'What's your dream?' Browns' Malik McDowell returns to his roots at Boys & Girls Clubs event

CLEVELAND — “Do you get along with the people you play with?”

“What do you do when one of your teammates makes a mistake?”

“Are you the tallest player?”

“What’s your dream?”

It was a Christmas gathering, so Browns defensive tackle Malik McDowell didn’t expect some of the tough questions he fielded Monday at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Northeast Ohio’s Cleveland club.

“I’m like, ‘You all are coming with some real questions.’ Some of these caught me off guard,” he said afterward.

One might have been the query on how to handle a mistake, but club director Joseph Greathouse was so impressed with McDowell’s response that he stepped in to add emphasis.

“You’ve got to control your emotions,” McDowell told the kids. “We take the blame as a whole.”

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In his first season with the Browns, McDowell hosted the event attended by about 50 children. Before he gave out gifts, autographed footballs, posed for pictures, and played catch, he told an attentive group seated in the gym bleachers that he started going to a Boys & Girls Clubs center in Detroit when he was 5 years old and continued until he was 11 or 12.

“This brought back a lot of good memories,” he told them.

McDowell, 25, didn’t tell the story of the off-the-field woes that nearly derailed his career. A second-round draft pick of the Seattle Seahawks in 2017 out of Michigan State, McDowell's life spiraled out of control after he suffered a brain injury in an ATV accident as an NFL rookie.

In February 2019, McDowell got into an altercation with police and was charged with assault, resisting arrest, and operating a vehicle while intoxicated. That April, police found a stolen car in McDowell’s possession. He received an 11-month jail sentence in Michigan.

Asked when he started playing for the Browns, McDowell said he’d been somewhere else before he came to Cleveland, “but that’s a different story for a different day.”

He didn’t hold back when asked about his dream.

“My dream is to one day go in the Hall of Fame,” he said.

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McDowell hadn’t played football since 2016 when he signed a one-year contract with the Browns on May 3, but said, “I’m all the way back. It feels like I never missed any time now.

“It took a few games just to get used to having a routine. I’m back now. I’m back.”

If the Browns elect to re-sign the defensive tackle who has started 12 of his 13 games played, McDowell sounded like he will also be back to the club in the heart of Cleveland.

“This is exactly how it was growing up, everybody in the gym, everybody just yelling and having fun,” McDowell said. “It’s just a good environment. To have people in here like [Greathouse], they help you grow up to be good people. You learn good things in the Boys & Girls Club and you just need ‘em.

“I really got into it, playing around with kids and everything. I don’t know how to explain it, but it bought joy to me, I can say that.”

Marla Ridenour can be reached at mridenour@thebeaconjournal.com. Read more about the Browns at www.beaconjournal.com/browns. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MRidenourABJ.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Cleveland Browns Malik McDowell tries to inspire at Boys & Girls Clubs