Ron Brown Still Fits In : Ex-Ram Looks Right at Home Even in Borrowed Shoes

Ron Brown, a Ram wide receiver until he unexpectedly announced his retirement last week, barely had time to catch his breath Sunday after the first race of his latest career, track and field, before reporters surrounded him to ask about his previous one. They wanted to know if he had paid any attention to the National Football League draft.

“A little bit,” he said nonchalantly.

But when one of the reporters mentioned that the Rams had not drafted a wide receiver, Brown corrected him quickly, which is the way he does most things.

“Aaron Cox from Arizona State in the first round,” Brown said.

So maybe Brown, a second-round choice out of Arizona State in 1983, paid more than a little bit of attention to the draft. It was only natural that he should remain interested in his former team even as he was about to begin on what he hopes will be the road to Seoul at the Mt. San Antonio College Relays.

If this adventure does indeed lead him to the 1988 Summer Olympics five months from now, Brown, 27, no doubt will recall that he began it in his socks.

He was supposed to get his shoes from a friend before the start of the 400-meter relay, but the friend was detained. As a result, Brown was standing on the track in his socks until moments before the gun went off, when he borrowed sprinter Emmitt King’s shoes.

King finished last in the 100 meters Sunday, but Brown proved it was not the shoes’ fault. Running the second leg for the Sports Track Club, a team consisting of four former Olympians, he had a lead when he got the baton from Harvey Glance and extended it before he handed off to Calvin Smith. Dwayne Evans ran the final leg for the team, which won easily in 39.09 seconds. That is not a bad time considering the team was put together last Thursday and never even practiced its handoffs.

The team members, however, had met before. Brown also handed off to Smith on the United States’ winning 400 relay team in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Brown earlier finished fourth in the 100 meters, not even a full step behind bronze medalist Ben Johnson. A few days after the Olympics, Brown was in a Ram uniform, not to return to the track for a real meet until Sunday, although he had earned the title as the NFL’s fastest man in a competition against other football players.

“Things were a little chaotic, but I was OK once the gun sounded,” Brown said of his race Sunday. “If the 100 had been following the relay, I would have run that, too. But I wanted to run the relay first to see how my leg speed was. Now that the relay’s over, my adrenaline’s flowing. I wish I had another race to run.”

Someone mentioned that Brown could still volunteer for one of the 1600-meter relay teams.

“I don’t want to run that bad,” Brown said.

Brown said he was not sure he wanted to run at all until last September, when he watched on television as Canada’s Johnson broke the world record with a stunning 9.83 at the World Championships in Rome.

“I knew I needed to get back out there and put my race together,” said Brown, whose best time is a 10.06 that he ran five years ago in Zurich, Switzerland. “I said, ‘OK, this is my turn.’

“I feel strong about coming back to track. I’m not coming back just so that I can be one of the members of the Olympic team. I’m coming back to achieve the status as the fastest man in the world. I’ve been blessed with speed, but I haven’t come close to my peak performance.”

After Brown regained his amateur status from the International Amateur Athletic Federation, track and field’s governing body, he called a press conference last Tuesday to announce his retirement from football. There was media speculation that it was a ploy in his stalled contract negotiations with the Rams.

Brown’s contract, which reportedly paid him $200,000 in 1987, expired at the end of last season. His agent, Jerome Stanley, said the Rams offered Brown a new contract that would have paid him less per year than the old one.

Even before the announcement, Brown said, he had an agreement for a shoe contract with a sports apparel company, L.A. Gear. He said the company has not yet designed the shoe he plans to wear this summer.

“I’m not going to discuss figures,” Brown said. “Just say that I’m very happy with what they’re paying me.”

Asked if he would consider playing football again, Brown said: “I never say never, but it won’t be with the Los Angeles Rams if I come back. I won’t play for what they offered me, and I didn’t expect them to offer me more because they’re pretty set in their ways on that sort of thing.

“I know a lot of people thought I was using track as a negotiating tactic. I think the Rams thought that, too. But my agent told the Rams he hoped they weren’t stupid enough to think we’d be stupid enough to do something like that. I’m serious about this.”

But if Brown does not succeed in track, he believes he can return to a professional sport. He said that no one should be surprised if that sport is baseball.

While in college, during breaks from track workouts, he sometimes took batting practice with the Arizona State team and said he has been working three days a week with Fullerton College Coach Nick Fuscardo. Those are not credentials that will have baseball scouts lining up outside his door, but he said he is serious about that, too.

“I’ve been talking with Tommy Lasorda,” Brown said. “I wonder if he can use a center fielder.”

Only if he brings his own shoes.