Jim Brown: Unstoppable Cleveland Brown, Hollywood movie star, Malcolm X associate, remembered

Editor's note: The author of this story, Steve Doerschuk, was a young Browns fan when he watched the final few years of Jim Brown's playing career. Doerschuk spoke to Brown periodically during the latter's run as a Cleveland Browns advisor. Brown typically said hello with his standard greeting to acquaintances, "What's up, babe?"

Jim Brown, who seemed larger than life as a Cleveland Browns ball carrier, is dead at the age of 87.

Babe Ruth wore No. 3 when baseball players started wearing numbers in the 1920s. Everyone in football knew Brown's number, 32, when he abruptly cut out of football in 1966.

In 2006, a half century after he last blocked for Brown, Dick Schafrath called his former teammate "the greatest athlete to have ever participated in sports."

In 2014, the New York Daily News voted Brown "the best player in NFL history," ahead of No. 2 Lawrence Taylor, No. 3 Johnny Unitas, No. 4 Joe Montana, No. 5 Jerry Rice, No. 6 Peyton Manning, No. 7 Tom Brady, No. 8 Dick Butkus, No. 9 Reggie White and No. 10 Walter Payton.

"Paul Brown called him the best football player he ever saw," said Hall of Fame general manager Bill Polian, a Daily News panelist. "I share that opinion."

The Daily News list is beginning to age, but Brown's football legacy is timeless. His fame extended to long runs as a Hollywood actor and social activist. In recent decades, he was a "special advisor" to the Browns.

In nine years as an NFL running back, all with Cleveland, Brown never missed a game on teams that produced nine winning seasons. Two Browns have been voted league MVP, Jim Brown in 1957, 1958 and 1965, and Brian Sipe in 1980.

The MVP award recognized by the NFL began the 1957, two years after quarterback Otto Graham retired. Whether Brown or Graham was the greatest Browns player is one of the great debates among fans plugged into Browns history.

Those who never saw Brown play, which is most people now, can watch him on myriad Internet videos. One that lasts an hour begins with a dozen strong runs that are standard fare compared to good modern backs.

But the video goes on. The runs get better. They never stop. In the last of them, in Brown's last game, he scores one of his three touchdowns in the Pro Bowl, in the Los Angeles Coliseum on Jan. 16, 1966.

This is an attempt to describe Brown's style:

Here comes this savant with a 6-foot-2, 230-pound body by Michelangelo. With 10-speed legs working every gear and angle, he bulls, stiffarms, slithers, veers, body bends, sidesteps and pulls away with palpable will and cool. Often, the only way to stop him is a first wave of broken tackles slowing him enough for a second wave to have a chance.

The NFL stage was quirky and earthy during Brown's run, 1957 through 1965. Striped goal posts forming a giant H rose from the goal line. Sometimes, in amassing 126 touchdowns, Brown came so close to the goalpost that he grabbed it.

After scoring, he flipped the ball to the nearest official and jogged on as if nothing happened.

Most stadiums of that era housed two pro teams. Football fields were set up on baseball diamonds. Grass got cleated into disgusting condition as autumns wore on.

The Browns and Cleveland Indians shared hulking Municipal Stadium then. The baseball team finished seasons with yard lines painted on the outfield. Brown scored many touchdowns running to the closed end of the stadium, where the rubber on the pitcher's mound stayed planted on the back line of the end zone.

Opening day, 1963, was classic Cleveland September.

In a 37-14 rout of Washington, Brown ran 15 times for 162 yards and two touchdowns, also catching three passes for 100 yards and another score. The grounds crew had a day to convert to baseball. The next day, in the bottom of the 10th against the Yankees, Max Alvis singled, took second on Joe Adcock's bunt, and scored the winning run off Joe Azcue's ground ball.

The Browns worked through a hangover after winning the 1964 NFL championship. In the 1965 home opener, a crowd of 80,161 saw them get crushed 49-13 by the St. Louis Cardinals, although Brown ran for 110 yards.

