Here we go, Brownies, here we go! Whoo! Whoo!
We made our way through the gate and entered the immense, creaky, old concourse, pigeons roosting in the rafters above, paint cracked and peeling from the supports, piss trickling from the restroom troughs. The sound here intensified, like a freight train in a tunnel.
Let’s go, Browns!
Let’s go, Browns!
Let’s go, Browns!
They cared, but even with something as overt as football, it wasn’t entirely clear what they cared about. It seemed to be more than just the outcome of the game. We climbed the cement stairs to the bleachers, entering a vast, roaring stadium, ungodly cold. There was a rancid spice of hot chocolate and cigar smoke. From our seats behind the goalpost, I could see mounds of snow plowed along the sidelines, where the players, all with long sleeves under their jerseys, danced in place, blowing thick steam into their hands, waiting for the game to start. They seemed to move in slow motion. The playing surface looked different from how it did on television, and my dad explained to me that it was mostly dirt, but the groundskeepers painted it green to look better on camera.
Three men behind us were passing a thermos back and forth, and when the game began and the Raiders quarterback, Jim Plunkett, took the field, one of them started hooting out, “Ya fuckin’ Indian!”
The reference was loose at best. Plunkett’s parents were Mexican American. But that mattered little. As the game went on, “fuckin’ Indian” rolled from the trio of thermos drinkers behind us nearly as often as the deafening, hair-raising roar of “DEE-FENSE” overtook the stadium. If I was looking for a sound to define my day, that chant was the answer. It would begin small, somewhere indistinct, like a random match dropped in a dry forest, a single voice: “Dee-fense.” A section of the stadium would call back in response, “DEE-fense!” Then half the stadium, and by the fourth or fifth round, the syllables would thunder—“DEE! FENSE!”—from deep in the guts of every one of the eighty thousand of us, a bellow of shared passion for stopping someone who was trying to push us around.
We could do it with our voices. We could stop the Raiders. We were vital. All we had to do was make ourselves known, to roar back into the mouth of Lake Erie.
* * *
The cold was brutal. I couldn’t understand how the players were able to catch a hard football or run into one another. Everything I touched felt as if it would shatter. My eyeballs were made of candy glass. My lips were hardened Silly Putty. Packed tight between my brothers, I kept dropping to my seat to rub my hands together between my knees. By the end of the first quarter, I couldn’t feel my toes and was nearly in tears as I bounced on the soles of my thin, woeful sneakers, desperate for warmth.
“I told you, you should have put on those boots,” my dad said.
I refused to admit my pride.
Down on the field, the players seemed to be playing against the weather even more than themselves. Brian Sipe, the Browns quarterback, the SoCal native, looked desperate, with a turtleneck underneath his jersey, hands crammed into pockets sewn to the front. He looked as cold as I felt. When he dropped back to pass and tried to set his feet, he would slide on the icy brown-green surface. Offense was nearly nonexistent. Running plays looked like the ones my brother and I concocted on the vibrating metal sheet of our Coleco Electronic Football game, stiff-armed footballers pushing chaotically against one another without advancing. The two teams traded punts and interceptions, neither ever really moving the ball.
Halfway through the second quarter, I couldn’t take the cold anymore and my dad sent me down to walk around in the concourse, where he thought it might be a little warmer. He didn’t want me to go alone, but there was no way he was missing this. So my eleven-year-old brother, Louis, and I tramped down the stairs to the filthy promenade. It smelled like beer and piss and the flaccid perfume of boiled frankfurters. As we made our way through the interior, the sound of the slightly distant crowd was almost haunting:
“DEE-FENSE . . . DEE-FENSE . . . DEE-FENSE . . .”
But then, all at once, it changed. The sound rose above its already-impossible volume, a cacophonous roar. Something was happening . . . something big . . . something from which we had been omitted.
Louis looked at me.
“Shit,” he said, a word he’d just learned from the thermos drinkers.
He knew I’d made him miss something, and even then his freckled baby face seemed to reveal a bitter wisdom, that this was something he would regret in something like a historic way. We raced back to our section, catching the scoreboard on the way.
