11-04-2016, 10:40 AM
I remember in a recent interview Mike Brown made some comments about visiting other stadiums and viewing their ring of honor. He made the following comments:
"It’s an oddly complicated issue. We honor our old Pro Bowl players. We put up large permanent posters of them in the building and that has been our way of doing this. I was at a stadium recently and I looked around at the Ring of Honor players they have, and I would tell you that these are guys that played 30, 40, 50 years ago. People don’t know who the hell they are. These things have a shelf life and I wonder whether there isn’t a better way to recognize old contributing players. We are going to try to do it by focusing on the Pro Bowl players (and) putting something on our website. We’re pressed to have the space to do it out in the stadium itself. So, we will do it our way and we hope that the old players and the fans understand that it is a bona fide effort to recognize these people that played here and made the team what it is today.”
My response to that is, how else are younger generations of fans going to find out who they are if they are not being honored? I was lucky enough to have people in my life who could tell me about how great Anderson, Riley, Munoz, etc. were for the Bengals. However, I wasn't alive to witness any of this. I'm in no position to convey this to my children so now you have a situation where young Bengals fans have no way of knowing who the true Bengals greats are unless you have someone close to them who can give their perception. Even then, memory is short-lived.
"It’s an oddly complicated issue. We honor our old Pro Bowl players. We put up large permanent posters of them in the building and that has been our way of doing this. I was at a stadium recently and I looked around at the Ring of Honor players they have, and I would tell you that these are guys that played 30, 40, 50 years ago. People don’t know who the hell they are. These things have a shelf life and I wonder whether there isn’t a better way to recognize old contributing players. We are going to try to do it by focusing on the Pro Bowl players (and) putting something on our website. We’re pressed to have the space to do it out in the stadium itself. So, we will do it our way and we hope that the old players and the fans understand that it is a bona fide effort to recognize these people that played here and made the team what it is today.”
My response to that is, how else are younger generations of fans going to find out who they are if they are not being honored? I was lucky enough to have people in my life who could tell me about how great Anderson, Riley, Munoz, etc. were for the Bengals. However, I wasn't alive to witness any of this. I'm in no position to convey this to my children so now you have a situation where young Bengals fans have no way of knowing who the true Bengals greats are unless you have someone close to them who can give their perception. Even then, memory is short-lived.
