An elderly gentleman wearing a raincoat and a crumpled tan golf cap ambled across a makeshift stage at dusk on Sunday in Kansas City to accept a trophy that many fans of him have it.
Twitter and Facebook did not exist the last time his Cincinnati Bengals won the AFC title and earned a trip to the Super Bowl, but 86-year-old Mike Brown has been a target for years, for running his football team on the cheap.
The Twitter wisecracks kept it up: “My man spoke at the podium like he was wondering how much the Super Bowl was going to cost,” one read. Another read: “You know how much cheaper the flights in are the next day? Let’s just show up the 14th and play then.”
That was a good one. The Bengals are to play the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl LVI on 13 February at the Rams’ beautiful new home stadium. The Rams, the designated visiting team in the game, won’t even have to make a road trip.
The Bengals’ journey, on the other hand, has taken 33 years. The fans are thrilled to see their team in the Super Bowl, but they are not quite ready to let go of the lean years, which included footing the bill for a new stadium so Brown would not move the team.
Days after the Bengals upended Tennessee on 15 January for their first playoff victory in 31 years, an op-ed appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer with the headline: Yes Cincinnati, you owe Bengals owner an apology. Many of those who commented were not kind to the author.
“An apology?! I don’t think so,” one reader wrote. “I’m old enough to remember Mike Brown blackmailing the taxpayers of this county to get a new stadium and including an implied warranty that the Bengals would field a more competitive team if one were provided to him. It took the Bengals a quarter of a century to deliver while Mike Brown screwed Cincinnati.”
Not only does Brown also serve as the team’s general manager, a la Jerry Jones in Dallas, the Bengals have been reluctant to chase free-agents and have no indoor practice facility in a city where average winter temperatures hover around freezing. The scouting department was thin for years, leading to poor personnel decisions. Former players have weighed in too – and it’s easy to see why Cincinnati may not have been the first choice for big name free-agents down the years.
Storytime with T.J. Houshmandzadeh about the early years with the Bengals: No bottled water or Gatorade, jockstrap issues and showing up to home games straight from the club pic.twitter.com/nvSX7STorM
— Herd w/Colin Cowherd (@TheHerd) July 9, 2018
“We didn’t have bottled water or Gatorade and when we first got it, guys would be taking bottles of Gatorade home,” former Bengals wide receiver
TJ Houshmandzadeh told Colin Cowherd in 2018. “The year before I got there, Willie Anderson was telling me they didn’t even have jockstraps. They would get a bunch of used jockstraps and throw them in the middle of the locker room and say ‘Here you go’”.
Add in rotten luck along the way – like when quarterback Carson Palmer, the No 1 overall draft choice in 2003, had his knee caved in as he completed a 66-yard pass, his first in the playoffs. Palmer played in only one other playoff game with the Bengals, losing that one.
The Bengals traded away the No overall 1 pick in 1984, which became the five-time Pro Bowler Irving Fryar, and their No 1 overall pick in 1994 was defensive tackle Dan Wilkerson, who forced a trade in 1997 after he called Cincinnatians “prejudiced and uptight and stiff.”
The No 1 overall pick in 1995 was the Penn State running back Ki-Jana Carter, who tore up his knee on his third carry in his first preseason game and missed his entire rookie season. Carter would gain all of 747 yards rushing over five injury-plagued seasons with the Bengals.
Sixteen years later, quarterback Joe Burrow, the No 1 overall draft choice, had his knee wrecked 10 games into his rookie season. The young head coach, Zac Taylor, won only six of 32 games in his first two years, leading Brown to issue a postseason vote of confidence.
But Burrow recovered to post a brilliant second season, the Bengals have rallied under Taylor to win 11 regular-season games and three playoff games, and Cincinnati is saying “Who Dey?” as they did when Boomer Esiason and Ickey Woods led them to Super Bowl XXIII. (The Bengals, who have never won a Super Bowl, lost to the 49ers for the second time.)
“When you say the Bengals are going to the Super Bowl, that has a nice ring to it,” Brown said on Sunday after accepting the trophy from Woods, an honorary captain. “Our people in Cincinnati will be ‘Who Deying’ it through the night.”
The perception is that Brown, whose late Hall of Fame father, Paul, started and coached the team in 1968, has ceded some of the hands-on operation of the Bengals – though he still attends every practice and game, and next on the organizational flow chart is his daughter, Katie, who has taken several steps to build a better relationship with the community.
“I personally am happy for Mike, who never received the credit he deserved for his part in building the last Super Bowl team, and who was incredibly accessible and thoughtful in my many dealings with him in Cincinnati,” Mike Bass, a former Cincinnati sports writer turned occasional columnist, tells the Guardian. “The fans grew to blame him for everything that went wrong after the Super Bowl, and he certainly deserved his share of criticism.
“When I was there, for instance, the Bengals relied for a long time on the coaching staff to do a lot of the college scouting instead of hiring more scouts to do it, the way other teams did. When I started writing again for the Enquirer, the fans clearly still were angry at Mike, seeing him as too cheap to build a championship organization or team, same as when I was there. Now? I don’t see Mike’s name come up a lot. The focus now is on Joe Burrow and the team.”
Burrow, the unflappable, cigar-smoking, bling-adorned 25-year-old quarterback, provides quite a contrast to Brown – but so did the inimitable former Bengals wide receiver Chad Johnson, who was known for a time as Chad Ochocinco, after his jersey number, 85.
Brown, who was born when his father was the 27-year-old football coach at Washington High School in Massillon, Ohio, in turn provides quite a contrast to the Rams’ 74-year-old owner, Stan Kroenke. Brown’s estimated worth is a mere $925m, making him the second ‘poorest’ owner in the NFL behind the Raiders’ Mark Davis. Kroenke, worth around $11bn, has amassed a sports empire that includes that gorgeous new stadium near LAX, as well as the Premier League’s Arsenal.
The Mike Brown sidebar to the Bengals’ Super Story would be so much cuter had he simply been the famous coach’s son who persisted through years of mediocrity to build a champion the old-fashioned way. This just feels as if the Bengals made it despite the old guy.