Two days later, before a baseball crowd of 3,674, Rocky Colavito swatted a three-run home run in a 6-3 win over the Yankees, a team that once offered Brown a minor league contract.

The 1964 title game, a 27-0 rout of Baltimore on Dec. 27 in Cleveland, is remembered for three touchdown passes to Gary Collins, and for the fact it was kept off local television because it didn't sell out on time.

Brown was quietly quite busy, the only man in the game with more than 11 touches. He ran 27 times for 114 yard and caught three passes for 37 yards.

His final day in a Browns uniform was Jan. 2, 1966, in another NFL Championship Game, this one at Green Bay. There was no baseball team to sully the grass at Lambeau Field, but a pregame snowstorm, in-game sleet, and a pigpen gridiron made for brutal conditions.

Green Bay led 20-12 midway through the fourth quarter when Brown beat linebacker Ray Nitschke on a deep route over the middle. Frank Ryan underthrew, allowing Nitschke to catch up and get a hand on Brown's right arm. The ball came out as Brown belly slid into plowed snow behind the end zone.

What became a 23-12 loss stands as the closest Cleveland has come to winning an NFL championship since that Sunday. The only subsequent trips to the NFL finals brought a 34-0 loss to the Colts in 1968 and a 27-7 loss to the Vikings in 1969, but by then, Brown was long gone to Hollywood.

He worked his first notable acting role in the 1963-64 offseason, before the Browns' championship '64 season. It was a western, Rio Conchos, starring Richard Boone and billed as "four men on a mission that could drench the whole Southwest in blood and flames."

In the summer of 1966, he was in London filming "The Dirty Dozen," whose all-star cast included Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas and Donald Sutherland. It was a World War II story about imprisoned murderers getting a chance to go free if they survived an impossible scheme to kill German officers.

Brown's character, Robert T. Jefferson, made it almost to the end.

In his 1989 autobiography "Out of Bounds," Brown said he considered rejoining the Browns after "The Dirty Dozen" wrapped, but decided not to when owner Art Modell threatened to fine him every day he missed training camp.

"Art should have known intimidation does not work with me," Brown wrote.

Brown's football fame, physical presence and mystique eventually made him a leading man, sometimes in so-called Blacksploitation movies co-starring former NFL player Fred "The Hammer" Williamson.

In October of 1968, Brown had just returned from Spain, where he filmed a love scene with Raquel Welch that made entertainment headlines. He was in Chicago for the premier of "The Split," in which he played the leader of a gang that stages a robbery at the Los Angeles Coliseum during a football game. Dihann Carroll played his ex-wife.

Chicago-based critic Roger Ebert interviewed Brown and wrote, "In all of his films, Brown plays a tough guy with a capacity for violence. He is usually either on the wrong side of the law, or morally neutral."

Brown told Ebert, "People can identify with this kind of character. There's a trend toward anti-heroes now, and I think it goes back to guys like Bogart and Cagney. They seemed to have no compassion, and they were always alone.

"That's the kind of cat I can play. If I played, say, the super-super kind of guy, there wouldn't be too much I could draw on. But these characters that are sometimes good, sometimes bad, kind of trying to get through in one piece, I can draw on my own experience."

Brown received equal billing with Racquel Welch and Burt Reynolds in "100 Rifles" and got top billing over Borgnine in "The Split."

Ebert wrote, "On the basis of 'The Split,' it looks safe to say Brown is the next black superstar, after Sidney Poitier."

Brown weaved through a who's who of Hollywood, appearing in films including Gene Hackman, Rock Hudson, Charlton Heston, Lee Van Cleef, Stella Stevens, Jack Nicholson, Pierce Brosnan, Annette Benning, Danny DeVito, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Pacino, Dennis Quaid, Jamie Foxx, Cameron Diaz and Kelsey Grammer.

