Friends remember Hickerson

10.23.2008

Bright sunshine and not a cloud in the sky. Crisp, yet very comfortable.

The kind of day when things actually sparkle when the sunlight hits them. To be sure, it was perfect football weather on Thursday morning.

So it seemed fitting, then, that this would be the day when former Browns offensive guard Gene Hickerson was laid to rest. The funeral for the team's 16th -- and most recent -- member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame was held at the McGorray-Hanna Funeral Home of Westlake in Cleveland's western suburbs. Burial was at Elmhurst Park Cemetery in nearby Avon, not far from where Hickerson had lived for years.

In fact, the route for the funeral procession heading to the cemetery purposely went right past the residence to give Hickerson one last look at the home he loved so dearly. He had been ill for some time before passing away Monday morning at a nursing home in Olmsted Falls at the age of 73, and right to the very end, he campaigned to be allowed to return home.

So in the end, he got his wish.

"He was a great football player but a better man," said longtime friend and Browns radio color analyst Doug Dieken, one of two of Hickerson's ex-teammates who participated in the eulogy.

Eulogy? Hardly. This was storytelling 101, and every one of the tales was good.

Browns chaplain Tom Petersburg who directed the eulogy recounted a story he had heard earlier in the week from former Browns punter/kicker Don Cockroft.

"Don said when he was a rookie (in 1968), he was doing laps around the field while everyone else was practicing," Petersburg said. "After Don had done a couple laps, Gene walked off the practice field to the track, waited for Don to come by and then grabbed him by the jersey.

" 'Hey, rookie,' Gene said, 'you've got the easiest and the best job on the team. The rest of us are out here working and sweating, and you're just running laps.'

"A little later, Gene walked off the practice again to talk to Don. 'Hey, rookie,' Gene said, 'as hard as the rest of us are working, none of us want to be in your shoes when there's three seconds left and the game is on the line. So you just keep doing what you're doing.'

"Don told me that incident gave him a lot of inspiration and really helped him."

Hickerson, who played for the Browns from 1958-61 and 1962-73, hated running. Dieken told the story of Hickerson finding a shade tree on a hot day as the offensive linemen were running a timed mile at the start of training camp at Hiram College one year. Needless to say, Nick Skorich, who had just taken over as Browns head coach, was not pleased.

When Hickerson asked Skorich if he would be getting paid extra or receive any other special compensation for running and the seething coach barked, "No," Hickerson merely waved at Skorich and said, "See ya."

Indeed. Hickerson could run laps or he could train his way and have another Pro Bowl season. It was Skorich's call.

"Gene walked to his own drumbeat, but it was a pretty special walk," said Dick Schafrath, who preceded Dieken at left tackle with the Browns and was Hickerson's roommate for all of his 13 seasons (1959-71) with the team.

"He didn't speak much, but when he did, you listened and you followed him because you knew that something good was going to happen. He just had that air of confidence about him that made you believe that."

But it was a serious side that drove him to personally deliver to needy people in his community the spoils from the half-acre garden he so meticulously grew each summer on his spacious property.

"He was a very generous man," Dieken said.

And it was that serious side that caused him to work very hard at his craft, football.

"I caught Gene at the tail end of his career, but really, there was no tail end because he was as good of a football player in his 15^th season as he was in his first," Dieken said. He could still play."

It is that excellence, in part, that caused so many notables to show up for the funeral. In addition to those already mentioned, there were other former teammates such as Monte Clark, Ben Davis, Ross Fichtner, Al Jenkins and Bobby Franklin, Hickerson's dearest friend; ex-Brown Bubba Baker, whose Avon restaurant, Bubba's Q, was the site of the reception following the funeral; former Browns public relations director Kevin Byrne; ex-Browns radio color analyst Jim Mueller; Mike Haynes of the NFL office; Harold Henderson of the NFL Players Association, as well as representatives from the Browns organization.

"Every time I walk into the Browns complex and see the mural on the wall of all the team's Hall of Famers, I think of Gene," Petersburg said. "He was the epitome of a pro football player."

The chaplain then read a Bible verse that stated that the best thing a man can have in this world is a good name.

"And Gene Hickerson had a very good name," he said.