I am, have always been, and will always be a sucker for the "back story" in sports. Curt Schilling's bloody sock, with the staples holding his ankle together? He may be an asshole, but I ate that up. Jerome Bettis, coming back home again to win the Super Bowl, in Detroit, in his last pro game? The whole damn league may be fixed, but I kept watching. That's why I can't watch the Olympics, because I have other things to do, and I don't need to be emotionally devastated by some skier who's lost three fingers, her mom and two uncles to hand cancer or something ridiculous, then falls just short of the medal stand and ends up breaking her spine in two. You know? I like it, but there's tasteful, there's untasteful, and then there's just plain stupid. The only back story I can think of that I can't stand is Lance "What, me worry about blood doping" Armstrong and his stupid testicles, or prostate, or whatever.
But back again. Last week's Sports Illustrated featured Cleveland native son Joe Jurevicius, in his triumphant return home to be the elder statesman of the Browns' receiving corps. Or something like that. If you remember back to Tampa Bay's Super Bowl win a couple of years back, you may remember hearing a whole lot about Joe, and his family, or more specifically his prematurely born son, who was struggling for life in an ICU in Florida while Joe was helping his team dismantle the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFC Championship game. Joe went on to catch four passes for 78 yards in a Super Bowl victory over the Oakland Raiders, and his son kept fighting for another month and a half before succumbing to a rare neurodegenerative disease on March 24th.
And now here's Joe, three years and two teams later, signing with the Browns and moving back home. I'm definitely a sucker for the "pro athlete going back home to momma" line (see Jerome Bettis, above), and I doubly appreciate it in the good old heartland of America. I also have to say that I appreciate Joe wearing a Teamsters Local 507 sweatshirt (Jackie Presser's old local!) in one of the magazine pictures, because, if I'm not mistaken, in addition to representing workers at the Cleveland Zoo, that's the local that represents workers at Cleveland Browns Stadium. Nice touch, Joe. And good luck.
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By the by, July 22nd, 1796 was the day that the city of Cleveland was founded. In case you were wondering. Also, Albert, Frederick and Charles Fisher founded the (in)famous Fisher Body company on this day in 1908, which in 1926 became the Fisher Body Division of the workers' friend, General Motors. December 28th, 1936 was the day that workers at Cleveland Fisher Body launched their strike, followed the next day by Flint's Fisher Body workers, and forty-three days later the modern UAW was born. Cleveland Fisher Body closed its doors in 1983, taking with it 1,700 jobs, down from a peak of 14,000 during WWII.
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