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If all else fails, there is psychology: go limp, play dead; maybe the defender will let go before you hit the ground. If not, it may at least lull the defense (and give the fans a fright) to see Jimmy lying there for endless seconds like an empty pillowcase, then slowly—ever so slowly—drag himself to his feet and shuffle back to the huddle. Imagine everybody's surprise when, on the very next play, he comes cracking right back through the line—knees churning, forearm swinging as though nothing whatever had happened. And to think he once turned down a $150,000 pro boxing offer by saying: "I don't like to hurt people."
Sweet Sue & St. Simons. Practically everybody who has ever come into contact with Jim Brown—on or off the field—has taken a fling at speculating on what makes Jimmy run. "Maybe it's inner frustration," suggests the Browns' owner Art Modell. "But no, Jim has too much talent to be frustrated." Brown himself shrugs: "I play the best I know how because I am a man." He is that, and he has been for as long as he can remember—because he has had to be. His father, a sometime prizefighter and golf caddy, ofttime gambler and good-time Charlie named Swinton ("Sweet Sue") Brown, lives somewhere in Hicksville, N.Y. That is all Jim knows or cares to; he has never seen much of Sweet Sue.
Brown was born on St. Simons Island, one of a string of sleepy islets that stretch along 100 miles of the Georgia coastline, just a stone's throw away from the rich white resort of Sea Island. His mother went North when Jim was two to take a servant's job on Long Island, leaving him behind with his great-grandmother. His enduring recollections of St. Simons are bittersweet: crabbing, digging for buried treasure, rock fights with white boys, a restricted beach, a two-room segregated schoolhouse.
When Jim was seven, he was handed a box lunch and packed off by train to join his mother. The town of Manhasset, N.Y., has not been the same since. At eleven, Jim hauled off and socked a seventh-grade classmate who called him a "dirty nigger" during a basketball game. Recalls his coach, Jay Stranahan: "About five days later, I got a call from the other kid's mother. She said she didn't particularly agree with her son's sentiments, but she wondered how another boy her son's age could hit him so hard that he would be laid up in bed for a whole week." The answer to that quickly became obvious. "When Jim was 13," says John Peploe, a former Nassau County policeman who coached Manhasset's Police Boys Club team, "he played an unbelievable game of baseball. He would pitch a no-hitter and knock out a few triples and homers himself. One day he came to me and said he didn't particularly like the game. There wasn't much to it, he said."