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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 4670405, member: 289"] Jim Brown was my first real hero, (after Errol Flynn and George Reeves died - but they were just actors playing roles). The best player in the only sport that mattered to me as a kid was a guy who had played for Syracuse! Somehow it made perfect sense to my little brain. As an adult I realized what an amazing circumstance that was. Jim was the football GOAT at a time when running the football still mattered. Now it's Brady because it's all about passing. Jim was football's Babe Ruth, Wilt Chamberlain or Wayne Gretzky. He brought the game's numbers to a level it had never seen before. Since then, other players have put up Jim Brown numbers but they didn't do it for 9 years in a row - and then quit at the top of his game. If you take the averages of all the great running backs - yards per carry and per game, % of carries that produced touchdowns, etc. - Jim Brown is still #1 across the board. I remember someone arguing with me that Walter Payton was better because he was a better pass receiver. I told him that we were talking about running the ball. He insisted that catching the ball was part of being a running back too. These days he's certainly correct. But I looked up Jim's pass catching numbers and Walter's. Jim caught 262 balls in 118 games for an average of 9.5 yards per catch. Walter caught 492 in 190 games for an average of 9.2. Jim caught 20 TD passes, Walter just 15. Case closed. On top of that, he was a dominant player in any sport he tired. He scored 38 points a game as a high school basketball player. He may have been the greatest lacrosse player ever. Roy Simmons SR., SU's boxing coach when we had a team, said he could have turned Jim into the heavyweight champion. Jim had an opportunity to compete in the decathlon in the Olympics but turned it down to play football for SU, (That was the Year the Olympics was in Melbourne, where the seasons are reversed, so they held them in November: Milt Campbell an Indiana football player who later briefly backed up Jim in Cleveland won it that year). Being a fan of Jim off the field has been harder than being a fan of his on the field. My parents asked me it fit matter to me that my hero was ...brown? I said know and wondered why anyone would ask. They said "Good". I admired his promotion of black capitalism. Why should blacks wait for whites to do nice things for them? I admire his efforts to get kids and inmates out of gangs. I admire his efforts to get other athletes involved in civil rights issue. On the flip side, there are his difficult relations with women, although he was never convicted of any crime. His last marriage appears to have been a success after a rocky start. But there's an awful lot of smoke there to be no fire. Then there was his bizarre support of Donald Trump after being a Barack Obama supporter. I guess it made sense to him. He's been a very problematic hero and you can't ignore either side of the ledger. I could never completely give up on my hero. It became obvious in recent years that we were going to lose Jim in the near future. He was obviously hobbled and weakened by age, (a car crash didn't help). He no longer appeared at events except on videos where he seemed barely able to talk and do as little as possible. His death was likely a relief to his loved ones and should be to us, too. The first and last of the famous 44's. [MEDIA=youtube]z05uHuQPQdg[/MEDIA] [/QUOTE]

Verification: What is a Syracuse fan's favorite color?