Rant #3,136: Fight the Power

This past weekend, it was announced that Jim Brown had died.

No, not James Brown the singer, or James Brown the sportscaster.

We are talking about Jimi Brown, the legendary football player, actor and activist who had perhaps one of the most interesting lives of anyone on the planet.

Yes, there was confusion even though the Jim Brown I am talking about here had one of the most interesting life stories of anyone I can think of, and his story was an American one, one that could only happen in this country.

He was born in Georgia and raised by his grandmother while his single mother looked for work in the North, and in the New York suburbs.

At age eight, he moved to Long Island, to Manhasset, as pearly white a Long Island town as there ever was or will be.

The only people of color you saw there were the servants of the rich white people who lived on the estates there.

Brown went to Manhasset High School, and he played every sport that was offered at the school, and he was good at all of them, not just football, but baseball, track and field, basketball, and the game he loved the most and was the best at, lacrosse.

His sports heroics continued on to college, and he chose football over all of the other sports because he believed it was the fastest track to stardom of all of these sports, and when he was drafted by the Cleveland Browns of the NFL, he went on to set every record there was to set, and then after nine seasons, at age 30, right in his prime, he did the unthinkable—

He retired from football, and retired way before his time.

Even if you weren’t a football fan, you knew of his exploits, and realizing that he didn’t need to sacrifice his body any more on the ball field to earn his day’s keep—and much more than that—he went right into the movies as the first black action star.

He eventually made several dozen movies, but his earliest films—including “The Dirty Dozen”—cemented his stardom well beyond what he attained on the football field—and made him more money, too.

During the filming of “100 Rifles,” he explained his departure from football by saying something to the effect of, “I am in a movie with Raquel Welch, I don’t have to earn my money by getting beat up on the football field, so what’s not to like?”

But being the one black on many of his pursuits—whether it was sports or being the only “colored” kid in school—made him want to get more into the burgeoning civil rights scene of the time, and along with the NBA’s Bill Russell, he was one of the first athletes to use their podium to say what they had to say about the racial problems of that time period.

And he continued that pursuit when he became an actor, and he felt that that was his true legacy beyond whatever records he made as a football player.

But in retirement, his legacy became clouded,, and that is probably why he is not held in the highest regard for his work in civil rights as, say, fellow athlete Russell or other high-profile blacks at the time, such as Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte.

Brown had a problem with his treatment of women, and was arrested several times for violence against females.

And what made it worse was that he never apologized for any of it, even serving jail time because he refused to acknowledge this violence.

So while he was fighting for civil rights, he also, apparently, was fighting with the opposite sex, figuratively and literally.

It tarnished his reputation, lessened his legacy, and relegated him to a life of B- and C-movies, never quite reaching the film stardom that he should have attained.

But he never stopped fighting for respect, for himself and others who didn’t have a voice, but he was truly a complicated person to understand.

There is no question that Jim Brown was the greatest football player that ever lived.

But as an overall human being, he was far from an all-star, even with his exploits to make the human playing field level.

R.I.P. Jim Brown, a totally imperfect human being who tried to make the world he lived in a perfect one while battling his own personal demons.