No Black or White in Life of Brown

Now it makes sense. I understand how one of the most admirable people in the sports world could also be one of the most deplorable. How a man of such strength could succumb to moments of weakness.

All of the answers are there in Spike Lee’s documentary “Jim Brown: All-American.” It’s a complete look at a man who can’t simply be summarized as a football legend. Actor, community leader and activist are among the roles he has played in what feels like three lifetimes.

Brown has impressed me as much as anyone I’ve met. He has a quiet intelligence. He doesn’t need to shout his opinions, he simply lays them out and lets the words and logic carry their own weight. He uses his fame and money for good, reaching out to make things better for those who have it worse. He invites gangsters to be productive members of society.

But his path never stayed on the high ground because of a history of violence toward women. He faced various assault and/or battery charges against women four times between 1965 and 1985--he wasn’t found guilty of any of them. He is serving a six-month sentence in the Ventura County Jail on a misdemeanor vandalism conviction for smashing the windows of his wife’s car during a 1999 argument.

Lee throws the good and the bad into the film, which ran 2 hours 10 minutes in the version that was screened in Los Angeles last week. It will be reedited and shown on HBO in December.

“People are going to make up their own minds no matter what,” Lee said. “But at least the more information you have, the more intelligent assessment you can make of a human being.”

You could almost predict some of the pitfalls that awaited Brown later in life when you learn of his early days. His mother wasn’t around for his childhood in St. Simons Island, Ga., where he was raised by his great-grandmother and grandmother. His father popped into his life only occasionally.

He lived with his mother while he attended Manhasset (N.Y.) High. His high school coach described scenes of Brown sitting in the corner while his mother and father had loud arguments in the living room.

He never saw his parents adhere to the most basic of adult responsibilities--raising their children. His only model of a relationship was dysfunctional.

I also wonder how much of Brown’s persona is a result of the sport he played and the expectations it carries.

The dominant theme running through the documentary is “manhood.”

You see it in the football highlights, where Brown simply refuses to be tackled, as if his pride wouldn’t allow it. You see it in the movie clips, where Brown shoots guns and has his way with women.

Brown is beyond old school. He’s old campus.

“Jim Brown comes from a different era,” Lee said. “A different era of black men, a different era of a black athlete. These were the brothers that had to go through segregation, had to go to different hotels. Jim Crow. The time when a brother could get lynched for just looking at a white woman the wrong way. It was a very different time.

“They don’t make black men like Jim Brown. I’m talking about the mythic ... Jack Johnson. John Henry, the steel-driving man with the hammer in his hand. They ain’t got that.”

If the men have changed, that’s because they adapted to the rules governing them. The rugged stuff isn’t accepted. Smacking a woman just isn’t something that men do anymore.

Looking back on his career, Brown boiled a man’s attitude down to this: “Men deal with physicality. The bottom line with a man is, ‘I can kick your ass.’”

It’s mental as much as it is physical. One teammate recalls an instance of Brown slipping on a patch of ice outside a restaurant and then struggling to stay upright by sheer will, refusing to abide by the laws of gravity.

Former Cleveland Brown Paul Warfield talked about how Brown played the game with “intellect.”

“Jim is a very fierce individualist,” Warfield said in an interview. “He believes in the things he does. There have been times when they’ve been contrary to the norms of society. He has always reveled in the fact that he is more than an individual who will accept his responsibility. I think he has done that.

“There have been some instances that have been unfavorable in which he cannot be supported. But he stands up to be counted, he stands up to whatever he has to face.”

It’s this determination to go down fighting that has Brown in jail now. Once again, the manhood came before all else. He was offered domestic violence counseling, 40 hours of clean-up or 400 hours of community service, but he decided to do the time instead. He told Bob Costas on HBO’s “On the Record” that he turned down the alternatives “Because it’s not just. If I had taken that, it would be the biggest sellout on Earth.”

Brown, through his wife and his attorney, declined to be interviewed for this story.

His circle maintains that there are greater forces and conspiracies at work here.

“It’s a political case,” said Brown’s wife, Monique. “They used it, they used us. They exploited it.”

Bo Taylor, who runs a gang intervention program that has benefited immensely from Brown’s help, said: “Being from the neighborhood, I know guys that don’t go to jail all the time for doing something similar. If it’s going to be vandalism, you don’t just go to jail for vandalism for 4-6 months. First-time offenders never go to jail. But this case was different....

“They’re just utilizing Jim as a tool to get some of their hidden agendas out, so that they can start mass incarcerations. If it happens in the black community and it happens in the white community, will they be doing the same thing?”

Post-Rampart scandal, anything is a fair question. And an outspoken black man will be marked. In the film, Brown holds up the FBI file on him he obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

But how much of Brown’s current plight is an inevitable result of his background and attitude, his own choices?

Sometimes the greatest titans stumble over the debris they scatter through the course of their lives.

Brown hasn’t been able to shake the story that he threw a woman off the balcony of his home in 1968. In a compelling stretch of the documentary, Brown and Eva Marie Bohn-Chin give their versions of that night.

It still isn’t clarified. Brown says she jumped off the balcony to “protect” him as the police were arriving to respond to neighbors’ calls about a loud argument. Bohn-Chin doesn’t specify what happened.

“He came towards me--maybe he wanted to hurt me or whatever --and I found myself in the hospital the next day,” said Bohn-Chin, who suffered a separated shoulder and bruises to her head.

“I was a young, good-looking person who loved life. Why should I jump?”

Why would anybody do something so contrary to what they stand for?

That’s the great mystery of Jim Brown.

Scores of at-risk youths have straightened out their lives because of his Amer-I-Can program, but he couldn’t play the role of father for his own kids.

In the film, his daughter Kim says: “I wanted to be daddy’s little girl ... and he wasn’t there.” His son Kevin can recall his father hugging him once in more than 40 years.

Brown says he didn’t realize his parental inadequacies until he saw the film the first time. He pledges to get it right this time with his new son Aris, who was born in November. But by spending six months in jail while his son is at the age when every day brings growth, he’s missing out on time that can never be recaptured. By the time he is released he will have been incarcerated for two-thirds of his son’s life.

Even at 66, there are still glimmers of hope for Brown, the chance for progress. He finally is making promises not to raise his hand in anger toward anyone. That would make him complete, no more apologies required, no more balancing acts.

Until then, how do you reconcile the two sides of Jim Brown?

“You don’t,” said Rosey Grier, the minister, former football player and Brown’s longtime friend. “That’s a whole person. You have to accept the whole person or reject the whole person. You can’t say, ‘I like this part, I don’t like that part.’ We all make mistakes. It’s not a thing about the good outweighs the bad, or whatever. You’re a complete person. You have human frailties. We all do. What you do, you accept the person that he is. We are told in the Bible not to judge. I am not the judge.”

I thought about the movie’s title again, saw the similarity in both elements: “Jim Brown: All-American.”

If you’re at all patriotic, you learned to live with conflict long ago. We pledge allegiance to a country that stomped on the Indians, included slavery in its original constitution, denied women the right to vote for more than half its existence and, to date, remains the only nation to carry out a nuclear attack. Yet we love it because it offers more freedom and opportunity than any other place on earth, because Americans tend to see the good in people and in our country and hope for the best.

That’s why Lee’s film concludes with the only ending that makes sense, with a former high school teammate, now a reverend, saying a prayer for Jim Brown.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: j.a.adande@latimes.com