Red Right 88

The cold, hard reality. That might sum what the Browns and their fans faced on a day when the temperature at old Cleveland Stadium – in the heat of the afternoon – was exactly zero, with a wind-chill of minus-37 degrees.

Their Cinderella season was over. The Kardiac Kids once again reached into their bag of miracles and came up empty-handed. No last-second comeback – no miracle finish – this time.

No, the numbers bore into the souls of everyone in Cleveland like a giant drill bit piercing the hardest metal: Oakland Raiders 14, Browns 12, making Jan. 4, 1981 a day that will forever make their blood run cold.

All because of Red Right 88, a pass from Brian Sipe to tight end Ozzie Newsome that was intercepted by Mike Davis, ending the drive, ending the game and ending the Browns’ season.

Abruptly. Immediately. It was as if, just when the song was reaching a crescendo, someone ripped the DVD right out of the player.

Where there once had been so much, there was suddenly nothing. Nothing.

"When I think back to that game, and specifically to that play, the first thing that comes to mind is the silence – the unbelievable utter silence – after it happened," Sam Rutigliano, the coach and orchestra leader of the Kids, said from his winter home in Charleston, S.C. the other day.

"There were over 77,000 (77,665) fans that day shivering in the cold, roaring and roaring and roaring as we drove the down on that drive. Then the ball that Brian threw gets intercepted, and it’s absolutely quiet."

Like the fans and his players, Rutigliano watched in stunned silence as well. But he was just as stunned – and just as quiet – when he sat in his office the next day and watched the tape of the game.

"The play was supposed to go to Dave Logan, and there he was in the end zone all alone. He had beaten his man by three or four yards," Rutigliano said.

But Sipe didn’t see him. What he saw – or what he thought he saw – was Newsome alone in the middle of the end zone, so he threw it there.

Sipe "should have thrown it to the blonde in the third row," as Rutigliano said at the time and a thousand times since when the play is discussed. But should the Browns have been passing at all? Shouldn’t they, on second down from the Oakland 13, have been positioning the ball in the middle of the field to let the venerable Don Cockroft kick the game-winner?

"It was the right call," Rutigliano’s wife of nearly 50 years, Barbara, jokingly yelled as she passed by the telephone.

Rutigliano has since admitted that the Browns should have kicked the field goal, but that was no certainty, either. Usually, Cockroft was money in the bank, but on this day, the brutally cold weather made it seem as if he were kicking a brick, not a football. Also, Cockroft had been hampered for much of the season by a cartilage problem in his left knee and sciatic nerve pain in his left leg. Plus, he had missed two field goals in the game already.

So instead of Cockroft or Sipe or Logan being the hero, it was Mike Davis, a little-known and little-used player in the Oakland secondary. It was Davis’ 15 minutes of fame, or judging by the shelf-life of this game, maybe more like a quarter-century.

"We traded Greg Pruitt to the Raiders after the 1981 season, and I remember him telling me once, several years ago, that Mike Davis had the worst hands of anyone he had ever seen," Rutigliano said. "Greg practiced against him every day, and the guy couldn’t hold on to anything. He caught everything with his thumbs.

"Greg told me that when he saw that, he knew that God had intervened so Davis could catch the ball."

Rutigliano said that with the passing years, much about the game has been forgotten. Included is the fact that even if the Browns had beaten Oakland, they weren’t necessarily headed to the Super Bowl. That was just an AFC divisional playoff game. They would still have to go to San Diego and beat the Chargers in the conference title contest.
But it wasn’t meant to be.

And the fact that it wasn’t still haunts Browns fans. It is as if the game were played yesterday. People still discuss it that frequently.

"I was in Auckland, New Zealand once and a guy brought it up to me," Rutigliano said. "Another time, I was having dinner in a little village outside of London and a Browns fan brought it up.

"It’s kind of fun to talk about it. Like they always say, the next-worst thing to bad publicity is no publicity, so the fact that you’ve tracked me down to talk about it, is a good thing. It means people still care about it, that they still remember.

"This doesn’t surprise me. I’m never surprised about Browns fans. It defines why Cleveland is the flagship of the fleet. It’s the only city that ever lost its team, fought to get one back and then built a world-class stadium for it."

A Kardiac Kids reunion is slated March 12 in Youngstown. Rutigliano at first had to beg out of it since he will be in Tampa helping conduct training camp for NFL Europe players.

"But the people running the reunion have arranged to fly me back to Youngstown that night, and then back to Tampa the next morning, just so I could go," he said. "That’s incredible."
So is the story of the man who really took the play seriously.

"Some guy from the media – and I can’t remember his name – told me in the early 1990s, when I was still coaching at Liberty University, that because of Red Right 88 and the way in which I handled it, it affected him so profoundly that it really changed the direction of his life spiritually," Rutigliano said.

As a spiritual man himself, the former coach can understand it.

"I talk all around Ohio on behalf of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and I talk a lot to churches, and I used that play a lot when I do," Rutigliano said. "There’s such a light side to it, and such a heavy side to it as well."

The heavy side?

"In the late 1990s, they had a reunion dinner for the Kardiac Kids," he said. "Brian attended it and at one point during the evening he looked at me and said, ‘The thing I still hold on to from that season and that game is that you trusted me.’ And that was our personality all year long, we trusted each other. We went out the same way that we went in."

The light side?

"You know, the weather determines how many people attend our funeral," Rutigliano said. "So we’ll all survive Red Right 88."