Maybe the best summation of Jim Brown, on the occasion of his death this week at 87, came from Brown himself during a brief 2010 interview.
“I am a born activist,” he said then. “I have an opinion about most things.” He was sitting in a make-up chair that day, preparing to offer his judgements on a number of topics on the cable show CenterStage, which featured mostly reverential sessions with sports stars and other celebrities.
Of course Brown was a football wizard, still considered—now almost six decades after the end of his professional career with the Cleveland Browns—among the sport’s handful of greatest performers. He was a movie star, the first Black action hero on the silver screen. He was an outspoken advocate for civil rights, founder of programs to support Black businesses and ex-convicts attempting to restart their lives. But, too, he was arrested a half-dozen times for assault charges against women, including his second wife.
He was an intimidating presence, 6-foot-2 and 230 pounds during his playing days, and acknowledged having issues with anger management. Of the Martin Luther King Jr./Mahatma Gandi philosophy of non-violent resistance, he told Esquire magazine in 2008, “I don’t know what they’re talking about. Spit on me and I’ll knock you out. I ain’t going to sing and march, man. But I’m fair.”
He never hesitated to speak his mind, regularly challenging expectations. At 29, at the peak of his football powers, having just led the NFL in rushing for an eighth time in his ninth season, Brown abruptly retired to go into movies full time. “People asked me, ‘Why would you want to quit?’ I said, ‘I make more money [as an actor], have Raquel Welch as a leading lady. I don’t get hit. They call me Mr. Brown.’”
He was born off the southern coast of Georgia on St. Simons Island, which at the time was an all-Black region with a slave-trade history but later was transformed into a resort community. He father abandoned the family six weeks after Brown’s birth and his mother relocated to the New York City suburbs to work as a domestic, leaving young Jim with a grandmother until he moved north to Manhasset, Long Island, at 8.
He excelled in football, track, basketball and especially lacrosse in high school and “pitched a couple of no-hitters,” he said, “but I wasn’t good at baseball.” Reports that the Yankees offered him $150,000 were “an exaggeration,” he said, “but I did get a letter from [Yankees manager] Casey Stengel.”
He always claimed that he experienced “no racism” during school and a Manhasset attorney named Ken Molloy organized fund-raisers in the local community to pay for Brown’s first year at Syracuse University, where he competed in basketball, track and lacrosse but was the only Black on the freshman football team and wasn’t offered an athletic scholarship until he demonstrated an ability to make the varsity.
That accomplished, he once scored 43 points in a single game (via touchdowns and placekicking) against Colgate.
“Sports,” Brown said during that 2010 chat, “always make people react a certain way. People are impressed by athletes. Overly so. I get a lot of things coming my way because I’m an athlete, and sometimes it isn’t fair.”
But it was his football ability that removed so many complications. He found less racism in football than in lacrosse, which he always said was his better sport. Paul Brown, his first coach with the Browns, “didn’t like my attitude of independence,” he said, “but he loved the way I played.”
A decade after Brown retired, in October 1975, when I was covering the New York Giants’ preparations to face the Buffalo Bills and Buffalo’s superstar running back O.J. Simpson, Giants coaches compared their challenge to what every NFL team had known about defending Jim Brown.
“When I was with Detroit,” then Giants assistant Floyd Peters said, “every time we’d play the Browns we’d try everything to stop Jimmy. He’d still get his 125 yards. Same thing when I went to Philadelphia.…Our linebacker would go stand right next to him; the old joke about going with the guy when he goes to the peanut stand.
“Once, we thought we’d figured him out,” Peters said. “Studied him on film and began to notice that on every play, he’d cut back after he went through the hole. So one of our dumb tackles made sure he was ready for the cutback, and sure enough, here came Jimmy. The tackle gets him down, and his eyes get great big and he yells—for everyone to hear, including Jimmy—‘Hey, he DOES cut back!’ On the next play Jimmy went right past the guy, all the way for a touchdown.”
Likewise, Brown lulled opponents into believing they were wearing him down by dragging himself weakly off the ground following each tackle, trudging slowly back to the huddle. Only to materialize—faster and stronger—on the next play.
“For mercurial speed, airy nimbleness and explosive violence in one package of undistilled evil,” celebrated sports columnist Red Smith once wrote, “there is no other like Mr. Brown.”
There now are 12 men who have surpassed Brown’s 1963 NFL single-season rushing record of 1,862 yards. But all of their careers bled into the league’s expansion from 14 to 16 games per season (Brown had four seasons with 12 games, five with 14). And none have matched Brown’s one-season mark of 6.4 yards per carry.
That’s one definition of activism.