The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Browns, Comic-Con intersect
The absolute last place I expected to be talking Browns and Baker Mayfield while vacationing in beautiful San Diego was at the biggest and best comic-con in the world.
San Diego Comic-Con is a four-day affair of all sorts of pop-culture geeky fun. It has to be seen to be believed — much like what happened to a sports editor from Northeast Ohio who was looking forward to not talking sports for a change.
It was unavoidable.
That’s because a strange thing happened upon arriving to Comic Con on July 17, the first night of the event. While sporting a Browns T-shirt (in one respect to represent the hometown, the other because it’s comfortable and light), I noticed looks. I noticed heads were turning.
After a few hours, I noticed I was one of the few — if any — wearing a shirt with a sports team logo of any kind. Before heading to downtown San Diego, my wife’s uncle Tony saw my shirt and said, “Yeah, you’ll stand out with that.” He was right.
Honestly, I didn’t think much about the shirt I was wearing that day. That changed after I arrived at the San Diego Convention Center. Had I wore the same shirt at the 2018 SDCC, it would not have resonated — at least from a positive sense. Not when the Browns were coming off an 0-16 season in 2017.
I almost certainly would not have heard this:
• “Go Browns!”
• “Dawg Pound, woo-hoo!” • “The Browns are actually good now!”
• “We love Baker!” Even more strange — people were asking to take photos with me in my Browns T-shirt. Seriously. It’s supposed to be the other way around with people dressed up as Spider-Man, Stormtroopers and characters from “Stranger Things.” I happily obliged because doing so brought smiles to everyone’s face.
A married couple approached me in the streets of San Diego later that
night with a “Go Browns!” so I stopped and asked if they were from Ohio.
“We’re from Oklahoma and it’s Baker. We love him,” said the wife.
A short time later in a grocery store, a young couple stopped me. “We saw your shirt inside. My brother won’t believe it. Can I take a picture to send to him?”
Uh, OK?
I wore the shirt two days later at Comic-Con as another test. The “Go Browns!” were more frequent, so I stopped and talked to as many as I
could.
A young man was a student at Hiram who grew up in Euclid. Another was from Columbus. Another — a security guard — grew up in my hometown of Seven Hills one street over from my family’s old house.
It’s Browns mania. It’s Baker mania. And it’s everywhere — or at least it was at the biggest comiccon in the world.
Go figure.
Podolski can be reached at MPodolski@News-Herald. com; @mpodo on Twitter.