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James Nathaniel Brown

None Loom Larger than James Nathaniel Brown

So we Clevelanders believed that James, surrounded by the best supporting cast he’s had to date, would make this the year to end our wanderings through the sports wilderness. When we clinched home-court advantage, having compiled the second-best home record in NBA history, we felt like we were one step closer. Orlando dealt us a serious blow by winning the first game of the series, but James revived our hopes with a miraculous shot to win the second game.

We carried on as though we’d won everything, but in reality he’d only saved our bacon for a moment. We had LeBron being Lebron, but they had a buncha guys playing out of their minds, and the Cavs were no match for them in the end. James staved off elimination for us for one game, but ultimately couldn’t do it a second time, and there Cleveland was again, in that all-too-familiar posture of not just defeat, but defeat that feels like the end of the bloody world.

Of course, it’s not the end of the bloody world—at least not yet. The upcoming season will be the last on James’ contract, and people have been wondering for months (in Cleveland, the word would be “scared”) if James will bolt for greener (as in $) pastures. All that will play out in earnest when the season begins this fall. For now, let us consider the last time the city of Cleveland boasted of a black male athlete with superior physical gifts, whose achievements became legendary, and who seamlessly entered the broader world of pop culture and entertainment. And in that process, we shall see just how vast an expanse 45 years really is.

*

Most folks – including many Clevelanders – don’t realize this, but Cleveland can lay claim to several significant mileposts in black sports history:

Pro football had been lily-white per “gentleman’s agreement” from the early ‘30s until 1946, when the Cleveland Browns of the fledgling All-American Football Conference became one of two teams to sign black players (the other was the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, which had just moved out west from Cleveland). Fullback Marion Motley and defensive end Bill Willis were trailblazers at their positions, and helped the Browns dominate the conference in its four years of existence. They continued their stellar play once the franchise joined the NFL in 1950. Both Motley and Willis are members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

We all know who Jackie Robinson was, but not too far behind him was Larry Doby, a 23-year-old outfielder signed by the Cleveland Indians from the Newark Eagles of the Negro National League in the spring of 1947. Doby had an outstanding big league career, but is overshadowed in the history books not only by Robinson but also by Leroy “Satchel” Paige, the 40-something-year-old Negro League pitching legend the Indians signed in 1948.

Beginning in the late ‘40s, Cleveland was a stop on the United Golf Association circuit. The tour was formed by black golfers, who were denied membership in the mainstream Professional Golf Association tour. The UGA was in business until 1960, when the PGA finally admitted blacks. The first black to win a PGA event was Charlie Sifford, in 1959. Sifford retired in the mid-‘70s to become a teaching pro at a public course in Cleveland. He was part of the festivities when the Senior PGA held its 2009 Championship in Cleveland this spring.

John McLendon was the first black coach of a pro sports team, the short-lived Cleveland Pipers. McLendon, a legendary basketball coach at black colleges in the ‘40s and ‘50s (most notably Tennessee State University), moved up the ranks for the Pipers gig in 1959, while the team was still in a semi-pro league. The Pipers turned pro in 1961, joining the brand-new American Basketball League. By then the team was owned by a Cleveland shipping magnate named George Steinbrenner; even back then he’d garnered a rep for, shall we say, mercurial ownership practices: he once traded one of the Pipers in the middle of a game—to the team the Pipers were playing!. McLendon couldn’t deal with such behavior, and left the team (which won the league championship under his successor). McLendon went on to become the first black coach of a predominantly white college team – at Cleveland State University in 1966.

Frank Robinson became the first black manager of a major league baseball team, taking over the Indians in 1975. He had actually joined the team as a player late in 1974, and speculation began almost immediately after the manager was fired at season’s end. Robinson took over with a bang:  on Opening Day 1975, in his first game as player-manager, he hit a home run in his first at-bat. But that was pretty much the end of the history making, as Robinson didn’t have much success with the Indians (no one did in those days), and became the first black manager to be fired in 1977. (As it happened, Doby became the second black manager, for the Chicago White Sox in 1978.)

