(8 of 10)
Going into its final game against Army, Syracuse's lacrosse team was undefeated—and, as luck would have it, there was a track meet with Colgate scheduled for the same day. Track Coach Bob Grieve persuaded Lacrosse Coach Roy Simmons to lend him Brown for one event: the high jump. Figuring that Jim would only have to jump three or four times (Grieve had assured him that the Colgate man could only clear 5 ft.), Simmons said O.K. Brown won on the high jump all right. But he was having too much fun to quit. He entered the discus throw, won that, and placed second in the javelin before Simmons dragged him away. In the track meet, Syracuse beat Colgate by 13 points—the exact number Jim had scored. In lacrosse, Syracuse beat Army 8-6; Brown scored one goal, was credited with three assists.
Another Man Named Brown. When he graduated in 1957, Jim was All-America in both lacrosse and football, and he had his choice of two professional contracts—one with the football Browns, the other with pro basketball's Syracuse Nationals, who drafted him even though he had not turned out for the college team in his senior year. "He could have made it, too," says Classmate Vincent Cohen, a basketball All-America at Syracuse. But Brown chose football, signed with Cleveland for $15,000—and it was not long before he began to have his regrets. The Browns were the proud personal creation of Coach Paul Brown, and the winningest team in pro football: in ten years they had won seven league championships—four in the old All-America Conference, three in the National Football League.
They would never win another as long as Paul Brown was coach. Moody, irascible, he stubbornly refused to treat his players as pros. "We will be the most amateur team in professional sports," he once told them. "I want you to think of the game first and the money second." He gave lectures on how to dress. He insisted on calling every play from the bench; he tried installing a radio receiver in his quarterback's helmet, and when other teams started tuning in on his broadcasts, he switched to shuttling "messenger guards" back and forth with his orders. "We were just a mechanical club," recalls Jimmy Brown. "We'd run a play and just stand there and wait for the guard to come in with another. Maybe the quarterback's arm had been hit on the last play and was numb, but if a long pass play came in, we had to run a long pass." Still, for five years he obediently followed orders ("If the man tells me to run 50 times, I run 50 times")—and each of those five years he was the No. 1 rusher in the league.