Sundays in the Pound: The Heroics and Heartbreak of the 1985–89 Cleveland Browns (review)

Early in the 1920s, the National Football League, founded in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association, faced interrelated problems inhibiting its growth and success: shifting franchises in small midwestern cities, haphazard scheduling, sparse crowds at games, the indifference of sportswriters, and the hostility of the collegiate establishment. But sixty years later, surmounting its problems, the NFL had become the premier professional league in the American sports world.

Similarly, professional football had languished in Cleveland in the 1920s. Three franchises in the NFL had collapsed, and Joe Carr, president of the NFL, feared that the city would never support the game. But by the 1950s, the Cleveland Browns had become the bellwether of the All-America Football Conference and then a stalwart member of the NFL. The team won more than its share of championships in the 1950s and 1960s, but it never played in the Super Bowl. All the while fans in and around the city gave the Browns unstinting emotional sustenance and dollars at the gate as the "team of the town."

Continuing and elaborating a theme of the town team in Sundays in the Pound, Jonathan Knight, a sportswriter from Columbus, argues that from 1985 through 1989 the Browns and the community reached a special plateau in their relationship. The Browns were the "most beloved on the planet," and "no city clung to a football team more than Cleveland clung to the Browns." The team represented the transformation of a "rust-belt hole into a gleaming renaissance town" (x). Especially distinctive among the Browns' fans were the men occupying a small section at the open end of the Cleveland Stadium; a raucous bunch, they barked at visiting players and hurled biscuits and batteries at them.

Primarily using the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Browns/News Illustrated as sources, Knight chronicles the Browns' seasons game by game, sometimes play by play, evoking the bittersweet nature of victories and defeats for players and fans. In four of the five seasons, the Browns finished first in the Central Division of the American Conference and were the wild card in one season. But they were unable to capture the conference title that would have given them a berth in the Super Bowl. Theirs were heartbreaking losses, notably in two games against the Denver Broncos: in 1986 the Broncos engineered a long drive to win in the final minutes of the game; and in 1987 the Browns' Ernest Byner fumbled at the goal line as the game ended to give the Broncos the victory.

Along the sad trail, Knight presents interesting vignettes of outstanding Browns' players, coaches, and owner Art Modell and describes the Browns' use and misuse of the draft. Considering the title of the book, one might expect Knight to have spent more space on the Dog Pound, asking and answering questions about its denizens: Were they blue-collar men quite different from fans in other sections of the stadium? Did they somehow epitomize the spirit of the city? Did they constitute a mob or were they merely mugging for television cameras?

Altogether, sports fans will find Sundays in the Pound a good read—the prose is usually sprightly despite a few grammatical lapses—and sports historians may find in it clues and cues for understanding the interior operation of a big-time football franchise.