The late Jim Brown leaves mixed yet memorable legacy

I usually don’t try to write about sports. But I beg your indulgence as I try to pay proper homage to football great Jim Brown, even as I still try to figure out what proper homage looks like.

Brown, who died in

May at age 87, may have been the greatest athlete to put on a football helmet, though too often he was one of the most flawed.

As a running back, there was no one like him. He was almost unstoppable. He was a marvel to watch as he blasted through would-be tacklers like they were bowling pins, fight for every inch of turf, drag tacklers along or simply run over them, if they didn’t get out of his way.

“Make sure when anyone tackles you,” he famously said, “he remembers how much it hurts.”

Then, after leading the Browns to a championship in 1964, he left football at age 30 to make movies. He appeared in more than 30 films. My favorite is “The Dirty Dozen,” in which he seemed almost to win World War II by himself.

In those days of rising Black empowerment, Brown’s stardom rose like Muhammad Ali or the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., as an indisputably bold symbol of Black manhood and empowerment — and not only in sports,

“I hope every Black athlete takes the time to educate themselves about this incredible man and what he did to change all of our lives,” NBA star LeBron James said. “We all stand on your shoulders Jim Brown. If you grew up in northeast Ohio and were Black, Jim Brown was a God.”

That’s partly because, like Ali, Brown pursued his own brand of activism in the late 1960s — and did it his way, with a conservatism that sometimes clashed with the Civil Rights Movement’s progressivism.

Most famously, he organized a 1967 meeting of the nation’s top Black athletes, including Bill Russell and Lew Alcindor, who later became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, to support Ali’s fight against serving in the Army.

Though some of the participants, including Brown, reportedly saw the summit’s purpose as persuading Ali to accept a government deal — he would perform boxing exhibitions for U.S. troops instead of serving in the war — Ali refused it, and the summit participants stood with him, according to Ali’s biographer Jonathan Eig.

In later years, he worked to curb gang violence in Los Angeles and in 1988 founded the Amer-I-Can Foundation, a program to help disadvantaged inner-city youth and ex-convicts.

But Brown’s legacy as a pioneering activist and athlete would shine more brightly were it not for his arrests for abusing women, including accusations that he had thrown a girlfriend off a balcony. When he refused to attend domestic violence counseling for smashing his wife’s car with a shovel in 1999 and threatening to kill her, a Los Angeles judge sentenced him to six months in jail. Not good.

But, just as bewildering for many was his fulsome support for Donald Trump in 2016, followed by his denunciation of civil rights legend John Lewis for calling Trump “illegitimate.”

Many wondered whether Brown had lost his mind. But, for those of us who had followed Brown’s evolution over the years, it was just the latest example of his long-running conservatism — in the model of such Black self-help leaders as Booker T. Washington or the Nation of Islam’s “Do for self” founder Elijah Muhammad.

In that spirit, it was not surprising to see the aging fullback sitting with Kanye West in their historic, if bizarre, 2018 Oval Office meeting with Trump. Birds of a feather do flock together.

In the end, Brown’s legacy of helping young men “feel more like men,” as Ossie Davis famously praised Malcolm X, unfortunately fell short of helping women to feel more safe.