Jim Brown’s Great Adventure

Jim Brown had a deep social conscience. Just a year earlier he had founded the Black Economic Union to promote economic opportunity for minority-owned businesses. His theory is that beyond “symbolic” actions to defend the role of minorities in society, it was necessary for them to have an economic base on which to build their rights. Thus the Black Economic Union sought a way to make loans or subsidize the start-up of businesses and companies. The success of this initiative was followed by the launch of a foundation concerned with teaching trades to boys who were part of street gangs or who had just been released from prison. That foundation even managed to get a truce declared in certain cities in the gang wars of the 1970s and 1980s.

Jim Brown achieved all this because of his beliefs but also thanks to the fact that he was an absolute football legend, a national symbol. He was the son of a boxer and always said that he did not suffer too much racism as a child because he grew up on the island of Saint Simons, a small community off the coast of Georgia. Things changed when they moved to New York, although there, in high school, Brown found a valuable ally in sports. He played American football, basketball, baseball and lacrosse at the same time. In all of them he was extraordinary. In fact, at Syracuse University he continued to practice all of them. There things were not so simple because that university did not usually welcome black athletes, but the insistence of Kenneth Molloy – a former college star and successful lawyer – made it happen even though he couldn’t avoid issues like being banned from sharing certain rooms with his teammates or being explicitly prevented from dating white girls. What happens is that later on the field Jim Brown was a beast, regardless of the sport he played at any given time. He was capable of breaking university records in each of the modalities and everything seemed possible for him. He even entered the national university decathlon, despite the fact that he did not devote much time to athletics, and finished in fifth position. Such was his adaptability to anything that came his way.

But when he finished his university stage at Syracuse the path seemed very clear. In 1957 he appeared in the NFL draft and there in the first round he was chosen in sixth place by the Cleveland Browns.. What started at that time is American football history. It was something he made clear in his ninth game where he rushed for 237 yards and set a record that would take fourteen years to be broken. Brown spent nine seasons in the NFL, always with the Cleveland team. He won a title in 1964, played in two more finals and was voted League Most Valuable Player three times. His numbers are absolutely staggering because he is the only player in history who has been able to average over a hundred rushing yards in each of his games. No one has ever been capable of something like that again. He covered more than 12,500 throughout his life as a player for the Browns and some of his records still stand in the Cleveland franchise such as the 1,863 yards rushed in a single season, the 1963 one (the oldest franchise record that stands among the 32 teams in the NFL). All of this made the “fullback” of the Browns an NFL legend to the point that He has been included in the NFL’s all-time team and there are many specialized media that label him the best player of all time. of the professional American football league. This circumstance opened doors for him and gave him money to help others and to develop that social conscience that helped him launch numerous projects in defense of civil rights, although at the same time it also put him in the crosshairs of others. collective. The FBI, in the years of his most intense activism, was following him and even promoted smear campaigns with the aim of weighing down a popularity that was difficult to combat.

just turned thirty Jim Brown decided to make a decisive change in his life. In 1964 he made his debut as an actor in the movie “Río Conchos”, a modest and mediocre production that he took as a small hobby before starting a new season with the Browns. But in early 1966 he embarked on a more demanding project. MGM chose him for one of the roles in “The dirty dozen” –known here as the “Garden Twelve”– which Robert Aldrich was going to shoot in Europe with a notable group of actors headed by Lee Marvin. Brown would be Robert Jefferson, one of the twelve convicts who are sent to France during World War II to assassinate a group of German officers who met in a castle near the town of Rennes shortly before the Normandy landings. The bad weather of those weeks in England, the scene of a good part of the filming, conditioned in many aspects the complex production of a film in which a lot of money had been invested and that was delaying the date of Jim Brown’s incorporation to the Cleveland training camp . The club owner Art Modell, began to lose patience and publicly threatened the player with a fine of $1,500 at the time for each week of training he missed. Modell had no idea what Brown’s response would be. Despite the fact that a couple of months before he had confirmed that his last season would be 1966, coinciding with the end of his last contract, he brought forward his retirement and did not play again. He stayed the necessary time in Europe shooting the film and no longer had to worry about fines from his crew. From that moment he decided that the cinema would be his main livelihood and participated in more than thirty films between the sixties and seventies. He wasn’t a great actor but he had something that many production companies wanted: fame. He became one of the highest paid actors of his time, although from the eighties his appearances were limited above all to individual episodes in famous television series. The youngest may remember him in his two most famous small roles in recent years: in “Mars Attacks” and in “An Given Sunday”, the American football movie in which he plays the defensive manager of the coaching staff led by Tony D’Amato, the character he played Al Pacino with that unforgettable speech in the locker room, the one about “either we heal as a team or we die as individuals”. This production directed by Oliver Stone, which was immensely successful, allowed him to unite what were his two great passions in life, a beautiful way to bring them together. Jim Brown passed away this week at the age of 87 at his home in Los Angeles. For many, the greatest man who has stepped on an American football field is leaving.