[The angry sports star who was a milestone between Jack Johnson
and Brittney Griner]
[[link removed]]

RIP JIM BROWN, HERO AND MONSTER  
[[link removed]]


 

TOMGRAM Robert Lipsyte
June 22, 2023
TomDispatch [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The angry sports star who was a milestone between Jack Johnson and
Brittney Griner _

Jim Brown, by Erik Drost (CC BY 2.0 / Flickr)

 

Jim Brown was a monster, not only as a wrecking-ball running back on
the football field but also as a prime example of an ever more popular
obsession with people (mostly men) whose admirable achievements are
shaded by despicable behavior (mostly directed
[[link removed]] at
women). He died last month at 87 and his obituaries, along with
various appraisals of his life, tended to treat the bad stuff as an
inevitable, if unfortunate, expression of the same fierce intensity
that made him such a formidable football player and civil rights
activist.

Often missed, however, was something no less important: what a
significant figure he was in the progress of the Black athlete from
exploited gladiator — enslaved men were the first pro athletes
[[link removed]] in
America — to the sort of independent sports entrepreneur emerging
today. Brown was a critical torchbearer and role model on the
century-long path between the initial Black heavyweight champion, Jack
Johnson, who went to jail for his “unforgivable blackness
[[link removed]],”
and one of the greatest basketball players ever, LeBron James
[[link removed]],
who was the first Black athlete to successfully create his own
narrative from high school on.

Jim Brown didn’t control his narrative until 1966. By then, he had
already spent nine years in pro football, retiring at the peak of his
sports career in what was then both condemned and acclaimed as manly
Black defiance. In doing so, he presaged Muhammad Ali’s refusal
[[link removed]] to
be drafted during the Vietnam War and the Black-power salutes
[[link removed]] of
protest offered by medal-winning runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos
as the Star-Spangled Banner began to play at the Mexico City Olympics
of 1968.

A LIFE DEMANDING STUDY

A year after retiring from football to concentrate on his movie roles,
Brown organized “the Cleveland Summit” in which the leading Black
athletes of that time, including basketball’s Kareem Abdul Jabbar
[[link removed]] (then
known as Lew Alcindor), debated whether they should support Muhammad
Ali’s refusal to join the Army. Their positive decision, based on
Ali’s in-person defense of his antiwar moral beliefs, was important
to so many Americans’ acceptance of his sincerity. It was also a
glimmer — as yet to be fully realized — of the potential
collective power of Black athletes. And it was all due to how much
Brown was respected among his peers. His close friend Jabbar, an
important voice in his own right, has written that “Jim’s lifelong
pursuit of civil rights, regardless of the personal and professional
costs… illuminated the country.“

And that’s probably more than you can say for Miles Davis, Ernest
Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, or Roman Polanski, among the dozens of male
stars of one sort or another whose lives have been reevaluated in the
wake of the #MeToo movement and a question it raises: “Can I love
the art [sport] and hate the artist [athlete]?”

As _Nation_ magazine sports editor and Brown biographer Dave Zirin
has pointed out
[[link removed]], “Brown’s
life calls for more than genuflection or dismissal; it demands
study.”

[[link removed]]

Buy the Book
[[link removed]]

Indeed! Consider some of the countervailing pieces of evidence to his
greatness. Although never convicted, Brown was accused
[[link removed]] of a
number of acts of violence against women, which he, along with the
male-dominated culture of his time, tended to dismiss as of no
significance. In one notorious and oft-recounted incident, he was
accused of throwing a woman off a second-floor balcony. He always
denied it, claiming she fell while running away from him. Tellingly,
when the victim declined to press charges, macho culture interpreted
that as proof of his irresistible virility, an extension of his being,
arguably, the all-time greatest football player ever (and he was
thought to have been even better at lacrosse in college). His brutal
style of play would later be reflected in his aggressive, independent
style of business and everyday life.

That image gathered force when he was 30 and in London on the set of
his second film, _The Dirty Dozen_
[[link removed]]. It was then
that Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell threatened to fine him daily if
he didn’t show up on time for pre-season football training, which
was soon to begin. Brown, then one of the sport’s major stars,
eventually responded by simply quitting football.

