Jim Brown, one of the greatest professional and college football players of all time, is dead. He was 87.
His wife, Monique, announced Brown’s death on an Instagram on Friday afternoon. He said Brown was at home in Los Angeles on Thursday night.
“He was an activist, an actor and a soccer star for the world,” said the place. “To our family he was a loving and wonderful husband, father and grandfather. Our hearts are broken..”
In 2020, Brown was selected to the NFL 100 full-time team and was also ranked as the No. 1 player. 1 full-time on the 150th list of the College of Football to celebrate the celebrations. In 2002, he was named the greatest football player ever played by Sporting News.
Brown, who was selected in the first round of the 1957 project, played nine seasons for Cleveland Brown (1957-65) and led the league in the precipitation of eight of these years. He fell 12,312 yards and averaged 5.2 yards to carry back throughout his career. He’s been named Pro Bowler every year. He led the Browns to the league championship game three times, winning the title in 1964, and was named MVP three times.
He ran at least 100 yards in 58 of his 118 regulars without missing a game. He drove in seven seasons for more than one.1000 meters, including 5,527 meters in a 12-game season and one.863 in a 14-game season.
Brown also worked for the Black community during the civil rights movement. In June 1967, Brown organized “The Cleveland Summit“, a meeting of the nation’s largest black athletes, including Bill Russell and Lew Alcindor – who later became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar – to support Boxer Muhammad Ali’s fight against service in Vietnam. In the following years, Brown worked for the containment of gang violence in Los Angeles and founded Amer-I-Can in 1988, a program that supports disadvantaged youths and former prisoners in the city.
Brown has also worked to make modern athletes more involved in the black community.
In a statement, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell Brown called him a “talented athlete” who “has become a leader and role model for athletes involved in social initiatives outside their sport.”
“It’s impossible to describe the deep love and gratitude we have for the opportunity to be a little piece of Jim’s incredible life and legacy,” Browns said in a statement. “We mourn his death, but celebrate the infinite light he has brought to the world.
“Our hearts are bound to Jim’s family, the loved ones and all those he met on the way.
Brown retired at the age of 30, at the beginning of his career. He filmed the film “The Dirty Dozen” during the 1966 offseason, and the production went on for a long time because of bad weather. Brown’s owner, Art Model, threatened to suspend Brown’s pay if he didn’t report to the training camp in time. Brown decided to retire and said he wanted to focus on his film career and social issues.
Since his retirement, no Brown’s player has had his number. Carried 32, and a statue of him went outside First Energy Stadium in 2016.
In Brown’s last NFL season, he drove 1544 meters and 17 touchdowns, leading the league in both categories. But he was content to go away at his height. According to his IMDB page, Brown appeared in 55 films or television shows as an actor.
The most remarkable moment in Brown’s acting career could come in the 1969 film “100 Rifles” when he and Raquel Welch had the first interracial love scene in a mainstream film.
Brown also made headlines for issues far from the field. She has a series of legal issues, most of which involve charges of violence against women. According to the Los Angeles Times, Brown was accused in five cases of violence against women, including one in which he was accused of throwing a woman off a second-floor balcony. The charges were dropped when the woman refused to refer Brown to her attacker.
Brown was not convicted in any case until he was sentenced to six months in prison for destroying his wife’s windshield in 1999.
Brown rose to prominence as a prominent athlete in Syracuse. Not only the All-American running back, he starred in basketball, lacrosse and track as well. He averaged 13.1 points in two seasons with Syracuse basketball team. He’s so good at lacrosse, he’s in the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame and some argue he’s one of the greatest lacrosse players ever.
Cleveland took Brown with the sixth pick of the 1957 NFL Draft. He was a direct star, leading the NFL in rushing yards and rushing touchdowns as a rookie, winning the Associated Press’ Most Outstanding Player award his first year. He also won the Most Outstanding Player (re-name MVP award in 1961) in 1958. Brown won his last NFL season MVP as well, in 1965.
Brown is bigger than almost all running back before him, with good speed to match. He was 6-foot-2, 232 pounds, which was almost as big as some of the top offensive lines of his day, with more strength and speed than the defenders would try to knock him down. He finished his career with 5.2 yards per carry. Among retired players, only Marion Motley averaged 5.7 yards per carry better. Brown’s 12,312 rushing yards stood as an NFL record until Walter Payton broke it in 1984. Brown had an NFL record of 126 touchdowns until 1994, when Jerry Rice scored his 127th touchdown.
Brown still holds some records that may never fall. He has eight hasty titles. No other player in NFL history has more than four. He rushed for 104.3 yards per game, and was the only player in NFL history to average more than 100.
The NFL record — and football in general — is just part of Brown’s legacy. More than 50 years after his sudden retirement, we still haven’t seen a runner back like him.