Two days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, the Dallas Cowboys played the Browns in front of angry, distressed and hostile fans in Cleveland. Many have blamed Dallas, a hotbed of far-right extremism in the early 1960s, for the death of JFK and, by extension, the city’s National Football League team.
“We didn’t feel welcome all over the United States, no matter where we played, for quite a while,” recalls Cowboys tight end Pettis Norman years later.
Although the nation was shrouded in grief, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle ignored the advice and ordered Sunday’s full seven-game schedule to be played – a move he later called a mistake . Meanwhile, the American Football League rival has canceled all of her games out of respect for the ousted president.
The afternoon game at the gloomy Municipal Stadium near Lake Erie pitted the Cowboys 3-7 against the Browns 7-3, one of the top teams in the NFL. But the game was the least of worries for most players on both teams.
“We were concerned about how the game would go and how the fans would receive us,” recalls Cowboys tight end Lee Folkins.
The Cowboys discovered it shortly after the team’s plane landed in Ohio.
WATCH: The Kennedy Assassination: 24 Hours Later on HISTORY Vault
Dallas Cowboys receive rude reception in Cleveland
The bell boys turned their backs when the Cowboys bus arrived at the team hotel. The players carried their own bags to their accommodations because hotel workers refused – an act the cowboys, running back Don Perkins, later said had made him feel “tainted.”
The day before the game, the Cowboys players had dinner as a group and tried to keep a low profile. The next morning, when the team bus drove to the stadium on a cold late fall morning, fans heckled and cursed them.
As the Cowboys went through their pre-game routines on the pitch, the stadium was eerily quiet. “[T]there were quite a few people in the stands. You could have heard a fly fly as we ran across the field, ”Folkins recalls. But as the Cowboys approached a stadium tunnel, fans went wild with vitriol and swear words.
Dallas is coming home! Return to Dallas!
“We were [viewed as] killers, we killed the president, ”Norman remembers. “It was amazing. I just couldn’t believe it.” Even some Browns players blamed Dallas for Kennedy’s death.
“This city, Dallas, killed our president,” Cleveland guard John Wooten said. “It was the feeling we had.”
Sensing the potential for unruly behavior or worse, Browns owner Art Modell hired officers on leave and ordered the stadium announcer to never use the word “Dallas.”
Cowboys players watched Jack Ruby’s filming of Lee Harvey Oswald on black and white TV in the Cleveland locker room.
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Hours before kick-off, Browns quarterback Frank Ryan scoured the pitch as he did before every game. Stunned and injured, he found himself on a sidelines, “wondering about life”. Then he spotted a phone on the bench and after convincing the stadium operator to make a call, the quarterback contacted his wife at home.
As the couple spoke, Joan Ryan watched television coverage of the transfer of alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald by law enforcement from Dallas Police Headquarters to another downtown facility. Next, a man walked over to the handcuffed Oswald and shot his Colt Cobra revolver into the stomach of the 24-year-old, fatally injuring him.
“Oswald has been shot! ” cried a television correspondent.
“Some of us knew Jack Ruby,” Folkins says of the Dallas nightclub owner who killed Oswald. “Another player and I somehow had been to Ruby’s club a week or two earlier. When we entered the club, this guy rushed towards us. It turned out to be Ruby. He identified himself as the owner, and he was going to buy us drinks.
“We took it on one and decided we should get out of there. We just felt the guy was a little scary. … When we realized on the plane on the way back [home] that it was that same guy, I’ll tell you, that was weird.
Some Cowboys players watched Oswald’s shoot on a small black-and-white television in the visitor’s locker room. Meanwhile, a stoic Cowboys coach Tom Landry continued with football questions as Perkins mumbled in the back, “I knew we shouldn’t be playing today.” Hall of Fame defensive tackle Bob Lilly wanted to return to Dallas immediately.
But Folkins was eager to step onto the pitch.
“Kennedy was the first president I voted for,” he says. “Getting him shot over there in Dallas by a bullet affected everyone. We were no different. But we had a job to do, and our job was to play football, and we put a lot of stuff aside to go out on Sunday and play.
READ MORE: Why the public stopped believing the government about JFK’s murder
Dallas Cowboys “Looked Like Zombies” in Cleveland
“It hit everyone over there in Dallas in Dallas, it affected everyone,” former Cowboys tight end Lee Folkins said of President Kennedy’s assassination.
Bettmann Archives / Getty Images
Shortly before Mike Connelly rushed onto the field before the game, Cowboys teammates told center it was nice to know him. He didn’t laugh. Fearing the reception given to the Cowboys, Dallas quarterback Eddie LeBaron urged his teammates not to remove their helmets on the sidelines. The Cowboys “looked like zombies,” Lilly recalls.
Shortly before the match started, the crowd stayed in silence for a minute or two to honor JFK. Most of the fan heckling subsided during the game, but occasionally Cowboys players heard epithets directed at them. The match, played in front of just over 55,000 in the 80,000 seats at the stadium, was appalling. “Probably the worst game we’ve played or that Dallas has played,” recalls one Browns player.
Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith completed 13 of 30 passes for 90 yards and threw four interceptions. Ryan wasn’t much better, throwing three interceptions and passing for 162 yards. Cleveland Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown, considered by many to be the best player in NFL history, ran just 51 yards.
The Browns won 27-17, but few cared.
“It was a game that no one was interested in playing, practicing, watching or writing about,” wrote Dallas Morning News Columnist Bud Shrake for the Next Day Newspaper.
Eager to return to Dallas, the Cowboys had only one game to play on the road this season in St. Louis.
“It’s amazing how [Dallas] took full responsibility for the death of President Kennedy, ”Norman said. “It was absolutely amazing. Other places let us know that they weren’t going to forget it and were not going to make us forget it.
“This town was poison to anyone who didn’t live here. “
