Then Mike Brown was in high school, a quarterback, of course, when his father made the Browns America’s first team while inventing the radio helmet, face mask, and draw play along the way.
“Things that you guys use and see today,” is how Mike Brown knocked off the cobwebs.
When Mike Brown came down to talk, there was a biography on his desk. There’s always a biography on his desk. It could be about Ben Franklin or Franklin Pierce or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But there’s always one, and there are times he’ll wonder in awe how the historians can do it with no one left to tell it for the first-hand footnotes. Sometimes, he’ll just wonder.
So, on the eve of the Bengals’ 58th season, Burrow’s sixth year at the helm, and his 90th year, Mike Brown went first-hand.
“Mr. Brown doesn’t talk a lot,” Burrow says. “But when he does, it’s a gold nugget or a valuable piece of information.”
Paul Brown’s fellow high school coaches banded together to urge Ohio State to hire him. When the first radio helmet failed, his quarterback, George Ratterman, kidded the press when he said it picked up police calls. But they went with the headlines anyway.
Bill Willis and Marion Motley? His dad knew they were really good. Future Hall-of-Famers, it turned out. Willis played for him. Motley played against him. He thought they could help his new venture. He didn’t think of them as black. Mike Brown spent his first pro training camps sneaking into the dorms at night to play “Hearts,” with his heroes. Willis. Motley. The punter Horace Gillom. The game’s first black players. All Mike knew is they were nice enough to let him play with Gods.
When Motley and Otto Graham fouled up a handoff and Motley still broke a big run, they watched the tape the next day and didn’t see a broken play, “but the germ of a new one.” The Draw.
When Graham was cheap-shotted in the face and needed 17 stitches, Paul searched for something big enough to protect Graham but small enough for him to see. A plastic bar in front of the face was soon in every locker.
“I’ve certainly familiarized myself with it all through reading and watching,” says Bengals head coach Zac Taylor. “But it’s cool to hear Mike talk about it because he’s lived the history. There’s usually a little more detail.”
Taylor has often sat across the desk with the biographies talking about the first Bengals head coach. He’ll ask questions about those things he’s read and heard to hear Mike Brown’s perspective.
“He was a little more detailed than he has been,” Taylor says of The Talk.
But he heard a new one this week. Brown mentioned in his talk that Branch Rickey, the man who integrated major league baseball with the Dodgers and Jackie Robinson the year after Brown integrated pro football, reached out to Paul Brown about a decade later when he was running the Pirates.
By this time, the mid-1950s or so, Brown was one of the headline names in sports, and Rickey wanted to know if he’d come manage Pittsburgh. But he was a football coach, Paul Brown told him. Yes, Rickey said. He had plenty of guys around who knew baseball. What he needed was a leader.
“That was new to me, but it makes sense,” Taylor says. “They were looking for leadership and turned to one of the guys that was excelling in leadership. That makes sense.”
Andrei Iosivas, the third-year receiver born in the last year of Paul Brown’s century, loved it even though he remembers watching the video of Paul Brown’s career as a rookie. Eric Ball, the director of player relations, makes sure every rookie class watches NFL Films’ classic A Football Life: Paul Brown.