It was perceived as a battle of wills. Modell was usually
characterized as a boss always operating in the best interests of his
team or (though this was rarer in those days) a classically
uncompromising, deeply entitled Big Whitey plantation owner. And Brown
was either seen as a defiant Black man, ungrateful for his celebrity
and money, or like Ali, as a warrior prince of Black manhood. As in
the heavyweight champion’s case, the reality was, of course, far
more complex.

ON RAQUEL’S TEAM

At the time, Brown was conflicted about his choices. In May 1966, as a
sportswriter for the _New York Times_, I happened to be in London
covering an Ali fight and had been invited to the _Dirty
Dozen_ movie set. Brown confided to me that the film was far behind
schedule and there was no way they’d finish shooting his part so he
could make pre-season practice in a timely fashion. He had, in fact,
hoped to play one more season, his tenth, but couldn’t imagine
bailing on the production before the film was wrapped. There were just
too many people dependent on him, he told me, and so the Browns would
have to wait. After all, it wasn’t as if he were going to miss
regular-season games.

But Modell’s insistence that he return immediately (echoed by the
media) eventually pushed him into a corner. And Hollywood simply
seemed like the better choice — a potentially longer career, more
money, and less physical damage. Indeed, Brown would go on to succeed
as the first Black action hero in mainstream movies. His on-screen
interracial sex scene with Welch in the 1969 film _100 Rifles_ would
also be considered a Hollywood first.

His football retirement, which began as expedience, would only enhance
his macho aura, which, for better or worse, was all too real. That
same year, in Toronto (also to cover an Ali fight), I found myself
having dinner at a Chinese restaurant with Brown, Carl Stokes
[[link removed]],
soon to be the first Black mayor of Cleveland, and comedian and
activist Dick Gregory
[[link removed]],
whose autobiography
[[link removed]] I
had written.

It was a lively, friendly meal until the check arrived. The waiter, an
elderly Chinese man, set it in front of me. Stokes and Gregory burst
out laughing and began bantering about the racism implicit in the
poorest of the four of us getting the bill. But Brown suddenly leaped
up, yelling at the waiter and grabbing for him. The other two managed
to push him back into his chair, where he then sat, muttering to
himself. Eventually, he did manage to see the humor in the situation,
but initially he had been deeply offended, and that simmering rage of
his (always a potential prelude to violence) seemed ever ready to boil
over.

He was in his eighties the last time I saw him, moving slowly on a
cane, and yet he still seemed like one of the two scariest athletes I
had ever covered, men whose baleful glares rose so much more quickly
than their smiles. (The other was former heavyweight boxing champion
Sonny Liston.)

It should be no surprise that Brown’s contributions to advancing
Black equality were of a piece with his complex life. After all, he
often derided civil rights marches as nothing more than “parades”
and his best efforts were directed toward lending a hand to the
economic advancement of Black small businesses and marginalized former
gang members.

What always seemed like a paradoxical conservative streak in him was,
in fact, essential Brown, the mood of a man who believed that Black
progress would never come from protests or demonstrations — they
always seemed like a form of begging to him — but from the power of
money, of muscling your way into the marketplace and buying into the
system. He believed, in other words, in economic power above all else
and, for what must have seemed to him like short-term pragmatic
reasons, would end up allying briefly with two otherwise unlikely
presidential figures — that football ultra-fan
[[link removed]] Richard
Nixon and then former football franchise owner
[[link removed]] Donald
Trump. Brown even went so far as to defend Trump
[[link removed]] when
iconic civil-rights activist Congressman John Lewis called him an
illegitimate president.

FOREBEARS AND DESCENDANTS

Brown’s unyielding rage evoked the earliest celebrity Black athlete
who rattled white folks: Jack Johnson
[[link removed](boxer)]. Although that
boxer’s style was different from Brown’s — living in the Jim
Crow era, he flamboyantly derided his opponents and flaunted white
girlfriends and wives — Johnson also offered a version of
intimidating masculinity that led all too many white men to call for a
“great white hope” to defeat him. It took the self-effacing,
self-destructive Joe Louis
[[link removed]], who
carefully concealed his affairs with white movie stars, to calm their
insecurities and become an acceptable hero for whites.

