A Browns Fan Hops on the Bandwagon

If you beat 'em, and they still go to Super Bowl, that's a win

For the eight years we’ve lived in Over-the-Rhine, my car has consistently been parked outside. My first lesson in city living was to lock those car doors each night. The second lesson was a bit more obscure. What we leave behind in the car says plenty about who we are.

For instance, as my mother’s caregiver, I stockpiled Gatorade and packages of Depend products, leaving them to sit in the car’s heat or chill until my next visit with her. My children and husband claimed when the end of the world came, they planned to take up residence in my vehicle where one would find a stash of snacks, including Milk Duds and Combos, stuffed into plastic compartments.

The final, orphaned occupant of my car is an orange and brown, matted-down, furry Cleveland Browns blanket acquired by necessity.

It was December, 1993. Driving north from Cincinnati for a Browns football game with my siblings, the cold had seeped into the car. We stopped at Kmart. The blanket stood out as easiest to port and fastest to warm, other than a flask that circled through the Dawg Pound later that afternoon.

Did the Browns win? I don’t recall. I coveted the blanket more, for its rush of memories. It was a cozy home I could hold on to when driving back to Cincinnati, while moving to Oregon and returning, as an added layer required during the kid’s outdoor games, or if the guys at the car wash ribbed me about my choice in sports teams.

Within those thousands of threads and the musty sweat of time, a certain sense of pride, of being a Cleveland Browns fans, had taken hold.

Living in the northern Cincinnati suburb of Loveland for many years, I easily dismissed the Bengals as a football team. Plus, there was a mix of sports fans in our neighborhood, including the Green Bay Packers. Yet hard as I tried, my son was swayed to the cheer for the team with a mix of stripes instead of a team with a straight-lined one down the helmet. He never veered.

My husband, a Cincinnatian through and through, and I moved downtown during a time in which the Bengals and Browns occasionally showed brilliance, but not enough to capture my attention for long. At stake was something more.

Sometimes, I left my car unlocked overnight. As such, it was entered (not broken into). The Gatorade bottles would disappear, a bag of nuts or Cheetos too. A refillable coffee mug, gone. A few nickels. Poof.

You know what stayed (other than the Depend underwear)? The Browns blanket. And so it became the object of my husband’s ridicule. No one wanted the Browns blanket, he’d laugh, despite the Bengals’ possession of a record more dismal and dysfunctional than a southern Ohio winter.

This North Coast fan held out hope. My younger sisters did too. We plowed our way through the past several seasons, cheering for the Browns during last year’s playoff games. This January, with only the two wins over the Bengals to hang our knit hats on, we did what most of Ohio has done—hopped our short selves up onto the Bengals bandwagon.

Now the Bengals are Ohio’s team. As my sister Jeanne said of last season’s Browns run, the team pushed us through the darkest of times. A similar sentiment applied now. We hitched ourselves to Joe Burrow and the assortment of young players and counted on them to pull us to the other side of the pandemic. For a while, it felt like Covid vs. Bengals. The Bengals won each time.

My sister, Beth, sends memes or links on her Android to our iPhone group chat and my niece was heading to the pep rally on Monday night. Our kids that don’t watch football are making batches of Skyline Chili dip, and the one who sent a video of himself crying (see Xavier’s 2004 loss to Duke before the Final Four and Oregon’s 2014 loss for the national title) after the Bengals broke their curse, refuses to alter his routine, won’t shave his newly prickly beard on what I still think of as a babyface, and will prepare a beefy portion of Skyline Chili paired with Bud Light for gametime. I was so careful in raising his culinary and sporting profile, but his devotion to place, like mine, was hard to break.

Of course, anyone who knows me, know I bleed for Cincinnati, sometimes orange, sometimes red. One doesn’t walk the boundaries of its 52 neighborhoods without some curiosity and devotion to a sense of place. One doesn’t rack up 5,000 miles of trekking around the city on foot during our pandemic years without an appreciation for the might, will and creativity that built this city and that which sustains it.

The Bengals hitting up the playoffs each year is a habit I can get behind. As well as the Browns in contention with them. Secretly though, if the Browns turn into winners, I might lose the blanket of security I’ve grasped hold of all these years. Without it, I may not know who I am, and will have to wear the mantle of true Bengals fan instead of this temporary one.

What’s your treasured sports memento, I’m curious to know. As always, thanks for reading! If you’re not already subscribed, please consider doing so. This post is also publicly accessible, so feel free to share!