Jim Brown

    Many sports have their great players from years ago in consideration for the greatest ever but usually, as time goes by it weakens the case for the athlete of the past as fewer and fewer living fans have seen them play.

After all, how could someone of an era without the modern advantages of nutrition, training, and specialization along with the athlete being naturally larger over time compete against the more modern stars?

In football, that's a different story as two players from the past are almost always in the conversation and often one or the other is rated first.

Jerry Rice is almost universally regarded as the greatest wide receiver ever and occasionally receives mention as the greatest ever but Jim Brown played his final snap almost sixty years ago and he's still ranked as the top runner ever with the best player period often following the first compliment.

Because Jim Brown was different.

His size and speed would have made him a star in today's game rather than a player that wouldn't be able to compete against bigger and faster opponents and maybe some of his statistics would be mildly affected (by average) his total numbers would increase as Brown played four of his nine seasons in the twelve game era with the remaining five years of the fourteen game variety.

If you take Brown's yards per game (104 averaged for his career) and add twenty-six games (if Brown played a sixteen-game season and added over a season and a half to his career) at his career average (no more, no less) Brown would add 2,704 yards to his total, which would then move him to 15,016 yards and leap him from eleventh overall to fifth.

That's only at his career average over sixteen games and nine seasons.

The players ahead of him in total yards played more games- Emmitt Smith (fifteen seasons 81.2 yards average per game), Walter Payton (thirteen,88.0), Frank Gore (sixteen, 66.4), and Barry Sanders (ten, 99.8).

Only Sanders is close to Brown, playing one more season and close in yards per game (104-99.8), so it's pretty easy to see that at minimum, Jim Brown is the greatest running back in history and with the possible exception of Jerry Rice, the best offensive player in history.

Brown is the only player in NFL history to average over one hundred yards a game for his career.

Jim Brown could run over people and sprint past defenders and he played in an era where defenders could literally do almost anything that they wished to drop a ballcarrier to the ground, which is why Brown adapted a slow manner of rising after a tackle with his reasoning being that if he got up the same way every time, defenders would never know when Brown was hurt or stunned.

Brown planned on playing in 1966 (which would have given him fourteen of those twenty-six games mentioned earlier) but he was co-starring in the classic film "The Dirty Dozen" and filming in Europe was running behind schedule, so Brown notified the Browns that he would be in shape but would miss some of the Browns training camp.

Owner Art Modell said Brown would be fined as any other player would, which resulted in Brown announcing his retirement, and robbing the Browns, who had lost in the 1965 NFL title game to Green Bay, of their greatest player in a season that would end with the first Super Bowl.

In a career filled with bluster and blunders, only the possible exception of moving the franchise to Baltimore would be the biggest error for Art Modell than essentially backing Jim Brown into a corner and losing him to retirement.

Jim Brown wouldn't become a star of the highest status in Hollywood but he did carve out a niche of his own in films such as The Split, Ice Station Zebra, Riot, and most notably 100 Rifles where Brown was at the top of the billing over both Raquel Welch and Burt Reynolds, where Brown and Welch famously would have the first inter-racial love scene in a Hollywood film.

Brown's leading man days ended in the seventies but he would have plenty of television work as a guest star in shows such as CHIPS, The A-Team, and Knight Rider in the eighties.

Brown's biggest role for me as "Fireball", a blowtorch-toting hunter in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film "The Running Man".

Brown was active in the civil rights movement as an athlete and was one of the athletes involved in the famous civil rights summit that provided the famous photo with arguably more greatest athletes in one photo ever with Brown, the then-Lew Alcindor, Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell, and several others.

Brown's foundation the "Amer-I-Can" is credited with the Watts truce that saw the largest Los Angeles street gangs come to a truce after several years of violence between these four gangs.

Amer-I-Can was established to help gang members adapt to life away from gangs by teaching skills to help with employment and helping them avoid a return to the gangs.

Brown teased a return to the NFL at the age of 48, resulting in a famous Sports Illustrated cover with Brown in a Raiders uniform because it appeared that Franco Harris was going to break his rushing record and Brown hated Harris's style of running, which avoided contact and saw Harris step out of bounds often before being hit.

Brown would challenge Harris to a forty-yard dash that saw Harris pulling away from Brown until late in the race when Brown pulled a hamstring which assured the result and ended any serious thoughts (as if that was happening anyway) of a return to the league.

Jim Brown is a member of three Hall of Fames- college football, pro football, and lacrosse, which is reputed to be Brown's best sport and some talk of him as an all-time great in that sport.

Brown played football, basketball, and lacrosse at Syracuse and a case can be made for Brown deserving of the 1956 Heisman Trophy (he finished fifth in the voting) that was won by Paul Hornung of Notre Dame, who threw thirteen interceptions on a 2-8 team.

Jim Brown did have his off-the-field issues with various assault and domestic violence charges against him but most of the major charges against him would either be dropped or found not guilty.

Brown was found guilty of choking a golf partner in 1975 on a misdemeanor charge resulting in a fine and one day in jail and of vandalism in 1999 for smashing his wife's car with a shovel, Brown would serve community service, pay a small fine, and go to counseling after being found guilty.

None of those legal cases take away from Jim Brown's performance on the field, which was exemplary, but they do show that even people that can do good for their community away from their profession may have their dark side and are as imperfect as we all are.

On the field, Jim Brown is the best running back ever to tote a football and perhaps even the greatest player to ever play the game.

Nothing is going to change that anytime soon.