Sunday, May 24, 1998

Hill makes pitch to buy new Browns

By PATRICK McMANAMON / Scripps Howard News Service

GREAT FALLS, Va. -- As Calvin Hill looks forward to the day he might be named one of the owners of the new Cleveland Browns, he looks back.

First to the Browns tradition, which is a big reason Hill has joined with former Browns receiver Paul Warfield in a bid to own the NFL expansion team that begins play in 1999.

But Hill looks even further back, to the ancient Greeks, a society that, he said, "understood athletics."

"The Greeks used to cancel wars when they had the Olympics," he said as he sat in his home in suburban Washington, surrounded by his collection of southwestern art. "Someone who won the marathon or who threw the javelin farther than anyone, Aristotle might write an ode or a poem about them. "The thing that was fascinating about the Greeks was even in these poems or odes, when they elevated them to godlike status they allowed them to have tragic flaws and they accepted them. They didn't allow that flaw to diminish their godlike status."

Like the Greeks in ancient times, Hill thinks he understands sports in the modern age. He knows of money and greed and misbehavior, but he also knows the pull a team can have on a city.

"In sociology they would call it a totemic structure," he said. "It's like a totem. It's something you can rally around."

And more than anything, Hill understands how fans in Cleveland rally around their Browns.

Hill knows because he was captain of the Brian Sipe-led "Kardiac Kids" teams of the early '80s. He knows because he grew up in Baltimore listening to Colts games and he played in Dallas against the Browns.

"When I was in grade school, the Browns beat the Colts (in the 1964 championship game). When I was a player (in Dallas) I lost my first playoff game to the Browns in the Cotton Bowl," he said, then gave a litany of names from the Browns past. "I understand Leroy Kelley and Jim Houston and Bill Nelsen and Ernie Green and Jim Brown and Gary Collins and Ray Renfro and Blanton Collier.

"This is not starting out as the Carolina Panthers. What the Browns have is that tradition. You're going to be measured by that."

It is a challenge Hill and his partners willingly accept

Never mind the king's ransom the league will exact from one of the ownership groups that have submitted bids for the new Browns -- a price that could go as high as $500 million.

Or the fact that the new owner will have less than a year to build an organization, draft players and form a team.

Or that he probably will not receive a full share of the league's TV money, or be able to work with a full salary cap for a few years.

"It's daunting," Hill said. "But it's also energizing."

Hill proudly talks of opening up his front office to creative people, be they black or white, male or female. He speaks progressively, saying he and Warfield have talked of creating a front-office atmosphere that will foster innovative thinking. Yet he also speaks almost reverentially of the history and tradition of the Browns that was interrupted when Art Modell moved his players and staff to Baltimore after the 1996 season.

The Browns helmet, for instance, the orange one with no logo -- the only helmet in the NFL without a logo -- would go unchanged.

"That's like the Yankee pinstripes," he said. "There's some things that have so much class. I think there's an elegance in there."

Not many people could talk about a helmet in terms of grace and elegance, but not many NFL owners talk of sociology and ancient Greek odes either. Hill, the father of Detroit Pistons star Grant Hill, would break the mold. He's Yale-educated and universally respected. No matter where he's played -- from Yale to Dallas to Washington to Cleveland -- he was much appreciated. He still has a key to the city of Cleveland given to him after his playing days ended. Last year, the league sent him to Dallas to help him clean up the mess caused by off-the-field problems.

Now, Hill has joined with Warfield, another well respected ex-Brown and a Hall of Fame receiver, to form a group that merits strong consideration. Howard Milstein, a close friend of Hill's dating to their prep school days, is the money man. He owns a New York real estate and commercial insurance brokerage firm, and he apparently has no problem with the record expansion fee the league is discussing, a figure that could start at $350 million.

"We're in as good a shape as anybody for whatever they come forward with," Hill said, shrugging off the managed-bid process in which owners will submit sealed bids for the team. "It might be a way to drive the price up, but we feel confident that we are the best team."

Hill and Warfield would run the team, with Warfield, an Ohio native and a member of the Browns front office from 1980-85, handling most of the football decisions. Both have Cleveland ties, and both are minorities, an important consideration for a league that is trying to increase minority opportunities.

Hill, though, said he did not want to see his effort as a litmus test of the league's position., instead calling it "an opportunity" for the league.

Hill said he would welcome the opportunity to bring different management ideas to the team, saying that there are many women and minorities with tremendous talent who are "aching to get an opportunity." He would not hesitate, he said, to hire a qualified woman in a prominent front-office role.

Nor would he hesitate to involve former Browns in the new Browns.

"Marion Motley, Dante Lavelli, Otto Graham, all the people who made the Browns so great," he said. "You bring them into the process in a way that dignifies what they've done. In a way that reconnects to the fans. There's a wonderful tradition and legacy.

"The new Cleveland Browns ought to know what they're a part of. I'd like to bring some of the older and younger players together, so the older guys could help us teach them what it takes to be a Cleveland Brown."

Hill played in Cleveland when the city was going into default, the mayor was being recalled and downtown was more or less closed after 6 p.m. He's seen the city's revival. If he were to own the team, he'd sell his home in the fashionable Washington suburb, the one with the pool and the flower beds and the groupings of 40-foot trees, and move to Cleveland. "I'd want to live downtown," he said. "I'd want to be right in the middle of all that excitement." He already knows who his real estate agent would be: Hanford Dixon, the Browns cornerback who started calling the secondary the Dawgs, which led to the formation of the "Dawg Pound."

"The more I read of Moses Cleaveland and the Western Reserve, I understand what the city was," Hill said. "That has been the challenge of the last 15 or 16 or 17 years. It's not the challenge of building a new city. It's the challenge of restoring a once-great city. That's the renaissance. And we're excited to be part of that renaissance."

(Patrick McManamon is national sportswriter for Scripps Howard News Service.)