Browns: 6
Raiders: 0
“You missed it!” Ralph screamed, wild-eyed, holding his hands against the sides of his stocking cap. “Bolton intercepted! He ran it back for a touchdown!”
The three men behind us were a tangle of arms and blankets and slaps and head bumps.
“Take that, ya fuckin’ Indian!”
The Browns lined up to kick the extra point. As Don Cockroft gingerly made his approach on the frozen mud, a Raiders player blasted through the line and blocked the kick.
The game continued on this way, a constant struggle for footing, for position, for inches of advantage. Failure. Failure. Failure. All afternoon, the wind kept ripping in from Lake Erie. The old concrete of Municipal Stadium felt like glacial ice and it just hurt, all of it: the cold, the frustration, the brutal brotherhood of violence.
By the fourth quarter, the thermos drinkers had fallen into bouts of slurred, profane nonsense, blasting racist spittle toward Plunkett. The game had continued in a series of jabs and punts and miscues. Sipe threw an interception. Reggie Rucker dropped a touchdown pass in the end zone. Cockroft missed a field goal. Plunkett was sacked and fumbled. Cockroft missed another. The Raiders crashed clumsily into the end zone.
The Browns were down 14–12 with less than a minute to go. Finally finding a frantic groove, they had driven the ball to the Raiders’ 13-yard line. It was third down. Sipe called a time-out. Everyone in the stadium was standing, bobbing with anticipation. Eighty thousand of us. Although I was squeezed parka-to-parka among the men of my family, I didn’t feel warm, but I did feel something oddly similar to warmth: a shared coldness. Many of the seats in that ungainly stadium were “obstructed view,” and part of the nuance of viewing a game there was adjusting position to see around the rusty, paint-chipped posts and I beams supporting the upper decks. We were all huddled close, the swish of nylon against nylon, the heavy murmur of anticipation, all of us sharing a calculation of the odds. All we needed was a field goal. No farther than an extra point. Then hold the Raiders for the remaining few seconds and this will all have been worth it.
The offense came back out onto the field. They lined up tight. Sipe raised his arms wide as he approached the line, trying to quiet the crowd. He leaned over the center, received the snap, looked across the end zone, drew back his arm, and released. The ball headed toward the goal line, toward the corner, toward tight end Ozzie Newsome, but it didn’t look right, didn’t zip through the air, was wobbling, caught up in the lake-effect wind, just long enough for a stumbling white jersey to cut in front of Newsome, the ball absorbed into the stickum-slathered arms of one of the Raiders, of someone who would be flying straight to California after this was done.
Intercepted.
The stadium fell silent. Browns players shrank from the celebration. The Raiders ran out the remaining seconds. It was over. Three weeks later they would win the Super Bowl. Everyone around us, wrapped in blankets and ponchos, looked dazed. What happened? We would soon learn that during the time-out, head coach Sam Rutigliano had called for a pass to the corner of the end zone, a play called Red Right 88. If no one was open, he’d told Sipe, “Throw it to the blonde in the second row.” That would leave one more play for the chip-shot field goal. But Sipe had tried to force the throw, and that was that. He tried because he believed, and th
at was the biggest mistake. He should have known.
* * *
But that’s what we do best. We believe. We come by this honestly. Because it’s not failure that we know. It’s something different, more complex, maybe worse: the feeling of almost winning.
In the years that followed it would become galvanized truth.
In 1987, the Browns played the Denver Broncos for the AFC Championship at old Municipal Stadium. With the clock ticking down and the Browns in the lead, John Elway led the Broncos on an impossible (not improbable; impossible) 98-yard drive, which became known as The Drive, to win the right to go to the Super Bowl. It’s regarded as one of the worst defensive letdowns in pro football history.
In 1988, the two teams met again in the AFC Championship. As the Browns were about to score a last-minute, game-tying touchdown, running back Earnest Byner fumbled at the 3-yard line to lose the game, in a turn of events that became known as The Fumble. The Broncos took over the ball with a minute remaining and went to the Super Bowl. It’s considered one of the most monumental collapses in pro football history.
