And so the broken-field running continues. Brown left football at the age of 29 with his myth, dignity and body wonderfully intact. All he had to do was switch to certain other games, the rules of which would be determined by the inevitable imagemakers and ad executives, and endless rewards would be waiting. But pride and a tendency “to let my emotions overpower my intellect” made that, and a lot of other things, impossible. The phrase “now defunct” can be applied to his one marriage and most of the ventures he initiated: a minority-businessmen’s group called the Black Economic Union, an independent movie-production company, a program for prison inmates known as Vital Issues. Brown says his track record comes with the territory, which he defines as “somewhere on the outskirts of the establishment.” He says he “just couldn’t do what a Michael Jordan, a Magic Johnson or a Bo Jackson has done–which is to keep smiling and taking the money and then keeping my distance from the black community.”
Brown doesn’t smile much, and he’s no stranger to the heart of Watts. He walks the streets where gang wars rage, looking tall and, thanks to a regimen of racquetball and weight lifting, as tough as ever. “People ask me if I’ve mellowed with age,” he says. “But that to me is a bad word; I hope I never get mellow, only wiser.” As he saunters along in snakeskin boots and a black leather jacket, he shakes hands and invites people to come to his house for a Wednesday night meeting. (“Oh, yeah, we had a big party on Mother’s Day–you should have been there,” he tells one gang member. “We had 250 people up on the deck, and everybody sang to their mom.”) Amer-I-Can is a grab bag of activities–self-esteem classes taught by former gang members, support-group meetings in which members talk about their feelings, job-placement services–aimed primarily at young black males and based on the idea that success depends on “life-management skills.” These include the ability to set reasonable goals and rein in one’s emotions. “A lot of us take such things for granted,” says Brown, “but some people have never been taught things like wearing a tie for a job interview and not beating up the guy next to you on the job over a slight disagreement. Those principles lead, little by little, to breaking the cycle of poverty and despair.”
There is more than a little irony here. Although Brown has gotten along famously with many females–including Gloria Steinem, with whom he claims to have had an affair after she interviewed him for a magazine article–he has also admitted to slapping around some other women. And while “poverty” does not apply to a man who lives where Brown does and drives a more-or-less-mint 1961 Mercedes, he has at times struggled to maintain his lifestyle. Brown never made more than $65,000 a season playing football, and “the ’70s and early ’80s were dead years for me,” he says. He makes a living these days from appearances and from small parts in low-budget shoot-’em-ups destined for release overseas. One recent Friday, he spent the morning planning a benefit for widows of gang members–and the afternoon shooting scenes of make-believe mayhem. “It’s five hours of work and an envelope with a check in it,” he says. “A badly needed check.”
Brown doesn’t see anything odd about his running Amer-I-Can. After all, it was he who began pulling it together a year and a half ago, mostly from pieces of other programs and texts he’d worked with over the years. The Amer-I-Can handbook mixes quotes from Thoreau (“Success is a journey, not a destination”) with the thoughts of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc (“Nothing recedes like success”) and, though Brown admitted in his autobiography that he sometimes drank too much, it also includes a pitch for Alcoholics Anonymous. “I’ve spent so much time working with people that this just evolved spontaneously,” Brown says. “Hey, I’ve done it all. I’ve been to London with the Beatles and the Stones; I’ve had all the women, been in all the Jacuzzis. But the one thing I’ve remained interested in is human development.”
As for his not being a model of financial success in a program that advocates black enterprise, Brown has an answer for that, too: he hopes to make money from Amer-I-Can. These days he is selling the program to state prison officials, school administrators and, of course, the media, with considerable charm and enthusiasm. Amer-I-Can classes are currently taught in 10 California penal institutions. In the next few weeks, Brown also plans to announce the expansion of the program to the Edgecombe Correctional Facility in New York City. More significant money may come from franchising the idea to black activists who will then try to obtain funding for the program in their own communities.
Obviously, unlike some reformers who came before him, Brown has no quarrels with the capitalist system. “This is the greatest country in the world,” he says. “All I’m saying is that people who have no power need to learn how things work, and then simply play by the rules.” The mere suggestion that a leader such as Jesse Jackson might object to mixing profit with social progress brings forth a veiled threat. “Some of those big boys better not get in my face,” Brown says, “because maybe they’re not living the kind of life that they’re preaching about.”
Hypocrisy is not one of Brown’s problems. “All my dirty linen has been out in public for years, and so what?” he says. “They still talk about Chappaquiddick, so I can’t complain about being singled out.” Although he admits his motives are partly financial, he does take phone calls from troubled kids at all hours and get them out of gangs one by one. “These are guys who been in and out of prison so much that people say they’ve been lost forever, hopeless cases,” says Brown. “But I’ve found them to be grateful for the love and acceptance we’ve shown them.” Once or twice a week, young men who used to try to kill each other convene at his house, and throw out words like “fear” and “ashamed” and “grateful” for discussion. “Most of these guys are just looking for a way off the streets,” he says. “But they’re warriors, and so you’ve got to give them something else, something positive, to fight for. That’s where my program comes in.” Then Brown stares out beyond his famous deck and actually smiles. “I just wish they weren’t having a fund-raiser up here Saturday night. I’ve got a lady friend coming in from Jamaica, and that party’s sure to spoil the mood.”
