Hard to tackle, harder to exaggerate

Jim Brown still was the NFL's essential running back at the time of his death, at 87.

It took Jim Brown nine games to break the NFL single-game rushing record and 12 games to become the Most Valuable Player. It took him nine years to do everything he wanted to do in football, and he was gone before his 30th birthday.

What was the hurry?

He said at the time that he wanted to leave football before his senses left him, which was a real knee-slapper to the linebackers whom he sought out and stomped. But Brown had a point. After he had become the personification of brute force on a football field, Brown became the man on the mountaintop for all Black athletes, the man who spent years with gang members and prisoners, urging them to seize economic power or at least self-sufficiency. He died on Friday at age 87, and immediately the NFL network began showing Brown’s highlights, as if to demonstrate where that expression, “Man among boys,” came from.

Clusters of defensive players would surround him, gingerly, as if approaching a land mine, and Brown would either accelerate through them or disappear into their knot and come out the other side, leaving them strewn on the dirt like old clothes. 

He would lie on the ground a long time before the next play, as if to lull the would-be tacklers to sleep. He hit them before they hit him, and far more willingly. He scored 126 touchdowns, all but 20 on the ground, in 118 games, and in seven of those nine seasons he had at least one touchdown run of 65 yards or more.

The only runner who could approach such mass, speed, violence and doggedness was Earl Campbell, in Houston. Campbell led the NFL in rushing his first three seasons. When he finished last in the mile run at Oilers’ training camp, someone asked coach Bum Phillips about it, and Phillips replied, “Well, when it’s third down and a mile to go, we won’t give it to him.”

But Campbell only lasted eight years, and his effectiveness plunged after three.He was done at 30, and not by choice. Brown led the NFL in rushing in eight of his nine seasons. His finale was 1965, and he was the league leader in carries yards, touchdowns, longest run, touches (323 in 14 games) and scrimmage yards. He won his third MVP that season.

Brown was 6-foot-2, 232. Of everyone who played any sport in the late 50s, he is the one who you could cut out of those times and paste neatly into these, and he would still distinguish himself.

Brown rushed for 1,863 yards in 1963. That figure would have won every NFL rushing crown, except for three, since 2005, and the league had a 14-game schedule then, not 16 or 17. And there were no spread offenses, no formations with four wide outs, no “light boxes” to run through. Brown headed into 8-man fronts more often than not. In his 2,359 career rushes, he averaged 5.2 yards per.

Cleveland played host to the Rams on Nov. 24, 1957. It was Brown’s ninth pro game. He took 31 carries 237 yards, breaking a league record. Quarterback Milt Plum was also a rookie, and together they subdued the Rams, 45-31. “I think we had a pretty good draft,” coach Paul Brown said.

Actually it was a good draft for a lot of teams. Four of the top eight picks became Hall of Famers: Paul Hornung at No. 1, Len Dawson at No. 5 (by Pittsburgh, although he made his name with the Chiefs), Brown at No. 6 and Jim Parker at No. 7. The Rams picked Jon Arnett at No. 2, and he was certainly worth it. But Brown was voted the second-best player of alltime, behind Jerry Rice, in 2010, even though he brought his own story to a halt.

There is a statue of Brown at Syracuse that honors his football life, but he was at least as good at lacrosse, where the Orange won three consecutive NCAA titles. Just as the NCAA outlawed the dunk to put guardrails around Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Brown inspired a rules charge that forced lacrosse players to keep their sticks in constant motion, rather than letting them hold the stick close to the body. It didn’t work, just as the dunk ban didn’t work, and Brown is known as one of the great lacrosse players of alltime. His coach, Roy Simmons, convinced Brown to stay in school when the football coaches considered making him a guard.

Brown also dabbled in track, supposedly winning a discus competition at an adjacent field while waiting for a lacrosse match to resume, and in 1954 he finished fifth in the National AAU decathlon. 

