Dawggone CRAZY : Browns Inspire a Passion in Cleveland That L.A. Won’t Try to Match

The Rand McNally Road Atlas says Los Angeles and Cleveland are separated by 2,366 miles, but the cities’ glaring differences make them seem much farther apart.

Both have baseball teams, but in Cleveland fans are lining up today to buy playoff tickets.

Los Angeles has the Academy Awards; Cleveland has the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, except that when a performer is inducted, the ceremony takes place in New York. Los Angeles has beaches; Cleveland has a river that used to be so polluted it caught fire. Los Angeles has its moments with smog, earthquakes, fires and mudslides; Cleveland has winter every year.

Cleveland also has a professional football team again, one that will begin play Sunday night in a $283-million stadium built primarily with public funds.

The differences there are obvious.

Cleveland filed a lawsuit against the NFL, demanding its return. Cleveland Mayor Michael White played a key role, maybe the biggest role, in bringing a football team back here only three years after its departure.

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan has been an NFL no-show.

The Browns sold 57,000 personal-seat licenses to fans who didn’t know whether they would get an expansion franchise or a group of losers from elsewhere. Kim Carnes of “Bette Davis Eyes” fame has recorded the Browns’ anthem: “Somebody Let the Dawgs Out.” There are signs everywhere welcoming the Browns back.

Cleveland has a 400-pound mascot, who legally changed his middle name to Big Dawg. People in L.A. would direct him to a fitness center.

Here, however, football is a religious experience. Fans will arrive four hours early Sunday in their $14 dawg masks, armed with bones and dressed hideously in Halloween colors, eager to plunk down $5 for 22 ounces of Stadium Ale in a souvenir mug, the better to bark fondly for Ty Detmer.

Cleveland stands proud today.

“Sometimes we have some pretty good snowstorms,” says Keith John Smedi, a Cleveland sports psychologist. “But you take a Monday after a loss and you have higher call-offs from work, an increase in domestic violence, more automobile accidents and a loss of actual revenue from a city-productive standpoint in northeastern Ohio.

“The last three years, the drug and alcohol facilities in the area have kind of dropped off. But it will pick up again now because of the Browns and the stress that will accompany them. It’s a situational disorder, short-lived, but week to week it will become more evident as people become more stressed. Who’s doing better? Ty Detmer or Tim Couch? It starts all over again for fans here.”

That’s what bothers the NFL about L.A. Fans will not get so wrapped up in a football team that they have to see a psychologist.

“The whole mentality of Cleveland is like they play the game too,” says Doug Dieken, who played for the Browns from 1971 to 1984. “It’s personal to these people. It’s a religion here.”

This Sunday in Los Angeles, meanwhile, will probably be like any other Sunday.

“I guess we experienced what the people in L.A. have experienced when the Browns left,” Dieken says. “I found out what it was like to play with my kids on a Sunday afternoon, what it was like to play golf. It was good. But, hopefully, I can rearrange the schedule and do it in the appropriate times, now that the Browns are back.”

Funny coincidence, but the football world is celebrating the return of football to Cleveland at the same time it looks with bewilderment on Los Angeles and its apparent inability to make a deal with the NFL.

“L.A. doesn’t know how to make a commitment,” says Smedi, the psychologist. “They are superficial in everything.

“The Browns are part of the family here--there is a bond. It’s part of the developmental dynamic of growing up here. They are cultural to Cleveland. L.A.’s culture is dynamic to the Hollywood sign, Universal Studios and the Academy Awards. Look at the fervor of the people who line up to watch a group of weirdos walk down a carpet dressed in $15,000 suits and $100,000 dresses. Come on now, how sick is that? That’s much sicker than someone wearing a dog face and holding a dog bone and going ruff-ruff-ruff.”

The good doctor, of course, has a split personality. As a psychologist, he has worked with Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali, besides a number of pro golfers, basketball and football players. He has also been a lifelong Browns’ fan, a season-ticket holder for 27 years, who estimates he will pay more than $12,000 in personal-seat license fees for four club section seats every year in the team’s new stadium.

He acknowledges having worn a dog face without embarrassment.

