth and choice. (Well, maybe a Red Sox fan would). Fandom just happens to us. And we don’t feel the need to explain or defend it.
The good news (as a former minister, I have to wrap up with some good news) is that we aren’t bound to our earliest strong impressions. It’s possible to love home as the place where “the wind never blows so cold” and still move away and experience other places and ideas. It’s possible to value the foundation that faith once gave, and yet examine it in the bright light of day. It’s even possible to switch football teams.
I’m not really as loyal to the Browns (anymore) as I have let on. I have jumped on plenty of other bandwagons. Nevertheless, the continued pull of the “North Coast” team surprises me, and warns me about a kind of bias most of us carry around within us.
