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Browns coach Freddie Kitchens, far right, as a receiver and backup quarterback as a sophomore at Etowah High School. This is from Kitchens' sophomore year high school yearbook. (Etowah High School 1991 yearbook)

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Chapter 3: Mr. Football

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ATTALLA, Ala. -- All sports goggles and rough edges before a growth spurt put some height on his size, seventh-grader Freddie Kitchens didn’t look like anyone’s quarterback. But he knew the eighth-grade quarterback at Etowah Middle School couldn’t throw a lick, and if he had to sit behind a guy like that, maybe football wasn’t for him.

Thirty years later, Kitchens publicly thanked Gene Hill, his middle school football coach, for pulling him back from the edge, because everything about Kitchens as a coach started with Kitchens as a quarterback. His father and his environment shaped him, but what’s the point of that tough love if you can’t get on the field to prove what you can do?

If Kitchens wins as the new coach of the Cleveland Browns, success will arise from a Culture of We built on the Confidence of Me. Kitchens never doubts and never boasts -- belief without ego.

In his mind, opportunity means victory. Give him a shot, he’ll win.

Don’t give him a shot? That’s your loss.

“When they win the Super Bowl,” Hill said with a laugh recently, “I want a ring.”

In 1987, the only quarterback qualities of that stocky teenager were his arm and his attitude. In Alabama, they still tell stories about the former. In Cleveland, they’ll win games because of the latter.

Kitchens almost quit football not because he was discouraged, but because he was defiant. Baseball called. He had a fastball, a power curve and a place on the mound. In football, with the body of a lineman and the head of quarterback, he demanded the position at the heart of the game.

A middle school coach taught him to attach patience to his conviction. Hill met with the seventh-grader and told him to hold on. His time would come. Kitchens relented. In high school, the future Alabama quarterback played receiver for two years behind a future Auburn quarterback. In the NFL, he coached into his 13th season before he was trusted to call plays.

“As stubborn as Freddie was, it wasn’t him doubting himself,” Hill said. “Because he was going to work himself into being the starting quarterback, whatever he’s got to do.”

Five years later, he was Alabama's Mr. Football.

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Find every chapter in this five-part Freddie Kitchens series: Follow along here

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A baseball player, who thinks like a football player

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Voted the state's best high school football player in 1992, Kitchens won the award in what maybe was his second-best sport. With a fastball around 93 mph and a straight-down curve that was “unhittable if he could throw it anywhere over the plate,” according to high school baseball coach Larry Foster, Kitchens would almost certainly have been picked in the top five rounds of the MLB draft, maybe higher.

“I have no idea,” Kitchens said, “but I was as good as anybody.”

Baseball scouts more than sniffed around Attalla for several springs, the Cincinnati Reds among those showing particular interest.

They were met with a clear message relayed primarily by Big Freddie Kitchens on behalf of his son. No team wasted a pick on a player they had no chance to land. At the time, the younger Kitchens told reporters several teams called him during the sixth round, but offered a signing bonus of only around $75,000.

So Kitchens told them the same thing his father had been telling them all along. This young man is going to college. This young man will play quarterback at Alabama.

Because just as Kitchens was a quarterback who looked like a lineman, he was a baseball player who thought like a football player.

“I think the reason he chose football was because of the physicality of the thing,” Foster said. “He could actually hit and get hit and do things in that sport that he couldn’t do in baseball. He could actually say some words and do some things that he could not do in baseball.

“You have to understand Freddie, because he was raised that way. He’s got face-to-face contact with 10 other people every time. If they’re not doing their job, (he thinks), ‘I can chew their (butt) out in that huddle and nobody’ll know that but me and them. I can say things I can’t say in baseball, because if I get on the mound, I’m in charge, but then again, I can’t catch it, I can’t throw it, I can’t hit it. I can’t control the game.’

“He controls it in football, though. And he controls it as a coach.”

An arm injury helped steer Kitchens as well, although he played both sports at Alabama. But in college or high school, on any field, he was the same competitor. When students from an opposing high school taunted him before a game, he scattered them with a wayward warm-up throw into the stands.

He did the same with a pickoff throw if the opposing dugout mouthed off. He’d also fire a pitch halfway up the backstop before a game to remind opponents that he might be wild that day.

Angered one game, he started shouting to the batters what pitch was coming. Then he’d throw that pitch and strike them out anyway. He faced a power hitter who, mid at-bat, wanted a lighter bat to catch up to Kitchens’ fastball. After he got back from the dugout, Kitchens put that next fastball in his ribs.

