To Absent Friends - Jim Brown

Jim Brown

1936 - 2023

Okay, ever since the news came down last Friday of Jim Brown's death at the age of 87, I began to wonder about what I would write about him in an Absent Friends post.  I soon realized that there is nothing that I could write that would capture the true greatness of Jim Brown.  Maybe Red Smith or Frank Deford could have done so.  Or Hemingway.  But The Grandstander?  Not a chance.

Brown played in the NFL for only nine seasons, 1957 through 1965.  I saw him play only on black and white television, but his impact was immediate on this then young boy's consciousness as a football player, no one I have seen since lug the football has surpassed Brown as a ball carrier and as an all around bad-ass tough guy football player.  He is conceded by many to be the greatest football player in NFL history.

Here are just some of his accomplishments:

• NFL Rookie of the Year, 1957
• Three Time NFL MVP
• Nine time Pro Bowler
• Eight time NFL Rushing leader
• Five time NFL Rushing TD leader
• Best player on the 1964 NFL Champion Cleveland Browns
• Member of the 1960's All-Decade Team
• Member of each of the NFL's 50th, 75th, and 100th Anniversary teams
• 12,312 rushing yards at the time of his retirement was the all time record and it stood for nineteen years
• 126 total touchdowns (106 of them rushing)
• Averaged 104.3 yards per game rushing over nine seasons. It remains the leading average yards per game in NFL history
• Member of the Pro Football, College Football, and Lacrosse Halls of Fame
• In 2020, upon the 150th anniversary of College Football, he was named the greatest College Football player ever

He quit football prior to the 1966 season to concentrate on making movies, and after Art Modell threatened to fine him every day he was late to training camp because filming of "The Dirty Dozen" was running over time.  Nice move, Art.  He did fashion a modestly successful acting career (58 IMDB acting credits).

Perhaps the perfect football player, he was far from a perfect human, and his obits have not shied away from his numerous arrests, often for domestic violence incidents.  He was never convicted of a felony, but he did spend a few months on jail later in life on some sort of rap involving a broken windshield (??).

He also fashioned a career as a social  activist, and a foundation that he started, Amer-I-Can, to work to rehabilitate gang members and incarcerated individuals still is doing good work in those areas.

"The Cleveland Summit"

He also convened what came to be known as "The Cleveland Summit" in 1967.  It involved influential Black leaders and athletes at the time, including Bill Russell and a 20 year old Lew Alcindor, and its purpose was to listen and offer counsel to Muhammad Ali at the time he was refusing to accept induction into US Military service. In his Substack column today, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writes of what took place in that summit.  If you don't feel like reading the entire thing, I will leave you with Abdul-Jabbar's final words that ended his piece on Brown:

The great thing about great men is that long after their light has dimmed, their deeds still light our way.

RIP Jim Brown