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All He Does Is Run. Statistics aside, there is no way to fix Brown's place among the great running backs of history—except to say that he is different. Somebody will always insist that Jim Thorpe or Johnny Blood or Bronko Nagurski or Red Grange or Steve Van Buren was the best runner who ever lived. Thorpe was flamboyant and unpredictable; he could be very good when the notion struck him—or very, very bad; he was always at his best when he had a bet riding on the game. Nagurski was a runaway truck who was lucky to be bigger (at 230 lbs.) than most of the people he had to run over in the 1930s. Grange was a 165-lb. scatback, who never ran over anybody at all. Like Brown, he was accused of being a shirker at blocking: "All Grange can do is run," was the classic comment—to which Bob Zuppke, his coach at Illinois, retorted: "All Galli-Curci can do is sing." Van Buren, "the Flying Dutchman," of Coach Greasy Neale's 1948-49 world championship Philadelphia Eagles, was the first great modern pro running back; a bruising 200-pounder, he could run the 100-yd. dash in 9.8 sec.—and set a career ground-gaining record (5,860 yds.) that Jimmy Brown buries a little deeper every time he pulls on his cleats.
In terms of pure style, the oldtimer whom Brown most resembles is the legendary Johnny Blood, whose real name is John McNally, and whose pro career spanned 15 seasons between 1925 and 1939, when writers could still get away with calling a football field a gridiron. McNally played for the Green Bay Packers and coached the Pittsburgh Steelers; now in his 60s, he spends his time "meditating," and Captain Ahab of Moby Dick is one of his favorite subjects. "Ahab," explains McNally, "had the courage of ignorance, comparable to the courage of a fullback playing his first season of professional football. He hurls himself against the line. But look at him at the age of 30. He will not be hitting the line with quite the same abandon. For the courage of ignorance, he has substituted the restraint, the caution of a little wisdom."
Which is the perfect way to describe Jimmy Brown. "At Syracuse," says Jimmy, "I was a slasher, a leveler. When I became a pro, I really became conscious of technique. I had to. In college you're running against a 230-lb. defense. But the pros are 260-pounders, and you're not going to run over them very often." By his own definition, Brown is an unorthodox runner: rather than depend on a play working out the way the diagram says it should, he relies on his instinct to sense the spot where a hole is about to open, on his reflexes and agility to get him there in time.