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Joshua Gunter, cleveland.com

Browns coach Freddie Kitchens meeting fans at the Greater Cleveland Sports Awards.

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Chapter 5: Made for Cleveland

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ATTALLA, Ala. -- The search for Freddie Kitchens was simple, because so many of the stories were the same.

“It’s not made up,” said Todd Lamberth, his high school friend and former teammate. “You can’t make these stories up.”

From the start, it was clear how deeply the Northeast Alabama towns of Gadsden and Attalla informed Kitchens’ inner workings. The Etowah High School secretary was right when she said no one had a bad word to say about the new coach of the Cleveland Browns.

Big, tough, talented, and real, there aren’t two sides to Kitchens. There’s just the one that everybody sees.

“Very seldom do you meet someone who doesn’t just fall in love with Freddie,” Lamberth said. “He’s always been like that.”

But stories aren’t enough. Everyone has high school friends. Everyone lived a life with a few scenes worth retelling.

What does all this tell us about what the new coach of the Browns will do, who he is and why he’s in Cleveland? In this five-part series, we’ve examined his family and his community, and his football career in high school and college.

We’ll finish with this: a quarterback, a camp and a mystery.

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Read 'Built in Bama," the entire five-part series on Browns coach Freddie Kitchens

From his family to his town, from high school to college, get to know Kitchens through the people who know him best.

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Tony Dejak, Associated Press

Freddie Kitchens (left) and quarterback Baker Mayfield laugh during the Cleveland Sports Awards on Feb. 6.

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What he'll do -- Coach Baker Mayfield

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In a quarterback league, Kitchens’ background gave him an edge. The Browns needed a coach for a team, but also a guide for a quarterback. If you couldn’t help Baker Mayfield, you couldn’t help the Browns.

That was obvious. Eventually, so was an explanation for why Kitchens and Mayfield seemed so in step from the start. With each Alabama word spoken about Freddie Kitchens’ father, something seemed familiar.

Acerbic and unrepentant, congenial and cocky, Big Freddie told you what he thought, enlivened every gathering and was as loyal to his friends as he was aggravating to his foes.

Remind you of anyone?

Kitchens’ quarterback is just like his father. Baker is Big Freddie.

The Browns didn’t hire a new head coach to help control Mayfield. They made it easier for Mayfield to be himself, because this coach completely understands him.

“I never thought of it like that,” Kitchens said to that theory. “There are so many people who could coach Baker. His skill level, his intelligence, his toughness, all of his intangibles, I don’t know how special you have to be to coach Baker. He could make a lot of guys look good.

“But maybe this is what you’re looking for: I think in today’s time and in life in general, you have a hard time telling people the truth. People always want to be politically correct, people always want to beat around the bush or dabble around the edge of things instead of just speaking the truth.

“You never questioned where you stood with my dad. And if he didn’t like you, you knew he didn’t like you. And if he liked you, you knew he would go to hell and back with you. And I think hopefully that carried over with me some, and I know Baker has those characteristics.

“I think that’s what you get from Baker more than anything. Hopefully that’s what you get from me. Because I know that’s what you got from my dad.”

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John Kuntz, cleveland.com

Baker Mayfield (left) and Freddie Kitchens (right) in the sideline during a Browns game in December.

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Doug Lesmerises, cleveland.com

Todd Lamberth, Freddie Kitchens' friend and former high school teammate, who is now the athletic director at Gadsden High School in the county where they grew up in Alabama.

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Who he is -- His football camp for kids

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One generation in Etowah County knows Kitchens as a quarterback. The next knows him as a camp counselor.

For 18 years, kids between the ages of 7 and 17 would get six hours of free football instruction one day each June provided by former football players from Etowah High School, Alabama and Auburn. Kitchens, Toderick Malone and Ed Scissum, who played together at Etowah and Alabama, led the way, with other teammates like Lamberth among the 20 counselors each year at the Freddie Kitchens Football Camp.

“Kids knew their names, and if you just throw a mediocre name out there, there’s no interest,” said George Baker, a high school basketball coach for 32 years who, like Kitchens, is a member of the Etowah County Sports Hall of Fame. “A lot of guys leave and they don’t return.

“Freddie doing this, it’d be packed. … I admired him for that.”

For a city like Cleveland, which values remembering where you came from, the camp reveals Kitchens’ core as much as anything in his life. For 18 years, he committed to something that mattered only to the people where he grew up. When Kitchens says now, as coach of the Browns, “If you don’t wear brown and orange, you don’t matter,” you understand what happens when he dedicates himself to a cause.

