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Then, in 1962, the once all-conquering Browns slumped to a 7-6 record—and for the first time since he entered the N.F.L., Jimmy lost the rushing title, to Green Bay's Jim Taylor. Disgusted, Jimmy and six other players sought out Owner Art Modell, told him they were quitting unless Paul Brown changed his coaching methods. Modell came up with a different solution: he fired Paul Brown and appointed Blanton Collier as head coach. A quiet, methodical technician who tries to figure the exact mathematical probabilities of what opponents will do in any given situation, coaches a six-day week and turns his boys loose on their own on Sundays, Collier was just the tonic that the ailing Browns—and Jimmy Brown—needed. In 1963, Jimmy had the best year of his career, and the team climbed to second place in the Eastern Conference. Last season they fought their way to the top of the league. Jimmy Brown's reward for that was the $10,000, diamond-studded Hickok Belt as 1964's Professional Athlete of the Year.
"Keeping In." Now Jimmy seems to be shooting for still another title: Most Controversial Athlete of the Year. Flashy, arrogant, casually indiscreet, he drives a red Cadillac Eldorado, brags that he owns so many suits that "I might lose one in the cleaners and never miss it." He does not care much for people in general ("I've met three or four beautiful people in my life. The rest all have an angle")—and he does not care what they think of him. "I do what I want to do," he says.
Brown does not smoke or drink. But he has a penchant for "keeping in," as he puts it, with a full cross section of society, and he is as well known to the toughs and prostitutes on Cleveland's Hough Avenue as to the gentle people at charity affairs. He is married and the father of three children, but twice in the last year he has been publicly involved in incidents with other women. Last March in Whitehall, Ohio, a 21-year-old ex-Ohio State coed lodged a complaint that Brown had raped her; the matter was dropped when she refused to press criminal charges. Last June he was charged with assaulting an 18-year-old high school dropout in a Cleveland motel room. That case went to trial and Brown was acquitted.
Obviously, there are several sides to Jimmy Brown. There is the dignified young executive, of whom the Browns' owner Modell keeps insisting: "He has no chip on his shoulder." There is the idol of adoring kids, who patiently signs autographs by the hour and tries to answer each of the 150 letters he gets a week. And there is the militant Negro who is the national chairman and chief benefactor ($12,000 worth) of an activist organization called the Negro Industrial and Economic Union, and says: "I am skeptical of white men, because even the best of them want me to be patient, to follow Martin Luther King's advice and turn the other cheek until God knows when."