Every Wednesday or Thursday between August and December a next-day-air package arrives at Ron Burger’s downtown office. It’s a package from dad back home in suburban Cleveland.
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Every summer when the Browns are at training camp, Burger visits his father to deliver blank tapes and envelopes. Every envelope is already stamped and addressed. He doesn’t want anything to go wrong. But the weirdest thing is that when Burger watches the game on Saturday he’s already watched it live the previous Sunday, in the company of 100 to 200 other frothing Browns fans in a private room at the Cubby Bear Lounge. And that’s the problem. That’s just too many people to watch a Browns game the way the good Lord intended it to be watched. Anyway, the networks replay the best plays only 4 or 5 times instead of 10 or 15.
Burger is president of the Chicago chapter of the Cleveland Browns Backers, the most insane of all sports fans. There are 85,000 of them, with chapters in Canada and Japan. On the main floor at the Cubby Bear different games play simultaneously on dozens of televisions, and cheers and groans rise from pockets of fans gathered around each. But the only way to accommodate all the Browns fans is in their own room upstairs on a giant screen.
Burger has a hard time explaining the addiction. He shrugs and says, “It’s therapy. We share with our friends in our own private ways, similar to religious beliefs.” Watching the game together is an immense “spiritual pleasure.”
He says there’s a science to it. “You don’t walk up and say, ‘Hey, you need a blanket?’” That’s too much like charity. Some would rather freeze. First he tries to get some rapport going with an opening line like “Shit, man, it’s cold out here!” Just talking for a bit lets them accept his offerings. “Sometimes all a guy’s got is a light sweater. Sometimes you slip a guy a couple smokes. If he’s sleeping, put a blanket over him. Put it over his head. Maybe the cops’ll walk up thinking he’s passed away and take him to a shelter.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Jon Randolph.
