Doug Dieken
For better or worse, I was born into being a Cleveland Browns fan. Strike that: at no time has “better” been involved. There has been plenty of “worse”: Red Right 88, The Drive, The Fumble, The Move, and under the reconstituted Browns, a a three-win season followed by a one-win season followed by a zero-win season. (For most teams, a three-win season would represent epic failure; for the new Browns it is just kind of overlooked.)
But it hasn’t only been “worse.” The Browns teams of my college years were pretty good; they did get to those conference championship games. And the Browns of my youth were generally at least middling. They weren’t the Steelers, certainly, they were regularly pounded by the Steelers, but they weren’t the Bengals either. They would finish 8-8, maybe 9-7, and offer a certain number of thrills and a certain amount of pride.
(It feels like we would listen more than we would watch. I would be working with my dad and my brother on rebuilding a tractor or some wretched piece of farm equipment in the shed. Or more often we would be driving back from my grandparents’ farm in Mansfield, three of us across the bench seat of a blue Ford pickup. We might catch the end of the game on TV when we got home.)
Middling or not, we cared about the outcomes. I was a kid, and so I cared more than my dad, even though my dad was more of a football fan than me and liked the game better than me and certainly knew more than me - he’d been a legit star in high school, played on the freshman team at a couple of big name places. But we were all a little happier if they won, disappointed if they lost.
The Browns were a different kind of middling than the Indians of my youth. The Indians had a string of years where they somehow managed to put together entire teams of average players and finished around .500, but never had any shot at anything. The Browns had stars, though. Brian Sipe won the MVP in the Red Right 88 year of 1980. They had Ozzie Newsome and Reggie Rucker and Clay Matthews, and always seemed to have a 1000-yard rusher in there. And they had a solid and stable offensive line anchored by Joe DeLamielleure, who became a Hall of Famer.
And at left tackle, Doug Dieken. Dieken wasn’t a star. It actually surprises me to discover now how much he wasn’t a star. He made the Pro Bowl once in his career, and I would have told you before looking that up that it was much more than that. But you knew his name, everybody knew his name, because he was as dependable as any football player has ever been.
That is not an exaggeration. Dieken started 194 games at offensive tackle, which is still the NFL record, including every game from November 21, 1971 to December 16, 1984.
The enormous value of having a high performer, or even just a good performer, in your lineup every game for fourteen years cannot be overstated. It’s an important, maybe a necessary, condition for being ready for the moment when the stars align and suddenly a championship is within reach. It also resonated perfectly with the self-image of Cleveland and its fans, the guy who shows up for work every day, does his job well, and gives all the credit to the people around him. A lot of those fans were genuinely blue-collar folks themselves. That’s less true today of course, in Cleveland and everywhere else, but even the the white-collar folks of present-day Ohio remember fathers and grandfathers who lived that life, drove themselves to work in the dark through mounds of snow under gunmetal skies, and even the ones who don’t like to think of themselves that way. It’s not a bad way to approach your work.
Playing more than 200 games in the NFL took its toll on Dieken. Not, by some stroke of fate, in the Mike Webster way, but by the end it’s not clear what exactly was holding Dieken’s knees together. He could barely walk by the end. I remember a game, probably in 1984, his last season, when Browns radio announcer Nev Chandler marveled at the way Dieken limped onto the field for a third down play, somehow willed his body to throw the critical block, and then dragged himself back to the sidelines.
After he retired, Dieken joined Nev Chandler in the broadcast booth, where he stayed for 34 years before retiring after Sunday’s game. The Browns’ website has a nice tribute, including a funny story about how he won the job - the finalists had to demonstrate how they would broadcast one quarter of a game, and Dieken managed to get his hands on a copy of the tape to be used and practice.
I’m not sure he was a star as a broadcaster, either. But he was good at spotting the little thing, the block or the missed block that made or broke a play, the wide-open receiver that the Browns’ QB didn’t see. More than that, he brought the ethic, or the aura, of Doug Dieken to the booth; he was your friend with the lunch bucket who was watching the game with you - for you - and pointing out the blown coverage or celebrating an epic touchdown run.
He worked alongside Nev Chandler for eight years. During the last couple Chandler was battling cancer, which Dieken once said showed more toughness than anything he’d seen on a football field. (Someday I’ll write about Nev; he was a terrific play-by-play man for the Indians and Browns.) Then he worked with Casey Coleman - who also died of cancer midcareer - and finally with Jim Donovan.
It was only in the last few years that from time to time I started listening to Browns games again. Unlike the teams of my youth they were truly terrible, and then last year they were unaccountably good, and then this year they were back to being a familiar, frustrating middling, blowing games they should have won, full of stars but never able to put it all together. But, you know, at this point I’m not much of a football fan and a W or L doesn’t shape my mood the way it once did. I listen to fill the silence, and more to recapture the comfortable feeling of being in Dad’s shed while working on some job, even if the job these days is sorting through old papers or making black bean soup and not changing oil.
I don’t know what the point of having sports heroes is. At first, I suppose, they just thrill us, and that’s enough. And then they inspire us, maybe to try to do the impossible, or maybe just to be better versions of ourselves, to show up for work every day.
The fantasy that fans have, that keeps us fans, is that in some way they represent us - that they are out there trying hard not because it’s what you’re supposed to do, or for the adulation and stardom and a fat paycheck, but because they’re wearing the city’s name on their shirts, because they’re our warriors doing battle on our behalf. That whole way of thinking is problematic and terrible, it’s a terrible reason to have an athlete as your hero. Especially because it’s bullshit. Even when the players enourage that kind of thinking while talking to reporters, it’s just another part of the job.
In 2017, the Browns were on their way to that zero-win season, the first in their history. I had totally given up on them by that point - it followed a 1-15 season, after all - but I tuned into the season’s final radio broadcast out of morbid curiosity. I think at first I was hoping they would finish the job, but my mood changed over the course of an hour or so. They were playing the Steelers, of course. It was a surprisingly close game, although Pittsburgh had wrapped up the division title and was probably resting starters for the playoffs. Late in the fourth quarter, the Browns were driving downfield, trailing by four, with a shot at taking the lead and avoiding ignominy. And facing a fourth down near the Pittsburgh end, the Browns quarterback scrambled, recovered, and threw a shockingly perfect pass to receiver Corey Coleman - who let it slip right through his fingers, ending the Browns’ chances.
If you cared - and I found myself caring in spite of myself - well, there was hope, and then there was no hope. It had a sudden, ringing finality.
I will not try to tell you what Doug Dieken was thinking or doing after Jim Donovan described the ball going through Corey Coleman’s hands. I can only tell you that for the better part of a minute, he didn’t say anything. I think he tried to speak at one point. Donovan did a truly professional job of keeping the broadcast going, and eventually Dieken returned to talk about the play and the disappointment and the work the Browns had to do in the imminent off-season.
I don’t want to make assumptions about what was happening at that time, but I will say it was one of the most moving moments of my life as a fan.
At some point next fall I will miss being able to hear his voice.