Browns owner getting his kicks in English football
AMAGANSETT, N.Y. — Standing at his restaurant's empty bar, Randy Lerner scans the epic sea struggle waging overhead.
Splashed in vivid colors, artist Stephen Farthing's "Hands of Fate" oil paintings dominate the main room, offering a surreal depiction of one of history's signature naval conflicts, the Battle of Trafalgar.
Hanging side-by-side, the works feature enormous pairs of hands descending from the heavens and sifting the turbulent blue-green waters, upending some of the warring ships.
On Oct. 21, 1805, Britain's Royal Navy, heavily outnumbered and outgunned, asserted its nautical supremacy by destroying 22 ships in the French and Spanish fleets without losing a single vessel.
Grabbing a reference book, Lerner, an avid art collector and history buff, excitedly traces his fingers across a page showing how the flagship HMS Victory, under the direction of Lord Admiral Nelson, courageously split the enemy lines with an aggressive maneuver.
"Just like that," Lerner says.
Two hundred years later, Lerner has made his own bold move.
Owner of the Cleveland Browns since 2002, Lerner recently doubled his sports domain by buying Aston Villa of the English Premier League. He's now trying to navigate two tradition-rich sports franchises on opposite sides of the Atlantic through troubled seas.
At the moment, Birmingham-based Aston Villa, which he bought for $118 million in September, is sailing along nicely.
The Browns, the treasured orange-helmeted team he cheered for as a kid and inherited four years ago following his father Al's death, continues to search for its course on the field.
Although Lerner's interest in buying a Premier League club predated him getting the Browns, the purchase surprised Cleveland fans, some of whom remain bitter about their beloved team being moved to Baltimore by Art Modell.
Lerner's purchase — he followed Malcolm Glazer, who owns the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and took over soccer giant Manchester United in 2005 — raised more questions about his commitment and prompted speculation he's positioning himself to sell the Browns.
In a rare interview with The Associated Press, Lerner insisted he's dedicated to rebuilding them.
"I'm not selling the Cleveland Browns," he said adamantly last week in his office overlooking the team's practice fields in Berea, Ohio.
A relative newcomer to sports ownership, the 44-year-old father of four is easygoing, analytical and private. He's mostly unknown and thus misunderstood by long-suffering Browns fans, who have had little to cheer since the team's expansion return in 1999.
Lerner feels their pain. He's one of them. In his eyes, the Browns aren't his. They belong to Cleveland — always have, always will.
To Villa's rabid supporters, he's seen as a savior, rescuing a neglected franchise with an infusion of cash needed to compete with the league's big boys.
