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To this day, any number of people on the street in Manhasset can recite Jimmy Brown's high school athletic record from memory. In three years at Manhasset High, Jim won 13 varsity letters in five sports. In his senior year, he made All-State in football, basketball and track. In football he played both offense and defense, averaged 14.9 yds. per carry; in the final game he personally stopped a last-ditch drive by rival Garden City High—making seven tackles in eleven plays—to assure his team its first unbeaten season in 29 years. In basketball he averaged 38 points a game, broke a scoring record set by Carl Braun, who later played for the pro New York Knicks and Boston Celtics. Jimmy played only one year of high school baseball, but that was enough to prompt an exploratory letter from Casey Stengel, then manager of the New York Yankees. What is more, Jimmy was a B — student, class president, and chief justice of the student court. Ohio State offered him a full four-year athletic scholarship. So did 44 other colleges.
Enemy in the Ranks. Playing it extra cool, he settled on Syracuse University, which not only offered him no scholarship but no encouragement either. A Manhasset attorney who just happened to be an Orange alumnus gave Brown a checking account with enough money to cover his freshman expenses, and Jim expectantly arrived on campus—to meet a decidedly chilly reception. It turned out that a previous Negro athlete had cut a prodigious swath through Syracuse's coed population, and, in his own words, Jimmy remembers himself as being looked on as "an enemy in the ranks—a potential troublemaker and a threat to Caucasian women." Things were not much better around the gym and the practice fields. The freshman basketball coach did not give Brown a starting assignment until the team's eleventh (of 15) game. Syracuse's football coach, Ben Schwartzwalder, was in the process of building a big-time team, but Jimmy did not fit into his backfield plans: he suggested that Brown turn out for end. Jim refused, and at the start of his sophomore season he found himself listed as a fifth-string halfback on the varsity depth chart.
Schwartzwalder, of course, was too good a coach to overlook Brown for long. Before that sophomore year was over, Jimmy was first string in basketball and lacrosse as well as football; he also starred in track and became the first Syracuse athlete since 1939 to win four varsity letters in one year. Syracuse won only five games in Brown's junior year, but the run he made with a Holy Cross punt was a harbinger of things to come. Zigzagging from one sideline to the other, he reversed field three times; he was officially credited with a 55-yd. return, but spectators estimated he actually ran 170 yds. In his senior year, Jimmy gained 986 yds., led the Orangemen to a 7-1 season, the Lambert Trophy as the East's best college team, and a trip to the Cotton Bowl—where he scored 21 points in a 28-27 loss to Texas Christian. He also found time to be the second top scorer in the nation (with 43 goals) in lacrosse.