In 1989, with the last second ticking off the clock and the best Cleveland Cavaliers team we’d ever known leading by 1 point and about to advance in the NBA play-offs, Michael Jordan rose above a double-team to hit a shot now known as The Shot to win the game. It is considered one of the greatest clutch plays in the history of all American sports. All we remember is the physical despair of Craig Ehlo, the Cavs’ player over whose desperate up-stretched arms Jordan had just made history, Jordan leaping euphorically, Ehlo collapsing to the floor, hands clenching for something that wasn’t there.
And so we have come to understand this bipolar choice we are offered: we could embrace impossible hope, or impossible hopelessness. But each of us had to choose. You can’t stand in a frozen, zero-sum concrete ring and be in the middle.
Through all this, we have become known as a place that always loses.
But that’s not how I see it.
I’m from a place that always almost wins.
ALL STARS
If you had to pick a single visual icon to represent the past century of Americana, I doubt you could do better than the Converse Chuck Taylor. The main trait of this seemingly uncomplicated canvas sneaker is not just how succinctly it represents the scope of American culture, but also how broadly. Iconic since its introduction in 1917, the shoe originally called the Converse All Star has offered street credibility to the entire range of American situations: a little boy in a Norman Rockwell painting; Larry Bird as the Hick from French Lick; a teenager in a mosh pit; a grunt on a Parris Island obstacle course; a Catholic schoolgirl; an aging rock star with a new album and an updated haircut; Whoopi Goldberg in an Oscar-night pantsuit; a new arrival at clown school. Like English ivy, the All Star arrived pure and then began to adapt.
For a long time, the shoes came only in two colors, white and black, like Hollywood cowboy hats. America became more colorful, and Converse followed, offering hues that eventually transcended color and would be better described as flavors: Cinnamon, Cantaloupe, Lilac, Amaranth, and Mud. Much like Jimi Hendrix, the All Star has dabbled in leather, hemp, and flames. It has reshaped itself to every new purpose without changing shape at all, tracing an inscrutable line from the ABA to CBGB. As much as anything in our culture, the Converse All Star is itself. And this is both despite and because it is entirely unsuitable for its original purpose.
The Chuck Taylor was one of the first shoes specifically designed for basketball. In nearly a century since, it has proven itself apt to everything except basketball. This is a shoe with the arch support of an emery board, the shock absorption of a Post-it note, and the breathability of a wet suit. That it endures despite itself suggests it has something to prove, something to overcome, which might be its most American quality.
There is one thing, however, that’s even more American than the Chuck Taylor: the art of marketing. And there may be no better fable of that art than the fable of Chuck Taylor himself.
Chuck Taylor (it seems unthinkable to refer to him by anything other than his full name) is the second-most-famous basketball player ever to come from Akron, Ohio. Most people don’t know he even played basketball. That’s understandable. He didn’t play much. A lot of people probably assume he’s not even a real person, but rather a marketing phantom, like Mrs. Butterworth or Chef Boyardee.
That’s understandable too, because his identity is confined to that signature inside the circle of the All Star logo. Chuck Taylor is an enigma akin to the 33 on the back of a Rolling Rock bottle and the arm and hammer on the baking-soda box. This may be the only athletic shoe in existence whose celebrity namesake is someone nobody knows anything about—or even whether it’s a real person at all. (Rod Laver is the exception that proves this point.) Air Jordans and Shaqs exist only because the athletes are famous. Conversely (so to speak), the real man named Chuck Taylor only exists in American memory because his shoes are famous.
In that sense then, he is both: a real person, and a marketing phantom.
* * *
Here is a peculiar identity trait: the fear that you have no identity at all. Places in the American Midwest seem to carry this as a genetic presumption. In fact, most places referred to as Midwestern shy away from the term, afraid such a broad, amorphous definition will counteract its purpose, leading to a misinterpretation, a stereotype, or an insult. We are so used to being misunderstood that we react preemptively. Our personalities are delicate and complex. My city is particularly stricken—a place known for most of the twentieth century as the Rubber Capital of the World was stunningly, completely stripped of that identity by virtue of a swift and profound industrial collapse. We were something, we were Known, like Firestone, and then, in a few years, we found ourselves with no idea of who we were or what was to become of us. As a result, we have tended toward a pathological compulsion to seize homegrown cultural coattails. To associate ourselves with something that would help us to explain ourselves to the wider world. To call out collectively like the Whos down in Whoville, “We are here! We are here!”
