Myles Garrett-Mason Rudolph dustup was just a brawl — and that’s all

The Browns and Steelers play again Sunday for the second time in a little more than two weeks, and two things are for sure:

One: The teams and their fan bases have never liked each other, and they really aren’t liking each other now.

Two: Browns defensive end Myles Garrett sure as hell won’t be playing.

You’ll recall that on Thursday night, Nov. 14, in the waning seconds of the Browns’ 21-7 win over the Steelers at FirstEnergy Stadium, Garrett was the player who ripped off Steelers quarterback Mason Rudolph’s helmet and clobbered him with it.

The melee that ensued ended with a total of 29 players being fined a total of $732,422. The game was a chippy one from start to end, and the grand total of fines for the whole event — including some for illegal hits by the Browns — came to almost $810,000.

But that’s nothing compared to the lost paychecks from the three players suspended for at least one game, with Garrett getting a six-game suspension that will continue into the postseason and might even flow beyond that. He will lose $1.14 million in pay for those six games, on top of a $45,623 fine for his unnecessary-roughness hit on Rudolph.

Throw in the $250,000 that each team was fined for not controlling its players and you’ve got way above $2 million tossed to the wind due to one fight. There is no question that it is an NFL-record amount for a brawl.

When the teams meet again in a short while, you’ve got to believe the players will be on best-behavior-lockdown mode, knowing commissioner Roger Goodell might send them to Ukraine or worse if they mess up again.

But beyond the moral outrage and brutality of the fight itself (amazingly, nobody was hurt; Rudolph’s cranium is that of a ship’s hull, apparently) lies the intense, technologically enhanced focus of modern times and the way we shift our viewpoint to fit the ethos of the era. In short, stuff like this has happened before. And we didn’t really give a sh--.

Let’s go back to a preseason game in 1985, down in Dallas, Bears against the Cowboys. Bears offensive lineman Keith Van Horne and Cowboys defensive tackle Randy White just didn’t like each other. No big deal. That’s how it used to be, before selfies and prayer circles at midfield after the game.

Stuff is going on between them, and they start to fight and — holy facemask! — White rips off Van Horne’s helmet and cocks it back like a medieval mace, ready to brain his detested rival. Check out the wondrous photo of that moment and you’ll see that Van Horne, all 6-7 and 285 pounds of him, is not going gentle into the good twilight. He can explain:

“I was trying to punch him in the face,” says the player who so often paved the way for running back Walter Payton and kept would-be sackers away from fragile quarterback Jim McMahon. “ ‘Missed him by that much,’ as they say.”

Van Horne, retired and living in the northern suburbs, immediately saw the ironic parallels between the Garrett mayhem and the White incident some three-plus decades ago. In fact, he laughs as he thinks about it.

“Back then, anything went. It’s all about image now,” he says. “You saw how defenses used to destroy quarterbacks.”

We talk for a spell about quarterbacks — men like the Lions’ Joe Ferguson and the Cowboys’ Danny White: good offensive players who got obliterated on helmet-first hits by wild Bears defenders. So, the thing is, Van Horne doesn’t really get too off-the-grid when he sees current football plays that push people into a frenzy.

In fact, he was at the center of another preseason, O.K. Corral-style brawl, this one in 1986 against the Cardinals, in which he was at the bottom of a pile of foes punching and kicking him. That melee resulted in 51 players getting fined — 26 from the Bears, 25 from the Cardinals — with the total penalty being less than $100,000. Van Horne got himself a hefty $1,500 fine. He and three Cardinals players were thrown out of the game. Included in the mix was a $2,000 fine for the Bears’ William “The Refrigerator” Perry for body-slamming Cardinals quarterback Neil Lomax.

It’s not like this was a tolerable thing just because it was back in the day.

“The commissioner had to do something as soon as he could,” concerned Bears general manager Jerry Vainisi said afterward, “or this sort of thing would continue on and on.”

