Brewster was one of the good ones

The summer of 1952 was the year the Cleveland Browns moved their training camp to Hiram College in the one-stoplight village of Hiram, Ohio.

The summer of 1952 was also the year Darrel “Pete” Brewster joined the Browns. I have his autograph in my old brown leatherette autograph book. The sight of it, with its bold signatures, reminds me of how we raced up the hill after practices to wait for the players to head to their dorms. They were patient with our requests despite two-a-day exhaustive workouts.

“We” were the children of their coaches. Training camp was a regular part of our lives each summer, and we each had our own heroes among the players.

Years later, a woman in the box next to ours at Cleveland Municipal Stadium asked me why I cheered for players by their first names, while she and most of the fans called out their surnames. The answer was simple enough. We knew them as friends we shared the Hiram hillside with after those long, hot workouts; we knew them without their pads and bright orange helmets. We shared meals with them, knew their teasing and suffered alongside new favorites who didn’t make the team.

My father, Blanton Collier, was the backfield coach.

I was 13 that summer, and I, along with my best Browns sidekick Jan Ewbank, daughter of coach Weeb Ewbank, had begun to notice there were some handsome fellows on the team. My little girl heroes — Otto Graham, Lou Groza, Marion Motley and my favorite receiver Dante Lavelli — were joined by this tall, broad-shouldered young man, who at age 22, was kind and patient and generous with his time with the just-turned teens and our younger siblings.

Back then, although we learned much from our fathers’ football talk, the criteria we had for pulling for rookies to make the team were much more related to such qualities than to football acumen. Pete Brewster had nothing to fear on either account, but he had a ready-made cheering squad when his name appeared on the final roster for that season.

Being solidly a Dante Lavelli fan — “Gluefingers” played right end — I was happy to see Pete at left end, where my teenaged mind decided, there would be no competition between two of my favorites.

Along with the happy memories of watching Pete move onto the starting team in 1953, and be selected for the Pro Bowl in 1955 and 1956, when I heard of his death, I was viscerally in a car with my dad and one of his University of Kentucky assistant coaches, headed back to Kentucky after a visit to training camp in 1954. My dad had accepted the position of coach at he University of Kentucky, but he and Paul Brown, who were the closest of friends as well as coaching colleagues, continued their football talks. And when we visited camp to give assistant coaches a taste of the NFL, it wasn’t unusual to see the former assistant working on a particular play or technique with a current player, either requested by Browns coaches or identified in his continual analysis of films.

As we drove southward, the two Kentucky coaches were talking about the work that had taken place with “Pete” Brewster. My dad and Pete had concentrated on footwork in various pass patterns, I remember, and now my dad and his UK assistant were going over the details of the work that had been done.

Pete, said my dad, had a natural physical talent, and was a willing, hard worker in those few days of post-workout sessions.

“He’s going to be a good one,” I remember him saying. (“Good one” was high praise from my dad.) It was a prediction that would certainly come true with Pete.

Pete took over the starting left end slot from Mac Speedie in his second season and totaled 632 receiving yards and four touchdowns. In 1955, the final season for Graham and Motley, the 25-year-old Brewster totaled 622 yards and six TDs.

It was Motley who perhaps underscored the importance of that pass pattern/footwork session between my dad and Pete Brewster and numerous other players. Marion was one of the many former players I interviewed when writing the book “Football’s Gentle Giant: The Blanton Collier Story.” Still a gargantuan man, whose physicality loomed over the room, he suddenly got to his feet, arthritis and the remnants of old football injuries set aside, and began walking his patterns, again, again and again.

“That’s what separates the good ones from the not-so-good,” he said.

He was “a good one,” Darrel “Pete” Brewster … a good player; a good man. Close to seven decades later, this “fan” remembers him as both.