Therefore, part of the local neurosis is a habit of identifying celebrities (no matter how minor) with ties (no matter how tenuous) to Akron, and at every opportunity making mention of this. Hugh Downs lived in Akron briefly as an infant, yet we claim him as a native son. Here’s a conversation I’ve heard too many times to dismiss.
“Oh, I see Hugh Downs is coming back for another season on 20/20.”
“He’s from Akron, you know. . . .”
I’ve observed this in other places too, the way people from Buffalo will perk up when someone mentions Frank Lloyd Wright and impulsively interject, “He’s from Buffalo.”
Liberace is from Milwaukee. Mario Andretti is from Allentown. Bob Eubanks is from Flint. You have no idea how important this is.
Pittsburgh, Lord. Andy Warhol famously hated the place, his hometown. But Andy Warhol became famous and Pittsburgh dutifully named a bridge after him and built his museum.
Is Akron the birthplace of the Chuck Taylor? Hell yes. Let me tell you how.
* * *
Chuck Taylor is not from Akron, but his basketball career would be irrelevant were it not for Akron, and his basketball career (a surprisingly brief one) was what led to everything else. Taylor played one season—1920–21—for a team called the Akron Firestone Non-Skids, a thick-thighed young man in striped socks and a tight tank top emblazoned with a stylized F. This was an industrial-league professional basketball team that, not surprisingly, was named after an automobile tire. The Firestone product from which the team took its name was itself a stroke of marketing genius. In the early era of the tire industry, competition among the American manufacturers, all based in Akron, was fierce. So in 1908, company founder Harvey S. Firestone, in a meeting with his design engineers, came up with the idea for a new tread pattern, one that would use raised lett
ering as the actual tread. As the story goes, he reached for a scrap of paper on his desk and, writing in a diagonal descent, showed them the pattern:
FIRESTONE
NON
SKID
An elegant solution: the words described their function, the function derived from the words.
From this signature product came the name of the company basketball team. The Non-Skids thrived in the years between the two World Wars. In 1939, the team (along with its Goodyear counterpart, the Wingfoots) became a charter member of the National Basketball League, which a dozen years later would merge into the NBA.
It appears from his statistics and the historical record that Chuck Taylor was not a significantly impactful basketball player. He made one key shot to win one important game and was celebrated for that moment, but otherwise the accolades are thin. Some sources even question whether he played as much pro basketball as his record asserts. Certainly it’s doubtful that he was ever a “famous” basketball player. Such a thing didn’t exist in 1921, at least not as we now understand it.
In the 2006 biography Chuck Taylor, All Star: The True Story of the Man behind the Most Famous Athletic Shoe in History, author Abraham Aamidor describes the Akron year as “a watershed in Chuck Taylor’s playing days.”
Aamidor writes, “What Chuck had learned in Akron, besides some pointers from [coach Paul] Sheeks and skills gained in competitive play, was the art of self promotion.”
It was a watershed in a different way as well. Taylor was off the team and out of town after a single season. The reason is not known; Aamidor speculates he may have been cut.
So Chuck Taylor, with dubious athletic accomplishments, left Akron with a handful of clippings from the local newspaper and a photograph of himself posing with the Non-Skids, documents he produced upon arriving at his next stop—Detroit—where he portrayed himself as a sports celebrity. Detroit was a bigger playing field with its own share of company teams, and Taylor soon picked up with a team called the Rayls, named after the sporting-goods store that was its sponsor. The connection to a retailer that likely carried athletic shoes is presumably what led to the ambitious young man’s next move, the following year, to Chicago, where he was hired by Converse. He soon hit the road, selling All Star sneakers through a series of basketball clinics he ran—his purported expertise based on his record as a professional basketball player. With a résumé that bordered on a bait and switch, he thrived.
The Hard Way on Purpose Page 6