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As a teenager, I certainly watched the remarkable Cleveland Browns fullback Jim Brown run amuck on a football field and I'm sure I wasn't happy about it, since he was doing so against "my" team, the New York Giants. But he was a great one in every sports sense imaginable. He led the league in rushing yardage in eight of his nine professional seasons, became the "most valuable player" three times, was a Pro Bowl invitee every single year of his career, and so on, and on, and on, until" well, as former New York Times sportswriter, columnist, author of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, and TomDispatch regular Robert Lipsyte points out today, he simply quit at age 30, at the height of his career and fame, to become" yes, a movie star.
It was, in short, a hell of a life -- and "hell" isn't exactly an out-of-place word to use in describing it either since there was one other factor to take into account: Jim Brown was Black in a world that, in his era, had only begun to open to non-whites. After all, he launched his career at Syracuse University in 1953 as the only Black player on its football team at a time when, according to the lacrosse star who convinced the school to admit him, its administrators "did not want Black athletes." And keep in mind that when he first hit the field for the Syracuse, it had only been six years since -- to jump sports -- Jackie Robinson became the Brooklyn Dodgers' second baseman and the first player to desegregate major league baseball. (Previous Black stars had been relegated to "the Negro leagues.") And again simply for a little context, remember that the last National Football League team to desegregate, the Washington Redskins, didn't do so until 1962, five years after Brown took the field as a professional athlete.
Not surprisingly then, Brown's recent death received significant attention and major obituaries. And with all of that in mind, let Lipsyte, who knew Brown and covered his years in (and out) of football, offer his own distinctive RIP for a man who did anything but "rest in peace" while alive. Tom
Life on the Run
The Angry Sports Star Who Was a Milestone Between Jack Johnson and Brittney Griner
Jim Brown was a monster, not only as a wrecking-ball running back on the football field but also as a prime example of an ever more popular obsession with people (mostly men) whose admirable achievements are shaded by despicable behavior (mostly directed at women). He died last month at 87 and his obituaries, along with various appraisals of his life, tended to treat the bad stuff as an inevitable, if unfortunate, expression of the same fierce intensity that made him such a formidable football player and civil rights activist.
Often missed, however, was something no less important: what a significant figure he was in the progress of the Black athlete from exploited gladiator -- enslaved men were the first pro athletes in America -- to the sort of independent sports entrepreneur emerging today. Brown was a critical torchbearer and role model on the century-long path between the initial Black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, who went to jail for his "unforgivable blackness," and one of the greatest basketball players ever, LeBron James, who was the first Black athlete to successfully create his own narrative from high school on.
Jim Brown didn't control his narrative until 1966. By then, he had already spent nine years in pro football, retiring at the peak of his sports career in what was then both condemned and acclaimed as manly Black defiance. In doing so, he presaged Muhammad Ali's refusal to be drafted during the Vietnam War and the Black-power salutes of protest offered by medal-winning runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos as the Star-Spangled Banner began to play at the Mexico City Olympics of 1968.
A Life Demanding Study
A year after retiring from football to concentrate on his movie roles, Brown organized "the Cleveland Summit" in which the leading Black athletes of that time, including basketball's Kareem Abdul Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor), debated whether they should support Muhammad Ali's refusal to join the Army. Their positive decision, based on Ali's in-person defense of his antiwar moral beliefs, was important to so many Americans' acceptance of his sincerity. It was also a glimmer -- as yet to be fully realized -- of the potential collective power of Black athletes. And it was all due to how much Brown was respected among his peers. His close friend Jabbar, an important voice in his own right, has written that "Jim's lifelong pursuit of civil rights, regardless of the personal and professional costs" illuminated the country."
And that's probably more than you can say for Miles Davis, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, or Roman Polanski, among the dozens of male stars of one sort or another whose lives have been reevaluated in the wake of the #MeToo movement and a question it raises: "Can I love the art [sport] and hate the artist [athlete]?"
As Nation magazine sports editor and Brown biographer Dave Zirin has pointed out, "Brown's life calls for more than genuflection or dismissal; it demands study."
Indeed! Consider some of the countervailing pieces of evidence to his greatness. Although never convicted, Brown was accused of a number of acts of violence against women, which he, along with the male-dominated culture of his time, tended to dismiss as of no significance. In one notorious and oft-recounted incident, he was accused of throwing a woman off a second-floor balcony. He always denied it, claiming she fell while running away from him. Tellingly, when the victim declined to press charges, macho culture interpreted that as proof of his irresistible virility, an extension of his being, arguably, the all-time greatest football player ever (and he was thought to have been even better at lacrosse in college). His brutal style of play would later be reflected in his aggressive, independent style of business and everyday life.
That image gathered force when he was 30 and in London on the set of his second film, The Dirty Dozen. It was then that Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell threatened to fine him daily if he didn't show up on time for pre-season football training, which was soon to begin. Brown, then one of the sport's major stars, eventually responded by simply quitting football.
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