Remembering Jim Brown

Jim Brown, regarded by many as the greatest football player of all time who quit the game at the height of his career and became a successful Hollywood actor and influential activist at the peak of the civil rights era, has died at his home in Los Angeles.

Brown died late Thursday at 87. His wife Monique was by his side, a family spokeswoman said.

A multitalented athlete cast in the mold of the legendary Jim Thorpe — he’s in three halls of fame — Brown was known best as a football player. Perhaps the football player. A fullback for the Cleveland Browns, he stepped away from the game after only nine seasons while on the set of “The Dirty Dozen,” saying he needed greater mental stimulation in his life.

In his career, though, the Browns won the National Football League championship in 1964 before the creation of the Super Bowl and he led the league in yards rushing eight times, failing to gain 1,000 yards only in his rookie season, He was the league MVP three times and, at retirement, held records, among many others, for single-season yards rushing, 1,863 in 1963, and career rushing, 12,312.

Those marks have long since been broken, but when Brown was playing, the NFL season was 12 games for his first four seasons, then 14 for the next five. Today’s pros play a 17-game regular-season schedule. And Brown’s per-game record of 104.3 yards rushing appears as unassailable now as it did then. No other running back has even cracked 100 yards.

Brown didn’t just run from scrimmage, though. He was an excellent receiver out of the backfield, catching 262 passes for 2,499 yards and 20 touchdowns, and he returned kickoffs for an additional 628 yards.

More impressive than his numbers, though, was his style. At 6-foot-2 and 232 pounds, he was a speedster who loved contact. If he couldn’t run past a defender, he’d try to run over him. And often did.

“Jim Brown was a combination of speed and power like nobody who has ever played the game,” Dick Lebeau, a Hall of Fame defensive back with the Detroit Lions and later one of the longest-serving coaches in league history, said to Sports Illustrated 50 years after Brown had walked away from the game.

“Obviously, arm tackles were not going to slow him down, but he was so elusive . ... He was so good at setting you up, then making you miss. You just didn’t know if you were going to get a big collision or be grabbing at his shoelaces.”

And said John Mackey, who, like Brown, played his college football at Syracuse and then went on to a 10-year career as a tight end for the Baltimore Colts and San Diego Chargers, “He told me, ‘Make sure when anyone tackles you, he remembers how much it hurts.’ ”

Football, though, was just one of the athletic things he did well. At Manhasset High School on Long Island, New York, he also played lacrosse, baseball, basketball and water polo and ran track. As a sophomore at Syracuse University, he was the second-leading scorer on the basketball team, competed in track and field, and continued to cultivate his love for lacrosse, which he preferred to football.

One spring day in the mid-1950s, Lefty James, Cornell’s football coach, took in a Syracuse-cornell lacrosse game and was surprised to see Brown, the All-american running back, leading the Syracuse team.

“Oh, my goodness,” he sputtered, “they let him play with a stick!”

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