Jim Brown: The Sheer Joy of Sports and Then, Okay, the Other Stuff
Football icon Jim Brown never took the popular route when it came to analyzing race relations in America, and when he died Friday at the age of 87, he left an activist legacy that defies easy assessment.
His athletic legacy is easier to summarize. It requires only one sentence.
He was the greatest running back in National Football League history.
And smart people who saw him at Syracuse University in the mid-1950s, before he was drafted as an NFL fullback by the Cleveland Browns, will tell you football wasn’t even his best sport. That was lacrosse.
Still, he did okay at football. In nine seasons with the Browns, he rushed for 12,312 yards, an NFL record that stood for almost 20 years. He’s the only player in NFL history to average more than 100 yards a game for his career. He was chosen for the Pro Bowl every year he was in the league, and he led the league in rushing eight times. It’s said that he was never tackled for a loss, which seems insane, but is consistent with his legend.
He was durable and he was consistent. Pretty much every game for nine seasons, he delivered — which may help explain why it’s hard to point to any one game, any one moment, and say, “That was Jim Brown.”
It almost happened on Dec. 14, 1958, when the Browns needed to beat or tie the New York Giants to win the Eastern Conference and go on to the league championship game.
On the first play from scrimmage Brown went 65 yards for a touchdown, straight up the middle. He would go on to rush for 148 yards on a snow-encrusted field, and that would have won the game for the Browns except the Giants’s Pat Summerall kicked a 49-yard field goal through a blizzard to win the game for New York and render Brown’s performance a footnote.
That was also one of the games where Brown sparred with his most famous nemesis, Giants’s middle linebacker Sam Huff, who made a career out of stalking Brown one on one. Huff had the same philosophy as Brown: Bring it on. While he didn’t stop Brown, because no one did, he slowed him down.
Cleveland won only one championship during Brown’s career, in 1964, and while that may seem to suggest Brown couldn’t singlehandedly make his team a winner, it’s worth noting that two different Browns teams haven’t won a single championship since.
On the purely personal side, Brown doesn’t need to be compared to Walter Payton, O.J. Simpson, Emmitt Smith, LaDamian Tomlinson or any other elite running back. They were all superb players. Payton eventually broke Brown’s career rushing record, albeit in quite a few more games.
Like another famous #32 from the early 1960s, Sandy Koufax, Brown had a style that set him apart. He was a human muscle car, a runner who welcomed contact and valued that extra yard or two that the defender didn’t think he was going to give up.
Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey said Brown once told him the goal of contact with a defender was to “make him remember how much it hurt.”
Brown famously scorned Franco Harris, who at one time was approaching Brown’s total yardage record, because Brown felt Harris would give up that extra yard to slip safely out of bounds and avoid being tackled.
In the end, like his fellow #32 Koufax, Brown left the game when he still had fuel in the tank. He became a movie actor, not as singular on the screen as he was on a football field, but generally considered one of the first black action heroes. He helped pave the path for the likes of John Shaft.
Brown’s movies wouldn’t be confused with A Raisin in the Sun or Do the Right Thing. They did reflect something central to Jim Brown: the idea that the biggest win was doing it for yourself.
Brown was speaking out for communities of color while he was still a Cleveland Brown, and he continued to do so until his death. He was good friends with Bill Russell and Muhammad Ali, making common cause with both.
Brown, however, took a different general tack from many of his fellow advocates. He favored what in the 1960s was called “black capitalism,” whose premise was that the best way for black Americans to progress was to build businesses and institutions on their own. Only economic power, Brown argued, would give black communities the leverage to force the kinds of systemic changes the Civil Rights movement was demanding. Money was the language the system spoke.
Toward that end Brown endorsed Richard Nixon, a black capitalism advocate, in the 1968 presidential election. Fifty years later he would meet with President Donald Trump and come away saying, “I fell in love with [Trump] because he really talks about helping black people.”
While that was not exactly a unanimous view of Trump in the black community, Brown felt that despite his misgivings about some of Trump’s actions and comments, Trump’s policies would make economic tools available for black folks to help themselves.
That’s consistent with what Brown was saying as early as 1963 about Martin Luther King Jr.: “Dr. King is a great man because he has courage. . . . [But] I for one will not march down the street and kneel and pray for my rights.”
In 2014 he told Nation writer Dave Zirin, “I didn’t think much of Dr. King. I am not trying to put him down, but if you think about the majority of the rhetoric, it’s about what’s being done to us. It doesn’t have damn near anything that says what we’re going to do for ourselves.”
Brown’s life, like most lives, had other complexities as well. He was accused and at one point convicted of violence toward women, a history that Zirin suggested may have been the reason he was never invited to meet President Barack Obama when Obama was hosting a steady stream of accomplished black athletes at the White House.
So Jim Brown left a life legacy that will continue to be sorted out. But to the extent we often break sports off into a world of its own, this is certain: Watching #32 on a Sunday afternoon on a football field those many years ago was uncomplicated delight.
