READY TO ROCK
TIGHT END HAS AX TO GRIND WITH HIS OLD TEAM.
CLEVELAND — Forget the feelgood homecoming storyline for a moment. Forget the narrative of a young Pharaoh Brown weaving through the bodies and barbecues of a Muni Lot tailgate, soaking in the smokey aura of another Sunday in a city that breathes the Browns.
Forget, even if for just a minute, that Brown once made a childhood pact to play for his hometown team, a promise he fulfilled on a September Sunday in 2019.
Because this is not just a feelgood homecoming. This is also Odysseus stringing his bow. This is the story of a Cleveland-born tight end who was cut by the Browns, a fourth-year veteran who has returned to Ohio with a Texans team that’s given him his best shot in the NFL yet.
Brown stated his intentions clearly on Monday: “I want to go out there and I want to dominate them guys.”
He’s not hiding from it. He knows he can’t. He can mute social media and turn off TVs, but he can’t ignore family calls that come with updates about a fan base and franchise that has since moved on without him.
Brown spent the 2018 season on Cleveland’s practice squad, and, after being elevated for nine 2019 games in which he caught two passes for 27 yards, the Browns cut the Ohio native during training camp in 2020.
The Texans signed Brown to their practice squad a week later, and, after he was once again elevated and started in nine games, the Browns snapped their 18-year postseason drought with an 11-win season that ended in the AFC divisional round.
Now, Brown has been named the starter within a Texans offense that leans heavily on its tight ends.
Now, the Browns are a favorite to win the AFC North, a team with a hard-nosed offense and hell-raising defense that’ll give the rebuilding Texans their toughest test yet. Game on.
“They think that they have a great team,” Brown said. “I know
all them guys, and they all know that they should be getting ready to strap it up, because I’m coming. They were in training camp with me. I’m coming hard. It ain’t no secret. It’s not bulletin board material for them. The coaches know me. Everybody knows me from the owner down, and I’m excited to go back. All I’m saying is we’re coming. We’ll be there Sunday.”
Visions of a child
Brown says he searches the stands before every game and his mind always fixates on the kids. They’re the ones with the purest expectations, the ones with dreams that life hasn’t yet cracked in half like a fortune cookie, leaving behind a crumbly mess and a glib message that makes you dream smaller.
They’re kids like Brown and Fred Zuber once were. They were friends. Best friends. Fifth graders who played youth football and made lofty promises to each other that they’d both reach the NFL someday: Zuber for the Packers, Brown for the Browns.
They both knew their pact wouldn’t likely hold up, Brown says, “not in a million years.”
They were given far fewer. On June 8, 2005, the friends joined a small party on Lake Erie’s Euclid Beach to celebrate their elementary graduation. Zuber and another friend both got caught in the undertow. One friend was dragged ashore and resuscitated. Zuber was not saved in time.
Jeannette Smith, Brown’s mother, said the family tried to console her only son after his best friend’s death, the first of three friends Brown tragically lost in Cleveland. They let him keep a picture of Zuber. They reinforced positive memories and messages.
“He’s looking down on you,” they’d say. “He’s rooting for you.”
Brown still sometimes feels Zuber’s presence, and, days before his return home to Cleveland, Brown recalled how he’s still convinced that he saw his friend in his room one night, how he sprinted to his older sister Tonika’s room and slept on the floor, spooked, and scared.
Now, those memories bring Brown a calming surrealism. They provoke thoughtful questions that, although unanswered, remind him to continue fulfilling his end of the pact and provide inspiration to the kids he sees in the stands.
“Is it just a promise as a kid?” Brown says. “Or is it really that full circle of life?”
A drive to be No. 1
There’s a recent tradition at Charles F. Brush High School, an academy with a historic building that’s about 15 miles east of Cleveland’s FirstEnergy Stadium.
Eddie Hall huddles his football team on the field before the Arcs’ first game each season and hands a player a No. 2 jersey. It’s Pharaoh Brown’s old number, a jersey that Hall and Brown’s former Brush head coach, Rob Atwood, decided to semi-retire in 2019 and award to the player who thrives both academically and athletically.
