Spotting a trend
Steve King, Staff Writer 07.30.2008
The Browns missed the AFC playoffs last season by a hair.
This season, they're trying to make it, with a lot of hair.
Never have the Browns had a club with this many players sporting long dreadlocks.
There's:
*Cornerback Terry Cousin.
*Wide returner/wide receiver Joshua Cribbs.
*Wide receiver Efrem Hill.
*Wide receiver Donte Stallworth.
*Tight end Kolomona Kapanui.
*Defensive end Corey Williams.
*And defensive back Gerard Lawson, among others.
For all of them, their hair extends out the back of their helmets. For most of them, their hair is so long that it covers their last name on the back of their uniforms.
The hair thing on the Browns this year has gotten so pronounced, in fact, that 73-year-old Walter Beach, the starting cornerback on the 1964 NFL championship team and a man who had a bald head at the time, showed up at camp the other day while in Cleveland as an employee of Jim Brown's Amer-I-Can program, and sported some long dreads of his own.
Among the current Browns with dreads, maybe Cousin has the most cred since he's the oldest of the bunch at 33, and entering his 12th NFL season.
"When I was with the Jaguars, we had seven, eight nine guys with dreads," he said. "All of them were prime players on the team. We all joked that the hair was the reason."
Cousin looked at Cribbs, the Pro Bowler who was being interviewed for about the 10th time in camp thus far, and just shook his head in tongue-in-cheek disgust.
"Cribbs thinks he has real dreads, but he doesn't," Cousin said with a laugh. "Those are too short. Those are junior dreads."
Take that. Cousin becomes the first player who has spilled Cribbs for a loss since probably some defensive end at Akron, Toledo or Bowling Green.
No, wait, maybe Cribbs broke the tackle.
"Cousin said that about me? Oh, man!" Cribbs smiled. "He's not giving me any love."
Cribbs had short hair while playing quarterback at nearby Kent State University and started growing his dreads when he came to the Browns in 2005.
"I did it to create an identify for myself, to stand out and get noticed and make a name for myself," he said.
When you're a rookie free agent, as was Cribbs that year, that's a smart idea. Rookie free agents are at the bottom of the food chain on an NFL roster.
Now that's established -- everybody in the league knows who he is now -- Cribbs doesn't need to grow his hair longer and make them senior dreads. He doesn't want to, either.
"If you get your hair too long, then guys on the other teams start grabbing it," he said. "In fact, that's already started. I got tackled by my hair last year. That hurt like crazy. And when I was the gunner on coverage teams, guys grabbed me by my hair when they were blocking me and pulled me down."
Still, that hasn't prevented Cribbs, Cousin or a few other members of the Browns.
"I started in September 2003, so it's coming up on the five-year anniversary of when I began growing them," said Cousin. "I had short hair at the time, and I wanted a different look.
"This is like a journey in that you have to be patient. It's like a kid growing up and his teeth all start to fall out. You've got your ugly stage with hair, too, as you're growing it."
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