Miscellaneous for Friday

 A couple of big races were run at Pimlico today.  Tomorrow is the Preakness Stakes.

Pimlico Special:

Black-Eyed Susan Stakes:

____

Perhaps the biggest sports story of the week was the death of football great Jim Brown, who was 87 years old.  He played for the Cleveland Browns, but in the mid-1960s, at his prime, he decided to walk away from sports and went into the movies.  He was quite popular as an actor.  Brown was also a noted civil rights activist. 

There are many sports observers who call Jim Brown the greatest (human) athlete of all time.  He was a champion lacrosse player in his college days, so he excelled in more than one sport.  Noted sports writer  Bert Sugar, who wrote a book in the late 1990s called The 100 Greatest Athletes of All Time, ranked Jim Brown as the greatest of them all, above such stalwarts as Muhammad Ali,  Babe Didriksen Zaharias,  and Jim Thorpe.  

Brown passed away yesterday. Snip:

“I could have played longer. I wanted to play this year, but it was impossible,” he said in 1966, according to Sports Illustrated. “We’re running behind schedule shooting (on the Dirty Dozen set), for one thing. I want more mental stimulation than I would have playing football. I want to have a hand in the struggle that is taking place in our country, and I have the opportunity to do that now. I might not a year from now.”

He added it was the right time to quit football. “You should get out at the top,” he said.

Brown also made his mark as a civil rights activist and by working with inner-city gang members and prison inmates. In June 1967, Brown organized “The Cleveland Summit,” in support of Muhammad Ali, who refused to be drafted for the Vietnam War. Other famous Black athletes attended, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, then known as Lew Alcindor.

“When I was 20, Jim Brown invited me to attend the Cleveland Summit,” Abdul-Jabbar tweeted Friday. “This was my first public support for Muhammad Ali and it was the first of many steps I would take as a civil rights activist. Jim’s dedication to the fight for equal rights was a lifelong effort and something that enabled me to maintain our friendship for over 50 years. The world and I will miss him greatly.”

In 1988, Brown founded the Amer-I-Can program, an organization dedicated to stopping gang violence and helping individuals “take charge of their lives and achieve their full potential.”

As this article and many others noted, Brown had his share of flaws when it came to women especially. He was accused of being an abuser and even a rapist. Not a good legacy in that regard.

________________________________

Speaking of Brown, I came across this article from a media outlet in Syracuse, New York, where Brown attended Syracuse University and made his mark excelling in several sports.

Snip:

Brown was a four-sport star during his time at Syracuse competing in football, men’s basketball, lacrosse and, when called upon, track and field. Here, he delivered an athletic career so comprehensive that he is one of a handful of people who could credibly claim to be the greatest athlete who ever lived.

He was the first of Syracuse’s holy trinity of running backs, along with Ernie Davis and Floyd Little, that are responsible for the number “44″ being retired at the school and included in the school’s phone numbers and zip code.

Sports Illustrated also had a good writeup on this complicated individual.