CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The head referee turned around.

"Where's the ball at, Randy?" he asked.

"Oh no," replied head linesman Randy Morgan, working his first game, a varsity football tilt in Olmsted Falls. "It's up in the locker room. I forgot it."

"Well, we can't start the game without it," the referee said.

Morgan scurried back to the building. He approached the entrance. The door was locked. He cocked his leg back and powered it through the door. He proceeded to the locker room and retrieved the football. When he returned to the field, he received a standing ovation.

What a debut.

"I never forgot it again," Morgan said. "Sometimes I'd go in there and sit on the damn thing."

That was some 50 years ago. It began his 48-year run of refereeing high school games. He refereed Division II and III college games for 21 years. He served as an umpire for local softball and baseball games. He has operated the clock for basketball games at St. Joseph Academy for 15 years.

And for 33 years, Morgan paced the sidelines during Browns games as a heralded member of the chain gang. He began in 1981, the year after the Kardiac Kids rose to fame. He was the only member of the group invited back when the Browns were re-established in 1999.

Morgan's knees aren't what they used to be. He suffered a torn rotator cuff in 2011. His body has taken the toll of decades of Sunday work, on top of the years of hunching and signaling he registered on the diamond and on the high school and college fields. His age finally caught up to him and, this year, he was relegated to the role of a second alternate on the chain gang.

Only, his phone isn't ringing. The Browns rarely even need the first alternate. Morgan struggles to come to grips with that "retirement" word, the one that indicates his recliner is his Sunday residence. But he hasn't been to First Energy Stadium in 2014. And it pains him.

"It kind of breaks my heart," he said.

Morgan witnessed it all during his tenure on the sideline. He watched John Elway tiptoe past the line of scrimmage before uncorking a pass during "The Drive" in 1987.

"The official wasn't where he was supposed to be and nothing was called," Morgan said.

He observed an overmatched Chris Palmer, the Browns' head coach upon their return in 1999, a gracious man who Morgan said refused to even utter the words "hell" or "damn." Morgan also studied the polar opposite in Palmer's successor, Butch Davis.

"His mouth was unreal," Morgan said.

Morgan fondly recalls Bernie Kosar's final game with the Browns. He can remember Kosar's touchdown to receiver Michael Jackson, a play call different from the one coach Bill Belichick had supplied.

"I was standing next to Belichick, who was saying, 'What the hell is he doing, for Christ's sake?' " Morgan said. "But the play he ran, they got a touchdown out of it. As Bernie was coming off the field, Belichick said, 'Who told you to run that play?' And Bernie said, 'I got a [expletive] touchdown, didn't I?' And he walked right by him. Sure enough, it was his last game."

Clad in a Browns crewneck, the red-haired man smiles when reminiscing about the time the chain gang prepared for a steady downpour one Sunday afternoon. Of course, the rain never came. As the group headed toward the stadium exit, Morgan spotted weatherman Dick Goddard.

"I said, 'Hey Dick, we dressed for rain and it never rained,'" Morgan said. "He said, 'Oh yeah? Wait until you go out that door.' "

They stepped outside en route to their cars and the skies opened. It started to pour. They turned around and there stood Goddard, laughing.

"I told you it was going to rain," Goddard said. "I just didn't say when."

Morgan withstood the rain, sleet and snow for three decades. No condition could scare him away. He had the best view in the stadium for "The Drive" and for the Browns' unforgettable double-overtime win against the Jets the week before. He endured every double-digit-loss season after the Browns' return in 1999.

He refereed high school affairs on Thursday and Friday nights and college games on Saturdays. He assigned officials to other events on other days.

Football was his life.

"Randy ate and slept football," said Marilyn, his wife of 56 years. "I never had to worry about him cheating, because football was his mistress."

Morgan filled every role on the chain gang during his career. Up until last year, he maintained a log of every penalty called. For record-keeping purposes, he marked down the infraction, the guilty party, the referee who called it, the time, the quarter, the yardage and whether the penalty was accepted or declined.

For a few years, he held the down marker stake. He has managed the clip that sits halfway to a first down. He has held the pole opposite the down marker. Belichick once tripped over it, stumbled to the ground, stood back up and heaved the pole toward the stands. Morgan, frozen in place, looked on in horror. He held the dead stick, a marker that indicates a drive's origin. That person stays in position until possession changes hands.

"I never understood why they needed that," Morgan said.