And throughout the years many black stars have passed through Cleveland – some at the beginning of their careers (Bobby Mitchell, Albert Belle), some towards the end (Nate Thurmond, Bobby Bonds), and some for the duration (Leroy Kelly, Brad Daugherty). But none loom larger, either during their time or years after it, than James Nathaniel Brown. In the 43 seasons since he retired, seven men have amassed more career rushing yards than Jim Brown, and nine have scored more touchdowns. Yet he is considered, virtually without debate, the greatest running back ever, if not the greatest football player at any position.

Jim Brown All American

Director: Spike Lee

Cast: Art Modell, Walter Beach

(US DVD: 24 Aug 2004)

 Amazon

Brown, an intimidating package of size, raw strength and speed the likes of which had never been seen before, excelled at four sports at Syracuse University (football, basketball, track and lacrosse). He was drafted by the Browns in 1957, just after their glorious 10-year run of championship success (10 straight division titles, seven league titles) at the franchise’s onset, and just before pro football started to register on the national consciousness.

He fit right in with the rough-and-tumble nature of the game back then, and proceeded to dominate it. He could run over defenders, around them or away from them – and often did all three on the same play. Rarely did one player alone tackle him. His brutal confrontations with hapless defenders still elicit awe on highlight reels. In an era where medical support for players was far from today’s sophistication, he never missed a game in nine years, dishing out far more punishment than he ever seemed to receive.

Brown helped his team reach that fabled ‘64 championship game, in which the Browns upset the Baltimore Colts 27-0. He helped the Browns get to the title game the next season, and the franchise seemed poised for another run of success. But during the 1966 preseason, Brown was off shooting a movie in London, and was not in training camp with his teammates. The team’s ownership called him on it, basically ordering him back to Cleveland or threatening to discipline him. Brown called their bluff, opting to retire immediately rather than to be ordered around like chattel (a theme linking all the phases of his life).

Thus did one of the greatest careers in pro sports, and possibly the greatest of any Cleveland player in any sport, end in the blink of an eye. He may or may not have thought about retiring when he was at his peak, but that’s how things worked out. His career record of 12, 312 rushing yards, amassed in only nine seasons, stood for 22 years.

Brown, who had already completed one movie while still a football player (Rio Conchos, 1964), proceeded to make his name in Hollywood by capitalizing on his image from the field: as one big, strong black man who stood apart from the crowd and took no gruff from no one. That movie he was off shooting turned out to be The Dirty Dozen (1967), one of those war movies that actually is more about the present day than the actual period of the war. Brown plays the resident militant black man on a team of Army renegades in World War II, recruited out of the doghouse to execute an all-but-impossible mission they’re given little chance of surviving.

We’ve seen the formula a thousand times: establish the premise for bringing the archetypical characters together, introduce their individual badass selves, watch them bond (with a nod or two to the moment’s cultural vibe), then set them loose on their mission. Brown acquitted himself well alongside Hollywood veterans including Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine, despite not having to do much more than be a big, black, headstrong outsider with a keen sense for justice, which could easily be argued as typecasting.

His other movie role of note was as a bounty hunter who gets caught up in his target’s mission in 100 Rifles (1969). That movie is less remembered for its plot than for a significant moment in modern film history, Brown’s sex scene with Raquel Welch, who played the feisty leader of a band of renegade Indians. It was the first interracial sex scene in a big-budget Hollywood movie, and while nothing about the act itself would make a 2009 audience blush or squirm, its very happening, a scant two years after the Supreme Court legalized interracial marriages, made it more than a little sensational at the time.

Again, the scene trades on Brown’s uber-black mystique, pairing him up with Welch, the reigning sex goddess – what sparks would fly when Hollywood’s two most fetishized bodies of the late ‘60s started rubbing up against each other?  In some quarters, this was actually seen as racial progress of a sort, in that a black man could have sex in a mainstream movie with a white woman (OK, she’s actually part Bolivian, but few knew that back then) without being characterized as a savage beast.