For this generation, Tom Brady is the GOAT. Best Of All Time quarterback.
Jim Brown, who passed away on Thursday at 87, is the GOAT of all GOATS.
Best Of All Time football player.
He was faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, in a position to leap tall buildings in a single certain. Superman led the Browns, who’ve never won a Super Bowl, to the 1964 NFL Championship, their last championship, over the Baltimore Colts.
“When the query comes up the best running back of all time, there’s never an argument,” former Giants GM Ernie Accorsi told The Post. “You’re gonna hear a discussion on the best quarterback that ever played, despite the fact that Brady won seven titles. You continue to have individuals who will say Otto Graham or Joe Montana or Johnny Unitas. But there’s never argument or dispute between fans or football people or anyone on the subject of who’s the best running back. When people have asked me over time, I just say, ‘We’ll look, let’s take Jim Brown and take him out of the discussion, OK?’ Because there’s no sense in even discussing anybody else.”
The defensive GOAT of GOATs is Lawrence Taylor. He ranks second in my book to Jim Brown.
“I actually have trouble like with offense and defense,” Accorsi said. “Because I feel Lawrence Taylor’s the best defensive player I ever saw. And Brown’s the best offensive player I ever saw. However it’s hard to check anyone with a defensive player because there’s two-platoon football.
“But I wouldn’t argue that, either. There was no one like him.”
Brown’s personal wars with Giants linebacker Sam Huff were legendary. Giants co-owner John Mara was a young boy when Brown was Public Enemy No. 1 for his late father Wellington’s Giants.
“I feel he all the time felt that the Huff-Jim Brown rivalry was nearly as good as there was within the National Football League during those years, and it was pretty fierce,” Mara told The Post. “Each one among them won their share. That’s who we needed to beat with the intention to get to the NFL Championship game.”
Mara, 68, recalls being on the Giants sidelines for a few of Huff versus Brown.
“I remember considering that it was just so violent and so physical in a number of the hits that they placed on one another, that made an impression on me as a child of course,” Mara said.
The late Huff was quoted as saying:
“You grab hold, then you definately hang on and wait for help.”
“Whenever you hit that guy, he lunges like a bull and sometimes he lunges right out of the tackle.”
“He was smart. He’d psyche you. I’d hit him and hit him and he’d rise up, pat me on the back and say, ‘That was a pleasant tackle, big Sam.’ ”
Brown would all the time rise up slowly. For nine years. During which he never missed a game. “You’d think that he was hurt,” Accorsi said. “That was his way of preserving his strength. I never saw him react to anybody on the sphere demonstratively. He just walked back to the huddle.”
Jim Brown was one among the young stars who helped popularize the NFL when the tv era arrived.
“Well to start with, he was 230 kilos,” Accorsi said. “He never missed a game. He played every play. You had a halfback and a fullback, however the fullback was principally a running back, and what he had, besides incredible stamina and endurance, he had the facility of a [Bronko] Nagurski-type fullback however the style and the speed and the flexibility to elude or a halfback. He had all of it.
“There just was no one like him.”
Mara: “Jim Brown was unique. He was just such a violent runner and such a talented player. … And let’s not forget he was probably one among the best lacrosse players [at Manhasset High School and Syracuse] as well.”
Brown’s quarterback in 1964 was Frank Ryan. “He never played with a Hall of Fame quarterback,” Accorsi said.
Accorsi won’t ever forget the primary time he saw No. 32 play at Baltimore Memorial Stadium.
“You might never get tickets to Colt games within the late ’50s — I got two tickets through a friend to the November 1st, 1959 Browns-Colts game,” Accorsi said. “The Browns beat the Colts 38-31 — Jim Brown scored five touchdowns. He took a screen pass for 70 yards, ran a draw for 25 yards … every way you would rating he scored. And the interesting thing about it, Unitas had the largest yardage day of his life, [397] yards.”
Brown (12,312 rushing yards, 5.2-yard average, 106 TDs) played with the fashion of a proud black man who refused to let the injustice of inequality stop him. “I used to be never gonna let anybody make me feel that I used to be not top shelf,” Brown said once.
He went out on top on the age of 29 following the 1965 season because he refused exit every other way. After which carried the ball as a civil rights activist when Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight crown for refusing induction into the Army and worked to assist curb gang violence in Los Angeles.
That anger also reared its ugly head in the shape of violence against women — meaning that the right football player was the imperfect man.
He retired when he did partly because a movie actor profession appealed to him, and then-owner Art Modell had threatened to high-quality him for missing training camp. “I need more mental stimulation than I’d have playing football,” Brown told Sports Illustrated. “I need to have a hand within the struggle that’s happening in our country, and I actually have the chance to do this now. I may not a yr from now.”
Across the years, only Earl Campbell and Derrick Henry have reminded Accorsi of Jim Brown.
“But there was no one like him,” Accorsi said.
The GOAT of all GOATs. R.I.P.
