Fumbling From Within
Ernest Byner’s goal line fumble in the 1987 AFC Championship Game for Cleveland against the Denver Broncos is a defining moment in Browns history. It’s also a defining moment in my life as a fan. It’s a moment which changes the franchise, and solidifies my commitment to a team that just can’t seem to win. It’s a moment intimately tied to Cleveland’s history as a city, and the resilience of a people facing the hardships of industrial decline. It’s a moment tied to an individual player’s anguish and eventual redemption. And it’s a moment which I still think about almost forty years later. Tick. Tick.
The kid’s muscles scream in agony.
Keep driving. Bounce one bronco. Another.
Breath exhausted. The goal is close.
Tick. Tick.
He’s kept them in it. Back from 21-3 at halftime.
44 carries the entire city on his back for 57.
Score twice, pound the frozen Mile High ground.
Hand off. Route running. Keep driving.
Everyone back home willing the ball forward with every labored breath.
Kosar draws to Byner.
Dick Emberg knows this is it. We all know this is it.
Tick. Tick.
Time crawls. History is here. Again.
Byner bounces one tackle, another.
The goal line is there. He can taste it. The Dawg Pound tastes it. Tie the game.
Legs driving. Arms aching. Mind numb.
The horrors of Red Right 88 and The Drive in the rear mirror.
Demons exorcized.
Bronco tackles side and front. Stop.
Tick.
The ball has other ideas.
It leaves Byner’s grasp, tumbles to the ground as Byner tumbles empty into an ending zone.
It tumbles. Fumbles. We fall.
Emberg screams oh my.
”There’s a war going on under that stack”
Nothing left.
A brawl.
Denver recovers on the 2.
Collapse.
Nothing left.
Nothing left.
Tick. Tick.
The long walk.
History will always remember. Fans will never forget.
Alone.
Anguished.
I cry for the first time. It won’t be the last.
Byner sits on his helmet as the game concludes. Along with it Browns hopes.
He ends his career as the 16th greatest rusher of all-time.
Transplanted to Baltimore as owners rip the team from the city.
A career of accomplishments. A future Superbowl win. Traded, but returned to the Browns years later.
The fumble on the 2 will always be there.
The fumble.
Our fumble.
The Browns never recover from Byner’s mistake on the goal line, and the franchise turns on the moment. Within ten years the team will move to Baltimore and become The Ravens, leaving the city without a football team for the first time in decades. Industrial collapse and the movement of manufacturing overseas had ripped the heart out of the city’s economy, now the owners had ripped the city’s team from the fans. Anger boils over during the last game in Cleveland and the stadium’s seating is destroyed in violent echoes of Bottlegate. Jerseys are burned. Owners are blamed. Baltimore went on to win the Superbowl just five years later, with many of the previous Browns still on the team.
The Browns are reactivated as a Cleveland franchise in 1999, only to immediately sink to a 43-0 opening defeat against bitter local rivals Pittsburgh. A revolving door of ownership, leadership, on-field calamities and injured first-round picks ensues for the next twenty years. Browns fans, eternally hopeful, endure prolonged, biting misery season after season, culminating in a 1-15 finish in 2016, and an even historically lower 0-16 finish in 2017. The Browns are in the record books again, but for all the wrong reasons. The point at which things can only go up. Everyone gets fired, and day one begins. Again. Things would be different this time. Again. It’s going to take time. Again.
I remember exactly where I was when it happened. I was in our local bar, sad. The Browns were playing the Jets on Thursday night. The Browns had often been primetime poison, but this would be different. Maybe tonight they’d snap a nineteen game losing streak. They’d drafted a cocky Texan out of Oklahoma with enough swagger to carry the league. As Baker Mayfield sat restless on the sideline for his chance at the big time, the Browns, as expected, fell to 14-0 before halftime. Same old Browns. The fans ached for Baker. They called out for change to be made. As they had done for decades. Coach Jackson, who wouldn’t last the season, refused. The universe intervened when starting quarterback, Tyrod Taylor got hurt and had to head to the locker room. Here came Baker. Finally. The Dawg Pound erupts. They know they have their man. Believeland. The snap. A 14-yard sling to Landry. The stadium goes nuts. He said he’d woken up feeling dangerous. All they want is something to believe in. Something to hope for. It had arrived.
Baker Mayfield would ultimately lead the Browns to their first playoff victory in a long, long time. And for good measure, it was against the old rivals, the Steelers. But the specter of organizational in-fighting was soon to rear its head. Again. Team squabbles, and Baker getting increasingly injured but refusing to be taken out of games would see his departure to the Panthers in 2022, after the Browns trade for better. He’d seen coaching changes, management changes, and what felt like the beginnings of a tide turned. Was it just a fake? A fumble?
Games turn on moments like Byner’s. But so does history itself. Those split-second moments of genius or disaster. Fandom is the long game. It’s deeply intergenerational, and exponentially more painful. The highs are higher, the lows are lower. The Browns are long overdue. They’ve never been to the Superbowl, although they’ve been within seconds of it. It took a heartbreaking franchise move to another city to get there. I’m not from Cleveland, I’m from rural England. About as far removed from Ohio’s cold, declining industrial heartland as you can get. But I feel it. As I watched Byner walk back to the sideline, even as a thirteen year old kid, I knew this was it for me. That I’d always be in it. That for some unknown cosmic reason, these people were calling me. My hair still stands on end whenever I hear Michael Stanley’s ‘Here we go again’, the unofficial anthem of the Browns, and the song they play after every home game.
These days, and approaching my fifties, I’m still in it. Every year I make the four hundred mile drive from New Jersey out to Cleveland to watch a home game. No-one I know will come with me. They know it’s my thing. And my thing alone. But it’s not the loneliness of walking back to the sideline after a fumble. It’s the joy of heading west and the manifest destiny this week’s game might bring. I sit in the Dawg Pound, with all the other deeply optimistic barking diehards. We drink. We yell. And we hug. The feeling of total and complete euphoria which comes from being surrounded by seventy thousand people who feel the same as you. And when we score, it’s the greatest feeling alive. I never want it to end. I am always one of the last to leave the stadium. As the thousands snake through the turnstiles and out into the bitter cold still whipping off the lake, there’s a satisfaction and comfort in knowing this is something in our lives. That whatever the team does on the field, the town is the team, and the team is the town.
No-one blames Ernest Byner for what happened, although he still often blames himself. The Browns would never have even been in the position to tie the game had it not been for him. And there are echoes of his hard-running, hard-hitting, drag-everyone-with-you style of play in today’s team. They play in the cold, and they’re tough as nails, just like their fans. But with all fandom, the championship-shaped hole is always there. And when it comes to Cleveland, it is going to be one of the best moments of my life. I still feel it, even after all the fumbles and self-inflicted organizational head wounds. Browns fandom nourishes me. It makes me feel alive. It reminds me of my failings. When they lose on a Sunday, I feel low all week. When they win, my energy levels rocket. I am often inconsolable after a severe loss. And lose my voice after a big win. Both ways I usually don’t want to talk about it.
The fumble.
Our fumble.
It’s who we are.
You can beat us on the field.
But you’ll never win.
And when it comes. Which it will.
We are never going to let you forget it.
Tick. Tick.
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