The last time the Cleveland Browns were legitimate contenders for the Super Bowl, UJ and I had season tickets.
We sat in the upper deck of old Cleveland Municipal Stadium during the late ’80s and early ’90s. We watched as the Denver Broncos and John Elway — may he rot forever in hell — broke our hearts with The Drive, and the next year we watched the great team that eventually fell, again, to Denver thanks to The Fumble. (It’s all part of the immense burden of failure lugged around by Cleveland sports fans, most recently recounted by this piece in the New York Times.) It was fun going to the games and great to watch good football, but eventually we gave up our tickets as the Browns jacked up prices and other obligations intervened.
But now Russell will be returning to the Midwest. He loves the Browns, and from the Cranbrook campus in the suburban Detroit area he’ll be within a reasonable drive from Cleveland. So, we talked about it during Russell’s Mother’s Day visit, and we decided to pull the trigger. Once again, I’ll be a season ticket holder, taking in the NFL in all its spectacle and wretched excess with Russell as we watch from our seats in Section 536 of Cleveland Browns Stadium.
I don’t think the Browns will be very good this year, but you never know . . . and sometimes you just have to put your money where your mouth is. This season, we’re betting on the Browns.
The expectations were low for the Tribe this year, and the season is still young, but this team seems to be a lot better than anticipated. Amazingly, right now the Tribe is one of the best slugging teams in the majors. Their starting pitching and bullpen have been solid, and they have some guys who know how to play in the field, too. They just swept a four-game series with Oakland, and they’ve got an interesting collection of players — as well as an experienced manager, Terry Francona, who appears to be touching all the right buttons so far.
The three women — Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight — apparently were held captive for years in a house on Cleveland’s near West Side. 
Akron, Ohio, the place of my birth, falls squarely within the Cleveland sports orbit. Parentage and pedigree played a role, too, as my parents and grandparents were all Cleveland sports fans. Rabid support for the Browns and the Tribe was a kind of birthright for the boys in our family. I gladly participated, going to Indians games with my grandparents and watching the Browns with UJ on autumn Sundays. Little did I know that, during those hopeful days of the late ’60s, I was signing on to a lifelong commitment that, for more than four decades, would not be rewarded with a championship.
Scientists say there is 
Will Chud be a stud? Who knows? Most recently, he’s been the offensive coordinator for the Carolina Panthers. They didn’t make the playoffs this year, but their offense was better than the Browns. Chudzinski’s supposed to be great at developing young quarterbacks — but then, so was Pat Shurmur, and we all saw how that Browns hire turned out. So, we’ve got a young guy who’s never been a head coach in the NFL before, trying to turn around a franchise that has given its fans awful teams over the past few years. It will be a big challenge for him, just as it was a big challenge for Shurmur, whose resume was just like Chudzinski’s. I hope the Browns hired Chudzinski because they thought he would be a good head coach, and not for other reasons, like his being willing to agree to restrictions on his authority that other coaches wouldn’t accept.