Still, no player was suspended or censured for the fight. Nobody was blacklisted. Nobody was shunned. Nobody in the public got his (or her) shorts in a knot. This was kind of part of the brutal sport called pro football.

Back to that Randy White helmet moment. Just like Garrett, White didn’t brandish Van Horne’s helmet because he wanted to polish it or check it for recording devices. He was gripping it to show dominance, anger, and to use it as a club.

After Van Horne missed his punch, there was an instant when he was vulnerable to a wild helmet arc from White. It could have happened, a real brain blow — you really never want to have your helmet off during a game. But — ta da! — fellow offensive lineman Mark Bortz came to the rescue.

Louis DeLuca/Dallas Morning News

Bortz — the left guard who lined up next to tackle Jim Covert, while guard Tom Thayer was usually next to Van Horne on the right — saw what was happening and rushed in to stop White. For his effort, Bortz got crowned with the swinging helmet. But he had his own helmet securely on his noggin and not much happened.

“He’s got a Neanderthal head anyway,” says Van Horne.

Bortz, also retired and happily hunting small and large game on his farm down in Quincy, Illinois, smiles at the memory of the brawl.

“That fight was ongoing for years, really,” he says. “It’s kind of funny. I got in between them, and he’s not going to hurt me because I’ve got my helmet on.

“The thing about that quarterback [Rudolph] going after the other guy — I would have run out of there. Without a helmet? It’s just painful for me to watch.”

Van Horne acknowledges his gloved punch at White likely wouldn’t have done much against White’s helmet, but it was just the thing to do, the proper response. The violence? No big deal.

“I played 13 years,” Van Horne says. “For a lineman, it’s literally like being in a low-speed, high-impact car wreck every play.”

He’s got the damaged neck and spine to show for it all. And even when the pain was greatest, he was going to keep on rolling, the way football players will.

“I hurt my neck in that 13th year, and I went to see Dr. Schaeffer, the team doctor, at his home,” he recalls. “He said, ‘Partner, come on over to my house.’ So I did, and he’s injecting my neck and he says, ‘Partner, it’s time for you to do something else.’ ”

Football is interesting like that. No player wants to be told it’s over. No player, at least at the beginning of his life after football, regrets that he played the game. Even the animosities seem comfortable. The enemies were co-conspirators, necessary foils, almost friends in a certain way.

Bortz usually doesn’t talk much to the media or to questioners of the past, but his memories of the old helmet brawl amuse him.

“It was just comical the way we didn’t like the Cowboys,” he says. “I remember we played them in London after the Super Bowl season, and I’m with Kurt Becker at the bar at Heathrow waiting for our flight back home, having a drink. Across the way, Randy White and [Ed] ‘Too Tall’ [Jones] are sitting there. The bartender comes over and says, ‘They want to buy you a beer.’

“I mean, growing up, Randy was my hero. I loved him. But Becker looks at the bartender and says, ‘No!’ ”

Oh, and the outrage over that helmet clubbing moment was so minimal that White was thrown out of the game and later received a $1,000 fine from the league, but that was it. No suspension. No lost paycheck. No Twitter shaming. No cancel culture. Van Horne got a small fine, too, and so did Bortz. Three hundred dollars apiece.

“I got fined for being the peacemaker,” Bortz says. “Like, one week of camp money.”

Back at the time, he said of the fine he was ordered to pay: “Maybe they’ll find a cure for cancer.”

Cowboys coach Tom Landry managed to turn the affront away from White, his future Hall of Famer, and direct it at that ever-perfect target, Da Coach. Recalling Mike Ditka’s time on his Cowboys staff, Landry said, “Mike’s temper sometimes got the best of him. It was interesting playing tennis with him. At least, as long as his racket lasted.”

We won’t say things were better then. We will say they were different. The PC police weren’t everywhere. Not everything was on video. Not everyone was a victim. Not everything had to be judged for its impact on society, on children, on the future of mankind.

But real people sometimes did get really hurt, and that wasn’t good. It’s worthwhile, sometimes, to look back and wonder. To marvel, even.