Gone GOAT

I followed Jim Brown around a golf course once.

It was 30 years ago and Brown was in the city for the Mad Anthonys Hoosier Celebrities golf tournament, and he knew just how to play it. Which is to say, the course marshals kept having to move him along because he kept stopping to sign autographs and shake hands with kids ("How you doin', little man?" he said to one blonde-headed tyke), and talk to pesky local reporters.

"I don't do much of this anymore," he said, explaining he had a business to run, and it was a vital business, because it was about saving young lives that were being snuffed out by gang violence in the most desperate reaches of American society.

Almost 30 years past his playing days, he was still an imposing cement block of a man, wearing a red, green and black African kuffi on his head. He'd launched his business, Amer-I-Can, five years before, with the aim of getting inner-city youth, ex-cons and gang members off the streets and into educational programs designed to give them a path to productive lives. And he was deadly serious about it.

It was an extension of the social conscience Brown first exhibited in the 1960s, when he abruptly walked away from pro football after Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell tried to strong-arm into reporting to camp. Brown, merely 30 then, was having none of it -- just as he had none of it when he became a key figure in the civil-rights movement after leaving football in 1965.

Now he's gone, passing Thursday night at 87. And it hardly seems possible, because the one defining image of Jim Brown was his invulnerability, his seeming imperviousness to the slings and arrows that afflict all the normal humans who play football for a living.

He was, quite simply, the greatest running back ever, and (according to some) the greatest football player, period. At 232 pounds, he was a not a throwback but a throw forward, built for a time not yet envisioned in the 1950s and 1960s. As big or bigger than some of the linebackers he regularly met head-on, he could run you down or simply outrun you. The poison was yours to pick.

And, sure, we can play the old parlor trick of comparing Brown's era to the modern era, when players are bigger, faster and stronger by a quantum than they were when Brown was bringing the pain for the Browns. The more accurate measurement is how much a player dominates his contemporaries -- and in that, Brown stands alone.

In nine seasons he led the league in rushing eight times, rushing for 1,527 yards in a 12-game season and 1,863 in a 14-game season. Fifty-eight times in 118 games, he went over 100 yards rushing. Seven times, in nine seasons -- most of them 12-game seasons -- he ran for more than 1,000 yards. When he left football in 1965, he left with 12,312 yards and a career average of just over half a first down per carry (5.2 yards).

He also had a dark side. You can't talk about Jim Brown without talking about his treatment of women, which was abominable. Arrested multiple times for beating spouses and girlfriends, it was as much a part of his legacy as the rest of it, and one without which any assessment of the man is incomplete. If he was a social justice warrior, he clearly had a blind spot where women were concerned.

Yet he was indisputably the GOAT, in more arenas than one. Taken in whole, his life was both decorated and consequential, and he put his fame as an athlete to far more useful purposes than most. 

Me, I just remember that day at the golf course, the marshals moving Brown along, the fathers bringing their sons to see someone the sons didn't know from Adam, but whom the fathers could never forget.

"This is the greatest running back in history," some of them would say, or words to that effect.

No argument here.