Jim Brown: The Fierce Life of an American Hero

(Paperback)

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Description

He intimidated people on and off the football field. He was brutal yet brilliant, narcissistic yet magnanimous, relentless yet unyielding. Most of all, he was the greatest football player of all time. He was Jim Brown.

Jim Brown was an astonishing physical specimen with tremendous skills and intelligence. An athlete who played a number of sports at Syracuse University, he ultimately discovered that it was the violence of football that appealed to him most. The idea of physically dominating other men, surviving ferocious battles on the field against opponents who would just as soon call him a nigger as try to gouge out his eyes fueled an astonishing, record-making NFL career that led to the Hall of Fame. He battled his defenses, sometimes his teammates, and often the Cleveland Browns' legendary head coach Paul Brown.

But Jim Brown had ambitions greater than football. He used his athletic brilliance to launch a movie career, becoming Hollywood's first black action hero, culminating in a scandalous love scene with America's sweetheart Raquel Welch. He leveraged his popularity into helping the NFL's black players and becoming a civil rights activist. Never shy about expressing his opinions, Brown would become the subject of FBI investigations and surveillance throughout parts of his life.

Then there were the women. The patient wife who was essentially a single mother and who endured public humiliation. The girlfriends he ran through and the scandalous accusations of violence made by some of them.

A complex and fascinating story, Jim Brown is a towering biography of a living legend.

Reviews

"Definitive...a fascinating look at a culture in transition...Freeman captures the life of a legend with grace and passion." -- Publishers Weekly

"[Freeman is] an excellent storyteller...what resonates most is Brown's fierce determination to do things his way." -- Sports Illustrated

Author Bio

Mike Freeman is a national columnist for CBS SportsLine.com. Previously, he covered the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, and college sports and was an investigative and enterprise reporter for the New York Times and a columnist for the Florida Times-Union. He has also previously been a sports reporter, features writer, and investigative writer for the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Dallas Morning News. Freeman is also the author of three critically acclaimed books: ESPN: The Uncensored History; Bloody Sundays: Inside the Rough-and-Tumble World of the NFL; and Jim Brown: The Fierce Life of an American Hero.