Sunday, August 20, 2000
The Man focuses on The Game
On Wednesday night, when Paul Brown Stadium was aglow with the passionate, the curious and the delighted, Mike Brown drove past on I-75, on his way to Bengals training camp in Georgetown, Ky.
Lit up and open for public inspection, PBS loomed like the Emerald City at the foot of downtown. Mr. Brown, wizard of his own Oz, allowed himself some momentary pride at “this beautiful building flashing in the night” as he called it. Then he pointed his Chevy sedan — sensible, mid-sized, American — due south, to work on football things.
Follow Mike Brown around Saturday night. That's what they told me. Observe him glad-handing and back-slapping. Watch
him revel in the glory of his team's new home.
Only, Mike Brown doesn't glad-hand or back-slap. If he revels, it's a state secret. “I'm not good at celebrating,” he said. I asked him for a dominant emotion at that moment. Elation, maybe? Joy, perhaps? “I'm anxious to see if we'll hold up our end of it on the field,” he said.
View from the field
Mr. Brown sat in his box on the suite level. It's a nice box: A few rows of leather, theater-style chairs, a stone floor in the foyer, a bar, a window that opens and closes.
When I asked him his favorite spot in the new place — this suite, perhaps? — Mr. Brown said he liked to stand on the field and look up into the stands, at the sea of “classy” green seats.
When the experts were deciding what color the seats should be, Mr. Brown figured green would work. Not orange or black, or both. Green. “We didn't want orange because it's a little too much,” Mr. Brown explained. “We didn't want black because it was too hot and too hard to clean.”
So it was green. Sensible, practical green.
Mr. Brown is not big on frills, even as they surround him from endzone to endzone. He's not Jerry Jones, entertaining sheiks on the sideline. An hour before the game, he is not entertaining celebrities. He is not demanding to be noticed. He's in his box with his son, Paul, his brother, Pete, and his longtime friend, Jack Schiff.
In honor of Dad
Mr. Brown spent the day with a friend from law school. He ate lunch across the river, at Mike Fink's, where he marveled that he could “see the lettering on the (PBS) scoreboard.” The friend presented Mr. Brown with a game program from 1946. In it was a picture of Paul Brown, coaching the Cleveland Browns in their inaugural season. It's a favorite of Mike's.
PB is clad in a white T-shirt, black baseball cap and brown pants rolled up so the bottoms don't get muddy. He's wearing high-top shoes. “That's when he was at the peak of his ability as a coach,” Mike said.
Mr. Brown never wanted a new stadium to impress his buddies or fatten his wallet. The new stadium was all about having enough money to compete. Frills mean money. That's all.
The stadium opened Saturday night, officially launching the No Excuses era of Bengals football. This is Mike Brown's chief concern, and everyone should be glad about that. Because a few more 4-12s, and nobody's going to be loving the new architecture.
Follow Mike Brown around? Easy enough. He didn't leave his box. Others reveled and celebrated. They toasted their good fortune, if not Mr. Brown's. Mr. Brown had none of that. He wanted to watch the game.
Paul Daugherty welcomes your comments at (513) 768-8454.
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DAUGHERTY: The Man focuses on The Game