His father worked on the camp nearly year-round, gathering sponsors. Community members donated time, money and goods. Little Freddie would return from Arizona each year, missing the camp only in 2013 when he suffered a serious heart issue two weeks before.

For the kids who couldn’t afford a camp at Alabama or Auburn, Kitchens brought one to them. He considered it a continuation of the way his father, 30 years earlier, would gather his son’s friends in the bed of his pickup and drive them to practice. For this generation, parents called each spring to ask the date for the next Kitchens camp, making that full day of football, with a T-shirt and a free lunch, a summer priority.

Two hundred kids was the norm, 400 campers the high one summer.

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“That says a lot whenever you get as far up the ladder as he had and you come back for these kids,” Ricky Green said. His grandson has been attending the camp his whole life. That grandson, Trent Davis, now plays running back and point guard for Etowah High.

“That was a big deal,” Green said.

Those who didn’t really know Kitchens knew the camp. But if you knew the camp … maybe you did know Kitchens. One former volunteer, when asked if she knew Kitchens, said, “Everyone in this county knows Freddie.”

The community couldn’t do it without him, and he couldn’t do it without them. It kept them all connected. The camp ended in 2017. Kitchens’ father died in 2015, and “when he passed away, it just wasn’t the same,” Kitchens said.

Kitchens is also keenly aware of how things evolve. He’s seen it happen with people in his coaching career, and he never wanted that for his camp, never wanted it to outlive its usefulness, never could stomach the idea he’d ever take advantage of the generosity of those who helped him. He lived in Etowah County for 18 years. He and his friends gave 18 years back. There was no camp in 2018, but volunteers are hoping to reignite it, perhaps with a different former Alabama player.

“But if they ever need anything,” Kitchens said, “all they have to do is call.”

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Doug Lesmerises, cleveland.com

The field where Kitchens played high school football, which also hosted his football camp at times over the years.

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Why he's here -- The gift of a stranger

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After KItchens started at quarterback for one year in eighth grade, his coaches wanted him to attend a quarterback school in North Carolina the summer before high school started.

“Hell, it was like $400 or something,” Kitchens said. “I mean, that would be a joke.”

His family didn’t have money like that. Someone else did.

“Somehow, somebody in the community, somebody in Attalla, gave the money for me to go to that quarterback school,” Kitchens said. “Still to this day, I have no idea who it was.”

Somebody believed he was worth the money, worthy of an opportunity. That was the push he needed. Look at the return on that investment.

So there is risk in the Browns’ decision to hire Kitchens. But not blind risk. Get around Kitchens, and you know what you’re getting.

“Freddie outwardly is not going to be a person that you would hire to be a head coach in Cleveland,” said Larry Foster, his high school baseball coach. “But inwardly, in what he does, if he gets an opportunity, he’ll be a great one.”

The opportunity has arrived. It wasn’t given, but was unexpectedly earned by a true Alabama soul routinely underestimated by those who don’t know where he comes from. The unlikely quarterback is now an unlikely coach.

It doesn’t mean he’ll win. It means there’s a chance. The Browns can’t do it without Kitchens, and Kitchens can’t do it without the Browns.

Before Gregg Williams went 5-3 with Kitchens’ help in the second half of 2018, no Browns head coach had left Cleveland with a winning record since Marty Schottenheimer after 1988.

The Browns’ 7-8-1 record was their best in 11 years, and all Kitchens said in his introductory news conference was that it wasn’t good enough.

“It’s a cocky confidence, and it’s hard to explain, but that’s who he is,” Lamberth said. “It’s almost arrogance, but it’s not. It’s almost distasteful, but it’s not.

“He fully expects to flip the script, no doubt about it. He would expect to lose his job if he doesn’t. What happens, happens, and he’s willing to accept those consequences. But I guarantee it has not crossed his mind that he’s going to fail.

“There’s no way.”

So he inherits a team on the rise, in search of its first championship in 55 years. At the very least, two people are certain Kitchens is the right man for the job.

Little Freddie. And Big Freddie.

Larry Foster, the high school baseball coach, smiled at the thought, imagining what Kitchens’ father would say today:

" 'My son was destined to be the coach in Cleveland, simply because of who my son is, and what he’s learned throughout his life.’ ”

Built in Bama, and all along, maybe perfectly built for this.

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Courtesy of Freddie Kitchens

Freddie Kitchens (second from right) at his 2015 induction into the Etowah County Sports Hall of Fame with his father, Freddie (far left); Gadsden mayor Sherman Guyton (second from left); and Attalla mayor Larry Means (far right).