Names of his characters included Gunn in "Black Gunn" (1973), Clyde in "Pacific Inferno" (1979), Fireball in "The Running man" (1987), Byron Williams in "Mars Attacks" (1996), and Montezuma Monroe in "Any Given Sunday" (1999).

Ebert touched on a seamy side of Brown's reputation in his 1968 piece:

"For a couple of years there have been stories about Brown doing this and Brown doing that, Brown breaking up places like Bogart used to do, Brown allegedly heaving girls off the balcony, and eventually you get the notion he's trouble.

"But you spend some time with Jim Brown and you begin to suspect that a lot of his image may be the work of press agents who realize that publicity helps the box office. All that stuff out of Spain about Brown and Raquel Welch was inspired by press agents. How else do you imagine the word got around so fast? Who knows what really happened?"

The perception extended well beyond 1968.

In 1978, Brown was sentenced to one day in jail for assaulting a golfing partner, Frank Snow.

In 1985, he was tried for rape. The trial ended with charges dismissed.

In 1999, he was fined $1,800 and sentenced to 400 hours of community service after smashing his wife's car window.

In, 2000 , he was sentenced to six months in jail for refusing counseling and community service based on the 1999 incident. He was released after four months for good behavior.

His career as a social justice advocate began to take shape in 1964, in the winter after his blockbuster 1963 season with the Browns.

He flew to Miami for a heavyweight title fight between Muhammad Ali (then named Cassius Clay) and Sonny Liston. After the fight, that same night, Ali, Brown, social activist Malcolm X and singer Sam Cook met in a hotel room to discuss ways they could use their fame to build opportunities for Black Americans.

"America racially in 1964 was embarrassing," Brown said in 2020. "Fairness didn't count. All around me Black people were being discriminated against.

"There were white people that were very racist. There were white people who would risk their lives to bring freedom, equality and justice to us. It was so intense. If you weren't careful, you'd be contradicting yourself."

Late in his playing career in Cleveland, Brown helped create the Black Industrial and Economic Union, which opened eight offices around the country and operated under the motto "Produce, Achieve and Prosper."

After settling in Los Angeles, he became active in counseling gangs, advising them to co-exist and seek opportunity through education. In 1988, he launched Amer-I-Can, a life-management program working in inner cities and prisons.

In a 2002 interview with Sports Illustrated, Brown called out Tiger Woods, Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan for doing too little with their celebrity for the Black community.

"He even criticized Martin Luther King Jr., for heaven's sake," former teammate Schafrath wrote in his 2004 book. "Who else could get away with that?"

Brown made headlines in 2018 when he and Kanye West met President Donald Trump in the Oval Office to discuss the state of America.

Brown built his platform on his career with the Browns, as a big star in an era when NFL popularity mushroomed.

He left the league with 12,312 rushing yards, which was akin to a Babe Ruth record. Second place at the time was 9,723 yards, by Joe Perry.

His final three years were statistically astounding. In that span, the NFL's top two rushers were Brown with 4,853 yards (5.3 per carry) and 36 touchdowns, and Green Bay's Jim Taylor with 2,921 yards (4.3) and 25 TDs.

James Nathaniel Brown was born in Georgia on Feb. 17, 1936.

His father, Swinton "Sweet Sue" Brown, was barely part of his life. Jim was in his 40s when Swinton died. He chose not to attend the funeral.

He was 2 when his mother, Theresa, moved to Long Island in New York, leaving him to be raised by his great grandmother and grandmother on Georgia's St. Simon's Island.

"I never felt more love than I did as a child on St. Simon's," he wrote in his book.

At age 8, he rejoined his mother, moving to Long Island and eventually enrolling at Manhasset High School, 22 miles from Yankee Stadium.

Decades later, in his 80s, Brown said the most influential people in his life were Manhasset football coach Ed Walsh, Manhasset school superintendent Raymond Collins, and a Manhasset community leader, Kenny Malloy, who became a New York Supreme Court Justice.

