Did Jim Brown ever prance, ridicule, and/or showboat in the end zone after any of his 126 career touchdowns?

Suckers for good sportsmanship unite! . . . And up with the public ownership of professional sports teams!

Apart from all the self-destructive legal and illegal sports-gambling activities—and the simple fact that professional sports teams have now embraced and profited from “the action”—the thing that upsets me most about pro football, in particular, is the excessive, never-ending celebrating, showboating, and taunting, along with other acts of unprofessional, on-field unsportsmanlike conduct.

They include the derogatory hand gestures, the excessive fist-pumping, and the self-congratulatory chest-pounding after big plays, as well as the big-cat scowls, the choreographed dancing in the end zone, and the obligatory spiking of the football after touchdowns.

I don’t remember Jim Brown, arguably the greatest running back in NFL history, ever dancing and/or prancing in the end zone after one of his spectacular runs.

Notably, in 2024-2025, the NFL’s high command ruled against “violent” and/or “inappropriate” on-field gestures. . . . But that’s not enough.

In baseball, if a player hits anything but a walk-off home run, he is required by tradition to show humility while rounding the bases. If he decides to celebrate and disrespect the opposing team’s pitcher, he can expect a 100-mile-an-hour fastball aimed at his head during his next at-bat, often followed by a bench-clearing brawl.

I’m sorry, but many of us are still suckers for good sportsmanship—in sports and in life. And bad sportsmanship needs to be condemned and punished—in sports and in life.

Speaking of Jim Brown, the current Cleveland Browns team doesn’t have the same DNA as the team with which we baby boomers from northeastern Ohio grew up. In fact, the Baltimore Ravens—who beat Cleveland, 41-17, on September 14, 2025, and will play them again this afternoon in Cleveland—is the real legacy of our old Browns team that was first led by head coach Paul Brown and supercharged by Jim Brown.

I still cannot forgive the late owner, Art Modell, for leaving Cleveland with the Browns, aka “The Move,” and taking his team to Baltimore in 1996 after Robert Irsay had earlier slinked away in the dead of the night with the Baltimore Colts in tow, moving his team, aka “The Midnight Mayflower,” to Indianapolis in 1984.

Sadly, I never felt a spiritual connection or kinship with either the Ravens, who won Super Bowls in 2001 and 2013, or the “new” Cleveland Browns in 1999, then a hastily thrown together ragtag NFL expansion team of misfits, who have made the playoffs only three times since then and won only one playoff game, the AFL Wild Card, in 2020.

To prevent these controversial moves in the future, when will pro football fans finally rise up and demand public ownership of NFL teams by the citizens of the cities in which they play?

It has worked since 1923 for the community-owned Green Bay Packers, the only publicly held, non-profit corporation in the NFL with thousands of Green Bay citizen-shareholders.

In 1960, the NFL prohibited the public ownership of any other team. . . . That needs to change.

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