In recent years, the only athlete who’s come close to Brown’s
steadfast individualism in the face of racism was Colin Kaepernick
[[link removed]],
whose insistence on kneeling during the pledge of allegiance before
National Football League games got a distinctly mixed response
[[link removed]] from
Brown. He liked the young quarterback, he said, but as an American
couldn’t abide the desecration of the flag (another instance of
Brown’s late-in-life cluelessness).

As Zirin aptly put it [[link removed]] in
his biography _Jim Brown: Last Man Standing_
[[link removed]],
his seeming paradoxes were those of a “flawed” figure who was
“heroic but not a hero.”

LEBRON AND BRITTANY

LeBron James, Brown’s current successor as the model of a modern
Black athlete, has proven a far more consistent figure. Already marked
as the future of basketball in high school, he’s orchestrated his
career in a remarkable fashion, moving to better teams and dictating
his own terms in the process. Along the way, he’s also built up his
business interests — always with a core of hometown friends — and
expressed his opinions openly. While at the Miami Heat, he led his
teammates
[[link removed]] in
a protest against the shooting of an unarmed Black teenager, Trayvon
Martin.

Not since the days of Muhammad Ali had such a big star been so willing
to take such a controversial stand. The basketball superstar with whom
LeBron is most often compared as a player, Michael Jordan, was known
for avoiding anything that might harm the sale of his sneaker brand.
LeBron on the other hand even called President Trump a “bum.”

He was indeed courageous, but of course, he could do that. Global
capitalism had his back. It’s even more courageous to take a stand
when true risk is involved. So, perhaps a hopeful harbinger of future
athletic heroes — regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation
— were the members of the predominantly Black Atlanta Dream team in
the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) who, in
2020, wore
[[link removed]] T-shirts endorsing
[[link removed]] Raphael
Warnock, the Black Democratic opponent of Georgia Republican Senator
Kelly Loeffler. It was a gutsy move, since Loeffler, a white woman who
had disparaged the Black Lives Matter movement, just happened to be
the Dream’s co-owner.

It was, in fact, particularly gutsy because WNBA players are among the
most vulnerable in big league sports, playing in a relatively small
league that pays
[[link removed]?] relatively
low salaries — the average is $147,745 while eight players in the
National Basketball Association make $40 million or more annually.
That’s why so many of those women play internationally during their
off-season. It’s why WNBA star Brittney Griner
[[link removed]] was
en route to a Russian team when she was arrested and detained for 10
months after vaporizer cartridges with less than a gram of hash oil
were found in her luggage. (She was finally released in a prisoner
exchange last December.)

Although widely admired as warm and friendly, before her incarceration
in Russia, Griner seemed to have something of Jim Brown in her
personality. She was active with her Phoenix Mercury teammates in
protests against the police murders of unarmed Black people and
insisted that the national anthem should not be played before sporting
events. Since returning from Russia, she’s been active in campaigns
to release others who have been wrongfully detained. A lesbian, Griner
and her partner were arrested in 2015 for assault and disorderly
conduct in a domestic violence case. They subsequently married and
divorced.

She may well be LeBron’s successor in the evolution of the Black
athlete. At the least, her mission statement, as described in a 2019
interview with _People_ magazine, is both humble and complete. She
said: “People tell me I’m going to break the barrier and
trailblaze. I just kind of look at it like, I’m just trying to help
out, I’m just trying to make it not as tough for the next
generation.”

These days, that’s heroic.

Copyright Robert Lipsyte 2023

_Follow TomDispatch on Twitter
[[link removed]] and join us on Facebook
[[link removed]]. Check out the newest Dispatch
Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands
[[link removed]] (the
final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s
novel Every Body Has a Story
[[link removed]], and
Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War
[[link removed]],
as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century:
The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power
[[link removed]], John
Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World
War II
[[link removed]], and
Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from
America’s Wars: The Untold Story
[[link removed]]._

_ROBERT LIPSYTE is a TomDispatch regular
[[link removed]] and a former sports and
city columnist for the New York Times. He is the author, among other
works, of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland
[[link removed]]. See
All Articles [[link removed]]_

 

* jim brown
[[link removed]]
* Brittney Griner
[[link removed]]
* Muhammed Ali
[[link removed]]
* sports
[[link removed]]
* Sports Activism
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]