Written by Jeff Rich

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This is one installment in a team effort by The Cleveland Fan, highlighting the top local sports figures by jersey number. Please weigh in with your thoughts, in the Boards. As David Letterman would say, “For entertainment purposes only; please, no wagering.”

Number 35; if that’s the number you wanted to wear, chances are it’s available and you can have it.  If you think about it, who has really worn the number well enough to define himself as the guy you think of when you see the number?  If you’re a little older, and into hockey, maybe Tony Esposito of the Chicago Blackhawks is an obvious call.  If you’re a lot older, it might be legendary Eagles receiver Pete Pihos, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1970.  Of course, names like Kevin Durant and Frank Thomas probably roll off the tongue a little bit easier for the ESPN Generation, myself included.

Unfortunately, none of those great #35s ever wore a Cleveland uniform, so the pool we get to pick from here is filled with pre-season football studs, 4th outfielders, and garbage-time heroes of the hardwood.  Sure, Ken Keltner wore it for his 1 plate appearance that netted him an RBI in 1937, before he changed numbers several times throughout his illustrious career with the Indians.  Jerome Harrison put himself on a Top-10 list running for history wearing 35 in 2009.  Phil Niekro won over 300 games in his career, but was just 18-22 with the Tribe, only after winning his 300th game in Yankee pinstripes.

It’s unbelievable, because in hindsight, you wish you would have given the guy a fair shake, but Danny Ferry ends up representing the city of Cleveland and the region of Northeast Ohio for the number 35.  In the end, it really wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t fill the shoes of Ron Harper, for whom he was traded.  If anyone should dislike Ferry, maybe it should be Clippers fans, who never saw the Hyattsville, Maryland native wear a Clippers uni after being selected 2nd overall out of Duke in 1986.  Ferry opted to play overseas in Italy, where he played pretty well, perhaps not well enough to live up to the young Larry Bird stigma that he was somehow anointed with, but well enough to pique the interest of Wayne Embry.

In Terry Pluto’s book Joe Tait, It’s Been a Real Ball, the legendary Cavs broadcaster names Ferry as one of his Five Forgotten Sports Heroes:

 

The Cavs forward could have just cashed the checks, but he worked so hard to make himself a respectable NBA player.

 

That’s just it; Ferry wasn’t a superstar in the NBA, like he was in the college ranks or even what he was in Italy.  What he was, was a basketball player that played more games than anyone in Cavalier history, before that mark was eclipsed by Zydrunas Ilgauskas a few years ago.  Ferry was a role player, he didn’t start many games and took abuse for what he was, a target, and what he wasn’t, Larry Bird.  He never saw the floor as well in the pro ranks as he did playing for Mike Krzyzewski in Durham, but he did have a 13-year career and walked away with an NBA Championship ring, albeit not with Cleveland.

Ferry came from good stock; his father Bob Ferry spent the better part of three decades around the NBA as a player and a GM, a path his son would replicate.  Morgan Wootten, his coach at DeMatha Catholic High School was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2000.  He’d go on to play for Coach K at Duke, leading them to three Final Fours and earning First Team All-American Honors and ACC Player of the Year in both his Junior and Senior seasons.  The knock on Ferry starts with his arrival in the NBA with Cleveland; the bar was just set too high.

The Duke grad didn’t miss a lot of time due to injury, missing only one game in his rookie season, when he appeared in 81, despite only getting two starts.  Though nothing truly calculates to high season averages, he had his moments.  There was his 21 points, off the bench, against Portland in 1990, his 16 rebound night against Atlanta in 1992, his buzzer-beater at New Jersey in 1993, and his 34-straight made free throws in 1994-95 really put an exclamation point on how good he was from the charity stripe.

The following season was his personal best.  That year, he saw career-bests in points, minutes, starts, assists, and steals.  He set a franchise mark for most makes beyond the arc in a game with 8, in a game he finished with 31 points, which was not a season-high.  He bested that with a 32 point performance at Madison Square Garden on April 11, 1996; 25 of his 32 came in the second half.

He played in all 82 games for three consecutive seasons, and a total of 301 games, before being sidelined by inflammation in his knee, at Philadelphia, on February 17, 1998.  He was place on the injured list for the first time in his career and missed 13 games, due to that injury, but he bounced back in an abbreviated 1998-99 season.

He appeared in all 50 games of the labor-stoppage-shortened season, and started 10, including the final 8.  In that stretch of 8 games, Ferry averaged about 13 points per game in an average of 22 minutes on the floor.  Ron Harper, on the other hand, averaged in double figures in points in each of his five seasons with the Clippers, but never won a playoff series for LA’s other team.  Later in his career, he became a role player on Michael Jordan’s Bulls for their second 3-peat.  There is no comparison, Harper was the better player, and the Cavs “lost” the trade that brought Ferry to Richfield, but if you look at Ferry for what he is, not what he was supposed to be, he deserves to be honored here.

Honorable Mentions

If we’re looking at single seasons, instead of the whole body of work, Gaylor Perry’s 1972 Cy Young campaign deserves slightly more than a mention.  In fact, Perry’s whole Hall of Fame body of work would certainly trump Ferry’s 10 role-playing seasons in Blue & Orange or Black & Lavender.  The infamous spit-baller won 24 games with a 1.92 ERA, including 29 complete games and 5 shutouts in the only year he wore #35.  He’d win 46 more games with the Tribe from 1973-1975, but he’d do it wearing #36, and this is all about the numbers.

Jerome Harrison finished near the top of the Heisman vote in 2005, after an outstanding season at Washington State, which saw him rewarded by being selected by the Browns with the 145th pick in the 2006 NFL Draft.  The consensus All-American 4+ seasons with the Browns, mostly as a backup.  He would score 9 combined rushing and receiving TD in his first four seasons with the Browns.  He broke out in the Browns lost season of 2009, where they started 1-11, but Harrison (among others) would carry them to a 4-game winning streak to close out the season.  He’d end the season with 862 yards on the ground in 14 games, many of them coming in his near record-setting performance against the Chiefs on December 20, 2009.  Harrison ran for 286 yards in that Browns win, putting him behind only Adrian Peterson (296) and Jamal Lewis (295) for the best single-game performance.