Morgan and his seven cohorts congregated at 10 a.m. at the Triskett rapid station. There, they split into two cars and drove to the stadium. The officials discussed with them any pertinent rules or regimen changes or any league mandate relating to a previous game. The head linesman delivered a speech, which the chain gang members could recite verbatim.

"We could probably shut our eyes and tell him what he was going to say," Morgan said. "He said the same thing all the time. 'Do this. Do that.' It was always the same."

Twenty minutes before kickoff, the chain gang took the field and set up the equipment.

"You'd watch the team come out and then the adrenaline would start flowing," Morgan said.

That adrenaline never waned, even on a blustery, frigid afternoon in the heart of winter and even if the team was light years from postseason contention. Morgan remembers the whiteout on Dec. 16, 2007, when the Browns hosted the Bills in a contest involving playoff implications. Cleveland won, 8-0.

Cleveland Browns quarterback Derek Anderson throws to Kellen Winslow in the third quarter that went incomplete against the Buffalo Bills December 16, 2007 at Cleveland Browns Stadium. The Browns won the game in heavy snow by a score of 8-0.

"It was a blizzard," Morgan said. "We couldn't even see the yard lines."

Morgan remembers an official asking if a particular gain achieved a first down. They had to measure. Morgan asked the official, "How do you know where to put the chains?"

"He says, 'I don't know. Just make it look good.' It was unbelievable. You'd get rain and snow, but you still had to go out there. I would have never turned them down."

Said his wife: "He never, ever complained, no matter how bad it was, how cold it was."

Randy and Marilyn met in ninth grade. They dated throughout high school at John Marshall in Cleveland and they married shortly after graduation. The day after their wedding, Randy took a train to the Great Lakes Naval Station in Illinois for military training. He spent six years as a Navy reserve.

Marilyn supported his passion for football for all of those years. She barely saw him on fall weekends. Randy joked that he would return home on Sunday evenings and his wife would ask who he was.

They actually attended a Browns game together once. That probably won't happen again.

Morgan has had season tickets since the '70s, but he has rarely needed them. He had a day off from the chain gang one Sunday in 2000, so he took Marilyn to sit in their seats, six rows up behind the Browns' bench.

Marilyn takes particular interest in telling this tale.

"Don't pay attention to what she's going to say," Randy cautions.

Marilyn begins.

"We went to the game together, but I might as well have been a fly on the scoreboard," she said. "He never spoke to me the entire game."

"I was watching the game!" Randy counters.

"And then at halftime, he said, 'I'm going down to get you a sandwich.' I said, 'You mean, you're going down to discuss the game with the guys. That's what you're doing.' "

"I did bring you a sandwich back," Randy said.

"Yes, you did," Marilyn replied. "But you didn't talk to me during the whole game. After that, I said, 'Sell the tickets.' That's the only time since they've been back that we've sat in the seats."

Marilyn can't blame her husband, though. He simply loves the sport, the team, the environment, the camaraderie. He doesn't want to sit in those seats, anyway. He wants to be on the sideline. He wants that responsibility.

"He's always been on the field," Marilyn said. "I think that's what's so hard for him right now."

Morgan's passion for refereeing rubbed off on his family. He taught makeshift refereeing classes on his back porch and, eventually, at a high school. His two brothers, his son-in-law, his nephew and his son all took up the gig at some point. Once, his older brother, Robert, who lived in Cincinnati, made the trek and all three brothers refereed a Fairview game together.

Morgan's name is etched on countless plaques commemorating his officiating ability and longevity. He was enshrined in the Cleveland Football Officials Association Hall of Fame last year.

When his daughter, Bonnie Whitmer, was planning her wedding, she was given strict limitations.

"I wanted a nice October wedding, but that was forbidden," Whitmer said. "Like I should interrupt football season with a wedding."

Bonnie Whitmer's refereeing relatives serenade her at her wedding.

So, Whitmer had an April wedding. About halfway through the reception, the relatives with refereeing experience left and and returned in the patented black-and-white striped shirts. They gathered around Whitmer and started singing about being a referee's wife and being alone on weekends and washing striped shirts for the rest of her life.

"It was priceless," she said. "I was stunned at first. Then they started singing and they weren't the best singers, either."

"Everything in this family was planned around the Browns or college football or high school football or something," Marilyn said.

Of course it was that way.

"It was my life, really," Morgan said. "I loved it."