Another Injury - and Memories of the Most Legendary Brown of All

The injury bug bit the Browns in a big way again on Tuesday, when cornerback Daven Holly blew out a knee during a practice at the team's facilities in Berea. Holly was expected to battle for one of the starting cornerback positions this season, but instead will apparently be lost for the year. Reports released Wednesday said Holly jumped for a ball during practice and came down awkwardly on the knee. His injury was the second serious setback for a Browns player in the past week. Right guard Ryan Tucker suffered a hip injury May 14 and had to undergo surgery. He'll miss most, if not all, of training camp, but is expected back in time for the season.

Remembering the glory days...

My brother suggested I post scans and photos from days gone by. There was a time when our dad had a couple of programs from Browns games in their pre-NFL days of the 1940s, when they were the dominant team (and only champion) in the four-season existence of the All-America Football Conference. Those programs may still be around, but we haven't come across them in several years. Maybe in a box somewhere.

Meanwhile, I went back to our old baseball/football card collections to pull out a few gems from the 1960s. The photo on the left is of the 1962 Jim Brown card from Post Cereal, one of an ongoing series issued on the backs of cereal boxes. That was a great idea for the time. We'd buy the cereal just to get the cards. Post did it for several years with baseball, but only 1962 for football. We didn't anticipate at the time that cards like this would ever be worth anything more than the stock they were printed on, so we cut them out with scissors and collected them, nothing more. The ones I still have are all cut unevenly and have rounded corners. Who knew? And who cared? It was Jim Brown, for crying out loud, and that's all that mattered. Look at him. Still the prototype for the NFL running back. 12,000+ yards in nine seasons. Everybody else takes a back seat. (Yes, you can see a cleaner image at the Vintage Football Card Gallery, but their cards obviously weren't mangled and worn with love like ours were. That's just boring.)

These next two cards are cool for different reasons. First is JB's 1964 Philadelphia card, part of a series that featured a hilarious set of player shots from the Browns. For whatever reason, unlike the other teams who appear to have had their shots taken at training camps per usual, the Browns players all had their card photos taken outside next to a parking lot. I'm guessing this might have been outside of Cleveland Stadium, or maybe at their training facility. But that Cadillac convertible (I think that's what it is) behind Brown is in the photo on every card of a Browns player I have from that season. (There's one of linebacker Galen Fiss that just cracks me up. Maybe I'll post it another time.) At any rate, the same season that this card was released, the Browns won the last major professional sports championship by any team from Cleveland, defeating the Colts in the 1964 title game, 27-0. I love Brown in this photo. Where the photographer tried to get guys to use typical football poses (like the one in the card above), you can tell Brown just thought, "Are you kidding? This is a sidewalk, with a car behind me! Just take the stupid photo," and crouched down.

Finally, there's the Jim Brown card from the season that never was. This is his 1966 card, and he never played in the 1966 season. The previous year, he ran for 1,544 yards and 17 TDs and averaged 5.3 yards a carry, leading the league (again) and just missing out on a second straight NFL title (the Browns were toppled by the Green Bay Packers). During the offseason Brown, an aspiring actor at the time, was in London shooting "The Dirty Dozen." The story goes that Brown intended to play at least one more season, although he admittedly had an eye on an acting career. However, when it appeared that the movie's schedule would overlap the start of Browns training camp, owner Art Modell proclaimed that Brown would be fined for every day of training camp that he missed. Bad idea. Never one to have things dictated to him, Brown simply retired, stunning the sports world. He had dominated the NFL for nearly a decade, but he walked away, and that was it. I remember feeling heartbroken at the time. Now, I can't imagine anything cooler. As Brown himself said, the way he went out was preferable to the way so many aging athletes do, "sitting on a bench, limping around, invoking sympathy."

Amazing, what memories a few old cards can invoke. Maybe over time I'll pull out a few other treasures to share.