He put away the sporting goods far earlier than he could have. Brown was in London during the summer of 1966, filming The Dirty Dozen, a war movie starring Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson and Donald Sutherland. He had told the Browns he would be late to training camp, as if he really needed to go over the plays, but Paul Brown threatened to fine him for each day he was late. Jim Brown mulled that over and decided to retire. This did not hurt the marketability of The Dirty Dozen, not one bit, and it made $45.3 million on a budget of $5.4 million. The Browns weren’t initially harmed, with Leroy Kelly thriving with all of Brown’s carries as Brown had predicted. They won 36 games the next four years, and Brown kept making movies, like Ice Station Zebra and The Split. He made $200,000 for A Hundred Rifles, in which he and Raquel Welch became pioneers for portraying intimacy across the color line.

“I wanted to play this year but it was impossible,’ Brown told a Sports Illustrated reporter who visited london. “We’re running behind schedule shooting here, for one thing. I want more mental stimulation than I would have gotten playing football. I want to have a hand in the struggle that is taking place in our country. I have the opportunity to do that now. I might not, a year from now.

“I quit with regret but not sorrow.”

Brown did not have to look far to find a cause. Muhammad Ali had announced he would not participate in the Vietnam War. Today we remember Ali as a unifying figure, surrounded by a grateful nation, but in 1967 he was alone on a crumbling precipice, overwhelmingly hated in the white community, doubted by a large chunk of Black America.

Brown organized what became known as the Cleveland Summit, held at the headquarters of the Negro Industrial Economic Union, an organization Brown had founded. Ali was greeted by Brown, Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, future Cleveland mayor Carl Stokes, and football stars Bobby Mitchell, Willie Davis, Curtis McClinton, John Wooten and Walter Beach. Soon Ali found himself cross-examined by the group, which needed to be convinced Ali’s motives were pure and that his commitment would last. Eventually it was, and the Summit announced to the world that Ali had friends in high places who understood.

But no summary of Brown’s life can leave out the unsavory side. In 1968 he was charged with assault with intent to commit murder. The victim, a girlfriend, declined to prosecute. Three years earlier he was acquitted of assault and battery against an 18-year-old woman. In 1985, charges of rape and sexual battery, brought by a schoolteacher, were dropped. 

In 1999 Brown was charged with domestic violence against his wife Monique, who was still his wife at the time of his death. Brown damaged her car with a shovel. Monique later said she had lied in the report and asked for police not to arrest Brown. This time he was convicted of misdemenaor vandalism and was sentenced to a year of counseling and community service. Brown refused. He was then given a six-month jail sentence in Camarillo, Ca., and served four.

After he was released, he was unrepentant. “I’m no angel but I’ve never been convicted,” he said. “I’ve just been harassed. I’ve been hit so much I don’t sting anymore.”

A columnist pointed out that Brown probably would be suspended from today’s NFL for such angry and indefensible behavior. Therefore, she wrote, she had not listed him among the NFL’s top players. This, of course, assumes time travel. If Rice had played in the 50s, when the passing game was primitive, he never would have had the numbers to deserve No. 1 status. It is possible to illuminate Brown’s violent side without resorting to hypotheticals. It is also possible, if not common, to separate good acts from bad, and the personal from the professional. There is no ledger that tells us how many lives Brown was able to reverse during his work with wayward young men. But then the moralists on both sides have had trouble with Brown’s views, which are difficult to categorize.

For instance, he did not support Colin Kaepernick’s kneeldown during the National Anthem, although he said he was with Kaepernick “100 percent. I don’t know what the big issue is because this young man, in backing up his statement, becomes stronger in my mind.

“Now, if you ask me, would I do that? No, I won’t, because I see it a little differently…I’m an American citizen, I want my equal rights. But this is my country and consequently I don’t want to open it up for ISIS and for anybody that will take away what we’ve already gained.”

That fight endures. But on the field that he left too early, nothing ever gained on Jim Brown. So he didn’t look back.