Malloy was his presenter at the Pro Football Hall of Fame enshrinement in 1971.

Walsh advised Brown to play college ball at Ohio State, where Woody Hayes was early in his run as head coach. Malloy, a Syracuse graduate, steered Brown to Syracuse.

"Ohio State seemed so far away," Brown wrote. "I wound up at Syracuse, where they almost ruined me."

He was the only Black player on Syracuse's freshman team, the only football player assigned to the dorm where he lived at first. He came to question whether Syracuse wanted him and whether he was good enough.

He was on the verge of quitting when superintendent Collins made the five-hour drive from Manhasset to Syracuse and talked him into staying.

In "Out of Bounds," Brown said he "reconciled completely with the university," noting he was part of a huge group of Black alumni invited back in the mid-1980s.

"Seeing all those Black professionals, graduates from a school that once had shunned Blacks, was one of the richest experiences of my life," he wrote.

In Syracuse sports, he became a versatile performer along the lines of Jim Thorpe.

Brown wore No. 44 in football and in basketball. He looked funny in basketball tank tops, due to his wide, muscled upper body.

He could do everything in basketball except shoot free throws. In averaging 15 points in 21 games as a Syracuse sophomore, he shot 60 percent from the line, 96 of 160.

As a football senior in the fall of 1956, he ran 986 yards for a 7-1 team. He ranked fifth overall in Heisman Trophy voting and third among running backs behind Tennessee's Johnny Majors and Oklahoma's Tommy McDonald.

His best sport might have been lacrosse.

In the spring of 1957, he had already been drafted by the Browns and was finishing his time at Syracuse. One day in a track meet, he won the high jump and javelin throw, then changed clothes and played for the lacrosse team, leading it to a win that completed a 10-0 season.

"I'd rather play lacrosse six days and football on the the seventh," Brown once said.

He was still available in the 1957 NFL draft when Pittsburgh's turn came up at No. 5 overall. The Steelers took quarterback Len Dawson. Cleveland took Brown at No. 6.

Brown's mentor from Manhasset, Molloy, negotiated his rookie contract. As a rookie, he made $10,000 in salary, plus a $5,000 bonus. He made $65,000 in his last year, 1965.

Brown loved that Coach Paul Brown relied on him immediately. His rookie season was typical of his nine years. He ranked second in the NFLL in carries, 204-202, behind Chicago's Rick Caseres. He was first in yards, leading Caseres 942-700.

The NFL schedule included only 12 games then. In Brown's second year, he an for 1,527 yards (5.9 per carry) and 17 touchdowns. Alan Ameche of the Baltimore Colts ranked second with 791 yards (4.6 average).

Jim Brown played six years for Paul Brown and three for Blanton Collier. Those relationships are covered in another story.

Schafrath, who played left tackle in front of Brown for seven seasons, respected his teammate on various levels.

Schafrath wrote in "Heart of a Mule," his 2004 autobiography:

"Jimmy will challenge your mind and your motives. He tries to develop honest and lasting relationships. He's slow at showing his emotions, but he has a deep feeling for others..

"In the huddle, when you looked into Jimmy's eyes, there was a lot of trust and respect. I remember all of us saying at one time or another, 'Run it over me, Jimmy.' He made you really want to produce."

Schafrath kept a photo of himself blocking against Rams defensive end Lamar Lundy.

"I remember the play because it was fourth and one," Schafrath wrote. "I said to our quarterback, Frank Ryan, 'Have Jimmy run it over my block. I'll handle my man.'

"Frank called the play. It wasn't a good block. Lundy stood me up. Jimmy still went flying by."

Reach Steve at steve.doerschuk@cantonrep.com

On Twitter: @sdoerschukREP

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Remembering Cleveland Browns and NFL Hall of Famer Jim Brown