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A hero’s welcome: Nick Chubb connects with Greater Akron-Canton High School Sports Awards crowd

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AKRON — Nick Chubb was humoring a rapt audience in Akron Civic Theatre Friday when the topic turned to his second-favorite sport.

He couldn’t think of one.

“I’m really good at football,” he said, offending no one, but instead drawing the kind of group laugh one hears at family reunions.

A braggart might have deserved to be booed off the stage. Chubb is anything but that.

Suppose the question of “favorite Browns player in the 25 years of the expansion era” was put to a vote.

Who would be the nominees?

Joe Thomas and Myles Garrett, likely. Josh Cribbs and Phil Dawson, maybe.

Nick Chubb, definitely.

The 28-year-old Browns running back was greeted as such as the guest celebrity at the Greater Akron-Canton High School Sports Awards.

Chubb empathized from the stage with everyone who ever had to come back from an injury. Dozens of top athletes sat right in front of him.

Coming off a 2022 season in which he ran for 1,525 yards, Chubb seemed the best version of himself in the 2023 opener against the Bengals and in Game 2 as things got rolling in Pittsburgh.

On a drive late in the first quarter, against a Steelers defense designed to stop him, he ripped off gains on 7, 9 and 20 yards. Then, on the second play of the second quarter, he blew out a knee.

“It was a terrible night,” he confided to the well-dressed crowd on a hot Friday with baseball’s RubberDucks playing to a sellout a block away. “I think about it a lot. How bad it was. How bad I felt in that moment. I’m doing a lot better now, nine months out.”

On stage, Chubb showed no signs of injury as he walked to and talked from a stool with Akron Beacon Journal sports writer Nate Ulrich.

Chubb is recovering from surgery. He doesn’t let on when he will be able to play in a 2024 season whose preseason opener against the Packers is 50 days away.

The vast majority of people in Friday’s crowd were athletes and their families on hand for honors in sports other than football.

The Boys Athlete of the Year, Marlington’s Colin Cernansky, is a distance runner. The Girls Athlete of the Year, Hoover’s Tess Bucher, is a tennis player.

Chubb is an athlete’s athlete, one of the brightest players in professional sports both in production and in workmanlike, team-oriented approach. He drew the applause due a distinguished peer.

The Browns are of interest to plenty of people known for other sports. One of Friday’s top honorees, Girls Coach of the Year an Ryan Shaffer of Hoover, is an icon in tennis, but he has followed the Browns since he was a Perry High School quarterback in the 1960s.

Chubb is the kind of player Paul Brown wanted when he coached the Massillon Tigers, Ohio State Buckeyes and Cleveland Browns to championships. The team that plays in Paul Brown Tiger Stadium, state football champion Massillon, was honored as Boys Team of the Year.

Chubb, who has rushed for 6,511 yards for the Browns, ran for 6,983 yards at Cedartown High School in Georgia.

Granted, he was playing against high school defenses, but not even Jim Brown’s highlights match a couple of Chubb’s spectactular runs that can be found on YouTube.

Cedartown is a small town 60 miles northwest of Atlanta. Chubb described it as “nothing but trees and people and family.” It seems to mean the world to him.

He spends most of his offseasons there, recapturing what it was like to be a high school freshman.

“I want to emulate that feeling that I felt when I was 14 years old, and I didn’t have anything, and I wanted it all,” he said. “I do the same workouts I did then. The same runs. I’m around the same people.

“I never want to lose that hunger.”

Chubb was a versatile high school track and field star to whom Massillon icon Chris Spielman can relate.

In 2014, Chubb won a Georgia state championship in the shot put with a heave of 55 feet. Spielman placed fourth in the 1984 Ohio state meet with a throw of 58 feet.

Spielman was no match for Chubb as a sprinter. Chubb set a Cedartown record in the 100-meter dash at 10.69 seconds. In this month’s Ohio state meet, Elyria senior Mateo Medina won the 100 in 10.68.

Cleveland legend Jim Brown was ranked No. 3 in a USA Today list of the top 100 NFL players all-time (behind receiver Jerry Rice and quarterback Tom Brady). In 2,359 career carries, Brown averaged 5.2 yards. In Chubb’s 1,238 career attempts, his average is 5.3 yards.

Chubb is a Cleveland Brown because of a previous knee injury, suffered his sophomore year at Georgia. He says that one was “tougher mentally than physically” and left him wondering if he would play again ever.

Doubts about his durability contributed to his dropping to the 35th pick of the 2018 draft, in which his fellow Georgia running back Sony Michel actually was taken four spots earlier, by New England.

The doubts are back as he recovers from another serious knee injury.

“I feel love through all of Cleveland, through all of Ohio,” he said. “I feel it here.”

Chubb applies one of his favorite scenes from the movies to his own situation. A character portrayed by Christian Bale suffers a broken back and is cast in a pit. He must perform the impossible task of scaling a wall to get out.

The movie was “The Dark Knight Rises.” By the end of his 25 minutes on stage, one supposed no one in the audience had an appetite for Chubb’s work with the Browns being at an end.

The night wasn’t about Nick Chubb, although Girls Bowler of the Year Madison Perrine of Green and Boys Bowler of the Year Michael Knox of Springfield doubtless get a kick out of the fact one of Chubb’s favorite hobbies is their sport.

Reach Steve at steve.doerschuk@cantonrep.com

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