Week 10 – SPORTS – Jim Brown

Born on St. Simons Island on February 17, 1936, Jim Brown would go on to be widely regarded as one of the best professional football players of all time. Brown was a descendent of Tom Floyd, a survivor of the Wanderer, the second-to-last known illegal slave trading ship to land on United States shores. After the Wanderer’s landing in 1857, Tom Floyd became a noted local medicine man and built a home on St. Simons.

Jim Brown lived on St. Simons only until the age of nine, when he and his mother moved to New York. He went on to play football for Syracuse University from 1954 to 1956 and for the Cleveland Browns from 1957 to 1965. Still, he carried memories of his childhood in the South End community with him throughout his life and certainly left an impression on those who had grown up alongside him. In Voices from St. Simons: Personal Narratives of an Island’s Past, edited by Stephen Doster, Jonathan Lorenzo Williams, who served several terms as a Brunswick City Commissioner, recalled his own childhood memories of Brown. Williams recalled noticing Brown’s athleticism even in childhood, when he and Brown were a force to be reckoned with.

Shortly after the conclusion of Jim’s career with the Cleveland Browns in 1965, he visited coastal Georgia. At the same time, Jonathan Lorenzo Williams was coaching football at Brunswick High School. Williams called Brown’s motel and asked for Brown, expecting to be turned away. Instead, says Williams, “he was elated. Man, you could hear him hollering, “Hey, my man!” So we had a good conversation. I told him I was coaching at Brunswick High and that I would like for him to come and talk to my team. He didn’t hesitate. He said, “I’ll be over there tomorrow.”

True to his word, Jim Brown showed up the next day on Brunswick High School’s football field. Williams recalls that his kids were “amazed” by Brown, who “looked like the Hulk coming across the field.” He shared his life story with Williams’s team, including his recent choice to pursue acting over football. “He said, “Well, I just wanted to something else,” Williams recalled. “The challenge I had was someone told me I couldn’t be an actor, so I wanted to prove that I can be an actor.” Even after this career change, Brown was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1971. More recently, at the 2020 College Football Playoff National Championship, he was introduced as “the greatest college football player ever.”