This explains it...
Trophy on the way for '64 Browns
Steve King, Associate Editor 09.08.2004
The 1964 Cleveland Browns championship team will soon have their trophy.
No, it wasn’t lost or stolen – or taken to Baltimore.
There simply wasn’t one. But there will be Friday when the Browns honor the last championship team from the city of Cleveland in a gala at Severance Hall.
Some of that team’s recollections were shared Wednesday by left outside linebacker Jim Houston and right guard Gene Hickerson as the organization continued to get ready for the celebration that will be held this weekend to recognize the 40th anniversary of winning the NFL title.
The festivities will be held in conjunction with the current club opening the regular season by meeting, ironically, the former Browns, the Baltimore Ravens, at Cleveland Browns Stadium.
Part of the celebration will be the presentation to the ’64 team by NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue of a 1964 championship trophy – commissioned by the present organization. It’s in keeping with the past, when teams could create their own trophies.
In today’s NFL, when the handing of the Lombardi Trophy to the Super Bowl champion has all the pomp and circumstance of a state dinner at the White House, it’s hard to imagine that no trophy remained with the Browns for that 27-0 victory over the Baltimore Colts.
But one did exist, more or less. It was the Ed Thorp Trophy, which rotated from champion to champion. When the Browns won, they got it from the Chicago Bears, which had captured the crown. And when the Browns didn’t repeat in 1965, they sent it to the club that defeated them in the title contest. That would be the Green Bay Packers, who, ironically, were coached by a guy named Vince Lombardi.
Since the trophy named in Lombardi’s honor began being presented to the Super Bowl champion when that game was inaugurated at the end of the 1966 season, there was no need to rotate the Thorp Trophy anymore. It had become passé. So it rests today in the Packers Hall of Fame, and until this weekend, the Browns had nothing to show for their victory in 1964.
Houston and Hickerson said they recall nothing about a trophy, which is understandable. It was shipped via some freight service to the Browns’ offices at old Cleveland Stadium in mid-January, several weeks after the players who had won departed for their offseason jobs. Its non-descript arrival was hailed like that of the bulk of soap for the employee restroom that was dropped off a dolly onto the floor.
It just wasn’t that big of a deal.
And neither, really, was the man whose name it bears. Who was Thorp?
Maybe George Veras knows. The Emmy award-winning and longtime CBS producer was a 14-year-old boy living in Cleveland at the time and attended the championship game.
“I did some research on him, and all I know is that he is not related to Jim Thorpe,” said Veras, who will produce and direct “Browns 1964 Championship,” the Friday night gala at Severance Hall honoring the team.
Thorp, according to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, was a game official in the early days of the NFL and later a sporting goods dealer in New York whose company was hired to make footballs for the league. Today’s game football is named The Duke. It’s in honor of Giants owner Wellington Mara, who, along with his father, Tim, were close friends of Thorp.
The Thorp Trophy began being handed out to the league champion in 1933, when the Browns weren’t even a gleam in Paul Brown’s eye. By 1964, though, the Browns were kings of the football world, and now they’ll have the trophy to prove it.
But there have been no trophy-winning Browns teams – no NFL champions – since, and that, of course, is the real sticking point here.
“Forty years, that’s a long time,” Houston said.
Several members of the Browns during that era have said recently that the 1965 team was actually better than the one in ’64. So what happened in 1965? Why didn’t that club win the crown, too?
“I know I felt just as good that year,” Houston said. “I can’t put a finger on just what went wrong.”
But maybe he did do exactly that just moments before without realizing it. While the 1965 club may have been better individually, it may not have been as good collectively. As Houston pointed out, the Browns put together a great team effort to beat the Colts.
“You talk about the team concept, and we had an excellent performance by all our players that day,” Houston said. “For instance, our defense was castigated all that season for not being overpowering, but it was overpowering that day.”
Houston pointed out that rookie defensive tackle Jim Kanicki had his way with the Colts’ Hall of Fame guard, Jim Parker. Who would have thought that?
Nobody in the country other than Hickerson, Houston and the rest of the Browns. They believed in themselves. Everybody else had the Colts, with Parker, John Unitas, Raymond Berry, Lenny Moore, John Mackey and Gino Marchetti, throttling Cleveland.
Houston said that disrespect drove the Browns in practice leading up to the game. So much so, in fact, that neither the Colts, nor anyone else that could have provided the opposition that day, didn’t stand a chance.
“The guys were walking around before the game on their tip-toes,” Hickerson said. “We were ready. I don’t care who we would played. We would have beat them. I roomed with (left tackle) Dick Schafrath, and I told him the night before the game that we were going to win.”
As he always does when he appears publicly, Hickerson used his dry sense of humor to turn the press conference into a stand-up routine.
“Can I use you, Gene?” Veras quipped at one point.
Hickerson even joked about the most sensitive issue left in his life, the fact that one of the greatest guards ever to play the game – a lineman who blocked for the best football player of all time in Jim Brown and then another Hall of Fame runner in Leroy Kelly – is still doesn't have a bust in Canton a full 31 years after his retirement.
“It doesn’t bother me a bit in the world,” Hickerson said. “I couldn’t care less.
“Everywhere I go, people ask me when I’m going to go into the Hall of Fame. I tell them, ‘Maybe next Thursday.’ Really, it makes no difference to me.”
But it does, even if he would never show it. You find that out when you talk to those close to him.
“Yeah, no question,” Houston said without hesitation when asked if Hickerson belongs in Canton.
Hickerson and Houston will be among those honored this weekend for what the 1964 Browns did as a team. What would complete the circle for Hickerson would be to get recognized for being among the best in the game individually.
That, like finally receiving the trophy, is long overdue.
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