“When you’re talking to the psychologist, you’re talking to somebody who is rational, advising other people to not exaggerate the value of this stuff--it’s just entertainment,” Smedi says. “I’m certifiable when you’re talking to the guy who has bought four PSLs. . . . I should be counseling myself to reduce my exaggeration of the value of the team.”

There is no perspective presently in Cleveland, which has gone bonkers for a team that will probably not win half of its games.

When Chris Spielman, a linebacker who joined the team in the off-season but never played a regular-season game for the Browns, announced his retirement recently, TV stations broke into their regular midday programming for the news conference.

“If you’re not going to some kind of Browns’ activity this weekend, you’re ostracized,” Smedi says.

This will be the fifth year without football in L.A., but Cleveland is back on the NFL map. Passion, the people will tell you here, has been rewarded.

“It might sound funny to Los Angeles, but for cities like Cleveland, Buffalo and Pittsburgh, you can’t underestimate the value of those blimp shots and the national TV commentators saying nice things about your town,” Mayor White says.

“That’s why we made the fight--it was a combination of city pride and economic issues. The L.A. teams were not foundational. . . . The Browns’ franchise was also contributing $80 million in local taxes and any mayor of a major city faced with a loss of a company pumping that kind of money into the economy would do what he could to keep it.”

Cleveland stood united behind its mayor, and there will be a football game here Sunday night.

“We were always the butt of Johnny Carson’s jokes,” Dieken says. “Now we’re getting the last laugh. We took on the big boys in the NFL and we won. I look at L.A. and it doesn’t care, but does the NFL lose by not having the second-largest market?”

Al Lerner, endorsed by White and the high bidder for Cleveland’s expansion franchise, will soon sit in judgment when it comes time to complete the expansion process and select either Houston or Los Angeles.

“The quick answer is that there is so much else to do in L.A., and so people don’t focus on any particular activity,” Lerner says. “But the problem with that quick answer is, when L.A. had good teams, they set all kinds of attendance records. I don’t think anyone has gotten 100,000 people to come to a game like they did.”

Lerner knows his history--the largest regular-season crowd being 102,368 at the Coliseum for a game Nov. 10, 1957, between the Rams and 49ers. Take that, Cleveland.

“If you compare the L.A. and Cleveland situations, L.A. kind of happened in stages,” Lerner says. “It came and went, then came back and then left again. There was no real catalyst to marshal the forces at the right time. In Cleveland it was one shock and you had the mayor who was there right at that moment.”

The public clamor for a second chance in L.A. has been muted by apparent apathy.

“L.A. has a community mood disorder right now,” Smedi says. “They are depressed. No one likes them anymore. They are fearful of falling into the ocean. The death rate due to drug abuse . . . the divorce rate in L.A. County is one of the highest anywhere, and they have no morality. They are suffering from chronic mood disorder.

“L.A. might think we’re nuts, sitting in the Dawg Pound, but how many of those 16 million people living out there are going to watch the Cleveland Browns on TV Sunday night? Football has come back to Cleveland because the world has demanded it. L.A. has blown it--they are missing something in life.”

Gail Goodrich, who shares a name with the UCLA and Laker hall of famer, works in sports management and is married to Smedi. She listened to her husband’s comments then shook her head in disagreement.

“I don’t think that’s it,” she says. “I think the people in L.A. are pretty sophisticated, maybe smarter than us.

” . . . We don’t have a life.”

Fortunately, football can fill that void.

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Brown Bagging

1995: Art Modell, upset city will not build him a new stadium, announces he’s moving the team to Baltimore.

1996: NFL owner approve deal whereby Modell can move his team to Mary land but the nickname “Browns” and the team colors stay in Cleveland. The NFL also agrees to put another team in Cleveland by 1999 and contribute to building of new stadium for new Browns.

May 1997: Groundbreaking for new Browns stadium.

1998: NFL owners agree that new Browns will be an expansion franchise. Former minority owner Al Lerner is selected as owner.

Jan. 21, 1999: Hire Jacksonville offensive coordinator Chris Palmer as head coach.

April 17: TAke Kentucky quarterback Tim Couch with No. 1 pick in draft.