“It’s a special thing to wear No. 2,” said Atwood, now an assistant principal at nearby Memorial Junior High.
Brown’s family initially lived in East Cleveland, and, as a single mother, Jeannette twice moved her two kids to safer neighborhoods to shield them from higher concentrations of violence.
Brown transferred to Brush from neighboring Richmond Heights as a sophomore, and, with a favorable frame that was already nearing 6-6, Brown became a dominant defensive end and tight end who also flourished as an allconference basketball player.
Cleveland basketball trainer Bob Nance said Brown had the tools to be a college starter, a player with a nice jump hook, a steady mid-range game and could gracefully handle the ball. Brown trained for three years with Nance, whose basketball camps have also served as youth outreach programs within the city for nearly four decades.
The camps are filled with repetitive messages like One day the ball’s not going to bounce, what are you going to do? and Winners hang with winners; Losers hang with losers. Nance often reminds kids they have a better chance of becoming a doctor than an NBA player, which is why he says it’s meaningful for a guy like Brown to return home, reinforcing the image of a Cleveland kid who initially used athletics as a conduit to a college education.
It’s also the image of a man who learned from setbacks while playing at Oregon and recovered from a gruesome knee injury that nearly required amputation.
In the fourth quarter of Oregon’s 2014 game against Utah, Brown’s right knee bent backward, tearing two ligaments and slitting open an artery that left him bleeding internally. Overnight surgery restored regular blood flow and prevented dangerous clotting that would’ve warranted drastic measures.
Curtis Oakley, Brown’s high school teammate and close friend, was watching the game in Rhode Island with basketball teammates at Bryant University, and, when he tried calling Brown the next day after surgery, he was surprised his friend answered.
“The first thing out of his mouth was, ‘I’m still going to the NFL,’ ” Oakley said. “And I was like, ‘Let’s rehab first. But I believe you, bro.’ ”
Brown underwent two more surgeries at the Cleveland Clinic and spent several months at home, bedridden in his basement. He spent the 2015 season rehabbing his knee, returned for his senior season, and was named first-team All-Pac-12 as a senior.
During Brown’s college career, an investigation by the Daily Emerald revealed Brown had fought separately with two teammates and was once investigated by the Eugene Police Department for a physical argument with his girlfriend that did not result in arrests or charges. Lane County’s district attorney’s office later determined Brown’s girlfriend was the primary aggressor.
“The key is once you have that moment, it’s learning from that moment,” Brown said. “If something happens, you can go any direction. I think I just always choose to go in this positive direction.”
Plenty to prove
Brown isn’t the only Texans player with an RSVP to the reunion in Cleveland. There are four total former Browns now starting for the Texans who are eager to prove they’re more than just cast-offs and rebuilding pieces against the franchise that released them.
Cornerback Terrance Mitchell signed a two-year deal with the Texans after playing three seasons in Cleveland. Christian Kirksey, a six-year Browns linebacker and three-time defensive captain, was a salary cap casualty in a 2020 cut that eventually led him to Houston. Tyrod Taylor was benched after suffering a concussion three weeks into the 2018 season, usurped by Baker Mayfield, the franchise’s No. 1 overall draft choice, who was selected two months after Taylor was acquired.
“Any time you get a chance to play against your former team, it’s definitely an opportunity for you to showcase how you’ve progressed as a player,” said Taylor, who completed 21 of 33 passes for 291 yards and two touchdowns in Houston’s 37-21 victory over Jacksonville in the season opener.
Brown’s four catches and 67 yards doubled the totals he produced in Cleveland, and the Texans are hoping his one-handed snag near the Jaguars end zone foreshadows how dynamic the 6-6, 258-pounder will be within the offense.
Still, Brown was nearly a medical scratch against Cleveland. He missed practice Wednesday and Thursday with shoulder and ankle injuries and returned Friday. His status remains questionable for Sunday’s game.
“I think coming back home as a starter, coming off a great Week 1, this is just going to mean the world to him,” Oakley said. “Him just being a part of this offense like we saw last week and coming home and just being around his family, his mom, his sister, his nieces and nephews? That feeling for a professional athlete to be around the place that loves you the most is always going to be special.”