Forever Brown

Forever Brown
Sure, We Pray On Sundays, But Not In A Church
By Jara Anton

Autumn in the Rust Belt settles in again. Fall Sundays break clean and cold. Burning plywood, bratwurst and beer crest over the bridges of the heart of rock 'n' roll. Cowbells and car horns are the soundtrack, and a red sun ominously ascends, lighting up the Terminal Tower. The endless caravans of families and friends flip up the skirt of the Cleveland skyline. It's football season.
For Browns fans, Sundays are a day of reckoning, a day for high hopes and heartbreaks, the sabbath of our shared faith. On Sundays anything can happen. We hold our breath as 300-pound men - sides of beef, really - float through the air.

Browns fans are a different breed. We are animals. Forged in the Rust Belt, we are rabid, raging and relentless. Browns fans are not fair-weather. We are there in sleet and sun, bone-chillingly cold and sun-burnt. We are chapped faces doting like proud parents on men we've never met. We are fans that are recognized nationally as brutally, intimidatingly loud. The Dawg Pound is the hardest of hard. They are the best of the best of the best and they don't fuck around. God keep you if you are in the vicinity and maybe don't want to be.
I spent some time in Los Angeles, and there are literally Browns-backed bars on the West Coast. I didn't see any Steelers bars (just sayin'). Browns-backed bars that show every game, live. Why, you may ask? Dude, because we're rowdy. Some bastards out there are still talking about the game where we threw the beer bottles onto the field. Plastic bottles. And it was like a hundred years ago.

The Browns don't even win a whole lot. And we lose hard. But our faith is unshakable, our patience deep. Outsiders are impressed with the way we dust off those old Browns T-shirts and just rage. Every season, every game, again and again.
It's fair to ask why. One Sunday we put together a lead of over 20 points, and the next we can't put three points on the board. But see, it's not really about winning. It's more about the exercise, the practice of Cleveland football Sundays. It's about wanting to get up at like 5 a.m. to wait in unholy traffic, wishing you'd left even earlier to get a good spot for tailgating (this is crucial). I know dudes who never wake up before noon six days a week. On Sunday? They are bright-eyed and building fires at 6 a.m. They do it for their team - and for the opportunity to be drunk for a whole day, with few ramifications. Muni Park is like a shanty town Mardi Gras.
Or maybe you take the Rapid downtown and end up chatting with bums about the impending game. Maybe you're wandering the Flats with a Brady jersey on and see the VP of your company. The point is that everyone is in a great mood, ready and willing, the city abuzz with what could be. And the Browns don't even have to have a chance of winning, necessarily, for us to be drooling and crazed, horny for the game.
We remember what it's like not to have a team. Those were dark days. And maybe that's why we don't care much that we always seem to peak in the preseason, and why we're quick to fall hard for every new golden boy. Timmy! Kelly! Charlie! Brady! He's the one who will take us to the top! I just know it!

But it doesn't matter; it's the orange and brown we're in love with. We're Browns fans. We go to war every Sunday with our team. We prepare with sausages and kraut, beer and face paint. We are on the bench, in the huddle and on the stretcher with our guys. Every one of our guys. We love our city, this dirty, smelly, broke-ass city. Maybe the Browns are one of the last things that make us truly, madly and deeply happy. That innocent little pleasure of watching the under-Dawg rise up and actually win is always a romantic idea.
And I say, HERE WE GO BROWNIES…