“He told him to get to first base,” Foster said, “and said, ‘Next time I face you, I’m throwing you the same fastball.’”

Yeah. He was a football player.

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Doug Lesmerises, cleveland.com

A sign at Etowah High School's football stadium shows the accomplishments of the football program. One section remembers Freddie Kitchens and Carnell "Cadillac" Williams, a running back who played at Auburn and in the NFL, who made Etowah High School one of two schools in Alabama to have two Mr. Football award winners.

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Turning good into great

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Kitchens' right arm opened up everything else for him.

“I still ain’t seen nobody that had an arm like that throwing a football,” said Jerry Reeves, who has been recording Etowah High School football games for the team since 1987. “Good mechanics. And the ball just exploded out of his hand, and I mean it looked effortless.”

Hill, who coached Kitchens for five years after moving to the high school ranks with him and later became Etowah’s head coach, said it was the best arm he’s seen live in 32 years. That includes facing current San Diego Chargers quarterback Phillip Rivers in a high school game.

Raymond Farmer, Kitchens’ football coach, recalls Washington State coach Mike Price showing up at practice to recruit Kitchens, looking for a replacement for Cougars quarterback Drew Bledsoe.

“I’ve seen eight or 10 of the best quarterbacks in the United States,” Price told Farmer, “and this is the best one I saw right here.”

Patrick Nix, who would go on to play quarterback at Auburn, was the starting quarterback when Kitchens was a freshman and sophomore. That left Kitchens to play receiver while backing up Nix.

The 1995 Iron Bowl between Auburn and Alabama would feature opposing starting quarterbacks out of the same high school, from a town of 6,500 people.

Once Nix graduated from Etowah, Kitchens showed he was the best quarterback in the state. Etowah went 22-4 during his two years as a starter, losing in the 5A state semifinals as a senior when he was sacked six times in the rain. They made it that far after a 69-63 six-overtime win to start the playoffs. The Blue Devils scored touchdowns in all six overtimes, the last on a game-winning 3-yard run by Kitchens.

He committed to Alabama on Dec. 21, 1992, and won Mr. Football two days later.

“Freddie has the most potential and the greatest arm of any quarterback that I’ve ever been around,” Farmer told the Gadsden Times then. “I think you’re looking at the potential to be a quarterback in the professional ranks.

“He can make a good football team become a great football team.”

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'. . . Your toughness, that's what you make of it.'

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Kitchens is the latest former quarterback to land a job leading an NFL team, but his arm won’t do anything more than hold a playsheet. When old coaches tell Freddie stories, they marvel at the arm, but lament how rare Kitchens’ other qualities became in athletes in subsequent years.

They’ll shake their heads about kids today and their cell phones, and spin another yarn about what Freddie and his generation were like.

“Freddie was the type of kid, you didn’t have to teach him the game. Any sport he played, he knew the game,” said Foster, the baseball coach. “You didn’t have to coach it because he did it for himself.

“And he just didn’t put up with any crap. He was that way with his teammates. He was the type of guy that said 'if you’re going to play this game, and you’re going to play it with me, you’re going to play it to win.'"

He was surrounded by talent at Etowah, with two of his high school teammates, receiver Toderick Malone and running back Ed Scissum, also playing at Alabama. When he backed up Nix, the two quarterbacks would leave baseball practice in the spring and start throwing routes on the football field. He absorbed a standard not only insisted upon by his father and coaches, but reinforced by the skills of his peers.

“If you cut corners, somebody else would take your job,” said his friend Todd Lamberth, who was Kitchens' backup and would have started at any other school in the county. “I don’t know if Freddie feared that, but he was a leader. If he needed to tell you to get in line, he could. But nobody cut corners, because our best player didn’t cut corners.”

He was Mr. Football. But what they remember most about Kitchens is that he was tough. That’s all he ever wanted.

“To me, that’s just respect, you know?” Kitchens said. “I think your skill is God-given. Your abilities are God-given. But sometimes, your toughness, that’s what you make of it.

“You can control that, and I think a lot of times, that’s how people are judged. That’s what type of guy you are. Where I grew up, that means just as much as anything.”

If he was back in Alabama now, everyone knows he’d sit down and swap stories, the same way they sit and swap stories now about the old quarterback with the big, new coaching job.

Some are just fun. Boy, he could spin it.

Others tell you something. And they know it. What they needed in their quarterback is what Cleveland needs in its coach.

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Coming Monday, Chapter 4: The Tide Turns in Tuscaloosa

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