The greatest athlete Ive ever seen
22 August 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I happened to catch a documentary this past week on the great Jim Brown and his work with gangs, prison inmates and the permanent underclass. It struck a resonant chord in my brain and I broke out my Spike Lee video on Brown and his athletic accomplishments. Now 68, Brown still stands tall and still casts an imposing figure. I met him a decade ago when he was the color man for the original Gracie-era Ultimate Fighting Championships and I was reporting on the fights for different magazines. I was struck by how freaking big he was: taller than Id imagined and wide-shouldered past my considerable expectations, he was friendly and open. I have long believed that Jim Brown was the most genetically gifted athlete of this century. Born on a small island off the coast of Georgia, he moved to upstate New York at a young age. In high school he played baseball, basketball, lacrosse, ran track and played football. He was an athletic prodigy from age 14 and eventually went on to play college football for Syracuse. Drafted by Paul Browns Cleveland Browns in the late 50s he shattered every professional record for running backs. His statistics are staggering. At his peak he stood six foot three and weighed 231. He had a good work ethic but never cross-trained in the modern sense of the word. He simply strode onto the field and began playing. Regardless the sport, he excelled. In addition to great power and size, he possessed terrific hand-eye coordination and cat-like reflexes.
He had the physique of a professional bodybuilder though he never lifted weights in his life. Physically he was the complete package: low body fat (9% in my professional opinion based on shirtless photos of him in training camp in 1966) combined with real size and power, 18-inch arms, 50-inch chest, 27 to 28 inch thighs Jim weighed 230 at a time when offensive guards weighed 230. More than just a body, Brown had incredible balance: he could take a blow full on and still maintain his feet only Baltimore tight end John Mackey, Earl Campbell and the great Walter Payton (405-pound bench press weighing 205) ever exhibited Browns degree of agile balance. This internal gyroscopic ability is a genetic gift: there is no drill or athletic practice that can appreciably improve balance. Brown was the greatest lacrosse player to ever set foot on the field and was unstoppable. Lesser known was the fact that he could likely have won the Olympic Gold medal in the decathlon had he decided to forego football. Courted by track coaches, he had run a 9.7 hundred yard dash, thrown the 16-pound shot 50-plus feet without any formal training and demonstrated strong hurdle, long jump and discus performance. Had he chosen this path he would have presented formidable competition to decathlon world dominators CK Yang and Rafer Johnson. Interestingly, another all-time great genetic wonder, Wilt Chamberlain, was in a similar situation as a high jumper. Coaches felt strongly that had Stilt taken a solid year to concentrate on the high jump he could have added 6-8 inches to his 71 best leap. Russian superstar Valery Brumel would have had the competition in Wilt that Ralph Boston never quite presented.
Jim Brown never lifted weights and the brain spins at what could have been had he been put on a rudimentary program. A bigger, stronger, faster 26-year old Jim Brown is the stuff of nightmaresbut he already was a nightmare without any weight training. In his peak earning year he made $18,000 and quit football when Art Modell refused to give him a raise after winning his sixth rushing title. Modell later called this, The biggest mistake of my life. Brown left professional athletics at age 28, on top of his game. He established a single season rushing record that stood for a decade (1,800-plus yards) and when it was exceeded it was done in a season now two games longer. He averaged 5.5 yards for his entire career, a mark still not exceeded, and incredibly, he never missed a single game on account of injury. As Leroy Kelly once quipped, After God made Jim Brown he shattered the mold into a million pieces and said, never again. Weve not seen his like since and I doubt that we will at least not until the looming nightmare of genetic engineering for athletics becomes reality and it will. Every time I see some overpaid superstar being touted as the greatest of all time, I break out the Jim Brown benchmark and watch as the latest/greatest shrinks into comparative nothingness when stacked alongside Gods greatest physical handiwork.
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