False Start: How the New Browns Were Set Up to Fail

nChapter 1 Your Team Never Had a Chance It was a fall Sunday and I had no understanding of football. I remember running into the house to ask my dad a question. He was in his sofa chair, watching the game on our Sylvania black and white TV. I was ready to run back outside when he almost begged me to watch the game with him. I vividly remember watching a player with No. 32 running and several opposing players bounced off him as he carried the football. I asked my dad, How does he do that? My dad said, He keeps moving his legs. From there, my dad told me about Jim Brown and the Cleveland Browns. I was hooked. . . . My dad passed away when I was a high school senior. I will always have memories of us and our Browns. Our lying crossways across his bed listening to the Browns win the 1964 championship over the Baltimore Colts. His throwing me the football in our backyard while saying, Frank Ryan hits Gary Collins with the touchdown pass . . . Bill Nelsen to Paul Warfield over the middle. Win or lose, they are always our Cleveland Browns. --Martin T. Zimmer Your team never had a chance. Browns fans need to know that about the reincarnated franchise that returned to the National Football League in 1999. The NFL never should have allowed Art Modell to hijack the franchise to Baltimore. And Modell never should have even considered moving the team when he had the perfect buyer sitting right next to him in his suite on game day--a man named Al Lerner. But Modell was one of the boys, a veteran owner, and the league loves to take care of its own. And if it's unfair to the fans, so what? They'll just put an expansion team in there and make even more money in the process. It was all about money. Never forget that. Money for Modell, and money for his lodge brothers in the NFL owners boxes. (Can anyone say Personal Seat License without reaching for the Tums?) This is the book the NFL really doesn't want you to read. It's the story of how some of the best football fans in the country were betrayed, abused, and finally stuck with an inferior product--but charged more for it. What has been the return on their investment? What have fans, who bought every ticket for every game since the Browns came back in 1999, received as a reward? Heartaches, headaches and frustration. That should come as no surprise. The NFL hamstrung the new Browns from the beginning, and for very selfish reasons. This led to a variety of poor decisions that haunt the franchise to this day. Is i