When There’s No More Silver Lining
For Cincinnati Bengals fans, this is the end of the road
Some fans just don’t see it. If only they’d look to the corner of the home end zone, they’d surely catch a glimpse of Rod Serling standing there, still as Carson Palmer in the pocket, pointing to the signpost up ahead, the one telling them the Cincinnati Bengals are as dead as the proverbial doornail. Not just for this season, but for …
There is no completing that sentence because there is no longer any future for the woe begotten franchise that calls the drab and featureless Paul Brown Stadium home. Almost two years ago, I compared PBS to a correctional institution, such is the atmosphere down on the Ohio River.
“To spend an afternoon in Paul Brown Stadium is akin to watching a Lockup marathon on MSNBC. The grey, somber expanse of concrete looks more Hamilton County jail than sporting venue. The aforementioned rich history of the team is almost nowhere to be found amidst the dank concourse and the sparse, prison-like lighting.”
It also doubles as a bunker for the Brown family, who rule the local NFL landscape like Russian oligarchs, negotiating in secret the details of a new stadium lease, cracking down on dissent by patrons foolish or frustrated enough to unfurl signage of a critical nature within the decidedly unfriendly confines. But, it’s the “bunker mentality” that most befits a concrete edifice so arrogant it doesn’t even acknowledge the street it sits upon, referring to itself only as “1 Paul Brown Stadium.”
There was only 1 Paul Brown, as everyone who’s ever followed the Bengals long-ago discovered. Football genius doesn’t necessarily get passed down from one generation to another, as Cincinnati’s long-suffering fan base knows all-too-well. If the Cincinnati coaching legacy of David Shula didn’t convince them, Mike Brown and family certainly have by now.
The concrete bunker on the riverfront is a fine metaphor for the Brown Family’s bulletproof armor that protects them from the slings and arrows that rain down from fans and increasingly from the local media. The NFL has always been heroin for the average sports fan. Unlike baseball’s daily narrative, the friend that visits each day for six months like a loyal neighbor, football withholds, forcing you to beg for six days each week before supplying its fix.
That has worked beautifully for The Shield and it’s 32 satellites around the league. Neither rain, nor snow, nor domestic violence, nor dark of CTE night stays these appointed franchises from their postseason rounds. The controlled violence the NFL sells like cotton candy is greedily gobbled up by a populace that cannot get enough.
All you need to know about the Cincinnati Bengals happened on a single date: January 9. On that day in 1963, Art Modell relieved head coach Paul Brown from his duties, a team that he created in 1945, coached for 17 seasons, a team that bore his surname on their helmets.
Fifty-three years later to the day, on January 9, 2016, the Bengals suffered perhaps their most ignominious loss, the Bengal meltdown to end all meltdowns. A heroic comeback by a backup quarterback against a hated rival in a driving rain was thrown away by a couple of knuckleheads their head coach had long ago shown he could not control. If only this Isle of Misfit Boys could have kept their counsel for one minute and thirty-six more seconds.
They lost me forever that day.
Flash backward to 2004. My son walks into a hat store in lower Manhattan’s South Street Seaport. He’s looking for an NFL team to root for. His 8-year old world is all Jets green and Giants blue. I silently joke to myself that I won’t steer him toward my fandom — social services might appear at my door posthaste, after all. But, he pulls down an orange and black tiger-striped hat and I look on, proud and dubious at the same time.
He called me the other day to tell me he’s done with the Bengals. Fifteen years later, he’s had enough of the circus that goes by the name of Cincinnati Bengals.
Two generations of Bengals fans are no more in this household. And we don’t harbor any illusions that Mike Brown gives a damn. The cash cow that is an NFL franchise doesn’t need me and my ilk.
For their part, the Brown Family never forgot what Art Modell did to their patriarch on January 9, 1963. As son Mike Brown remembers:
“He said to me, ‘They took my team away from me.’ That’s about the only time his voice ever broke when speaking with me.”
They listen to nobody now. They’ve long ago circled the family wagons. They know what they know. And what they know is that no one can be trusted. No one gets into the inner circle, now. No one takes their team away from them this time.
I saw them on social media on Monday morning — those fans who just don’t see it — wearing paper bags on their heads, pining for the №1 pick in the draft and the college QB who rolled the Tide a day earlier. Carson Palmer knows. Now, a discarded Andy Dalton does, as well. God speed to LSU’s Joe Burrow if he is drafted by the Bengals next June. There are no saviors in Cincinnati.
Only survivors.
