Playing for the Browns from 1957 to 1965 after earning all-American honors at Syracuse University in football and lacrosse, Brown helped take Cleveland to the 1964 National Football League championship.
In any game, he dragged defenders when he wasn’t running over them or flattening them with a stiff arm. He eluded them with his footwork when he wasn’t sweeping around ends and outrunning them. He never missed a game, piercing defensive lines in 118 consecutive regular-season games, though he played one year with a broken toe and another with a sprained wrist.
“All you can do is grab, hold, hang on and wait for help,” Sam Huff, the Hall of Fame middle linebacker for the Giants and the Washington team now known as the Commanders, once told Time magazine.
Brown was voted football’s greatest player of the 20th century by a six-member panel of experts assembled by The Associated Press in 1999. A panel of 85 experts selected by NFL Films in 2010 placed him No. 2 all time behind the wide receiver Jerry Rice of the San Francisco 49ers.
He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1971, the Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 1984 and the College Football Hall of Fame in 1995.
He retired in 1966…
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Handsome with a magnificent physique — he was a chiseled 6 feet 2 inches and 230 pounds — Brown appeared in many movies and was sometimes cited as a Black Superman for his cinematic adventures.
“Although the range of emotion Brown displayed onscreen was no wider than a mail slot, he never embarrassed himself, never played to a demeaning stereotype of the comic patsy,” James Wolcott wrote in The New York Review of Books in his review of Dave Zirin’s 2018 biography, “Jim Brown: Last Man Standing.” He called Brown “a rugged chassis for a more self-assertive figure, the Black uberman.”
One of Brown’s best-remembered roles was in “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), in which he played one of 12 convicts assembled by the Army for a near-suicide mission to kill high-ranking German officers at a French chateau in advance of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. He next played a Marine captain in the Cold War thriller “Ice Station Zebra” (1968).
IMDB. He was also a prominent civil rights activist.
Martin Amis, British novelist.
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Mr. Amis’s misanthropic wit made his voice at times reminiscent of that of his father, Kingsley Amis. Kingsley, who died in 1995, was one of the British working- and middle-class novelists of the 1950s known as the Angry Young Men and became famous with the success of his comic masterpiece “Lucky Jim” (1954).
Father and son were close, but they disagreed about much. Kingsley Amis drifted to the right with the rise of Margaret Thatcher; he once publicly referred to his son’s left-leaning political opinions as “howling nonsense.”
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Mr. Amis’s talent was undeniable: He was the most dazzling stylist in postwar British fiction. So were his swagger and Byronic good looks. He had well-chronicled involvements with some of the most watched young women of his era. He wore, according to media reports, velvet jackets, Cuban-heel boots, bespoke shirts. He stared balefully into paparazzi lenses.
His raucous lunches with friends and fellow writers like Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Clive James, James Fenton and Mr. Hitchens were written up in the press and made other writers feel that they were on the outside looking in. He seemed to be having more fun than other people. His detractors considered him less a bad boy than a spoiled brat.
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Jim Brown was a bit before my time as far as watching play football live, but I watched a lot of his films playing, and he was just a force on the field. I also watched some of his movies, which I can still find on occasion, on my library feed.
I was a freshman in high school while a senior running back was the same kind of running back. We scrimmaged them in practice once, and I tackled him, with a perfect tackle, shoulder right in his midsection, arms around him. I ended up on my back staring at the sky, wondering what happened. I might have had footprints on my chest, I don’t know.
The man who did that to me ended up doing quite well in his career. He went into sports journalism, and I think his team won an Emmy. He was responsible for coming up with the idea and technology of putting colored line on the field of play for a first down, on television for football games.
The last I heard, he was a VP at ESPN, but he may have retired by now. I know that he was a very strong ambassador for minority achievement in education and such. In fact, his entire family was full of high achievers, with a sister who was a doctor, I think an engineer, and other well educated people. His mom and dad were ordinary working people who stressed education.
One of the girls helped me to learn to play flute, while I was in band. I think that she went on to become an RN, working in one of the big hospitals in the east.