Larry Brown, the unlikeliest Washington Redskins star

Larry Brown’s legacy

That Super Bowl may have signaled the beginning of the end for Larry. The Dolphins No-Name Defense, anchored by defensive tackle Manny Fernandez, stopped Brown all day, and the rest of the offense could not pick up the slack. After another solid year in 1973, Brown began a noticeable decline. After all, Jim Brown weighed in at about 230. Larry never topped 200. Five years of heavy workload took its toll. By his final year, the young stud Mike Thomas had taken over, running for more than 1,000 yards. And blocking for him was an idiosyncratic fullback, late of the New York Jets, by the name of Riggins. The changing of the guard was complete.

Larry Brown was instrumental in changing the nature of offensive football in the NFL – something for which he rarely receives proper credit. Since the retirement of Jim Brown in the mid-’60s, the league had been waiting for a new star runner.  Jim Brown’s teammate, Leroy Kelly, emerged as the league’s best in the immediate aftermath. Kelly, another underrated, undersized back, suffered from succeeding the legend. No matter how great he was, he was never going to be Jim Brown. Another back over in Chicago, was also electrifying crowds for a brief spell, but sadly, Gale Sayers’ injuries prevented him from taking his proper place among the all-time greats. From the year Jim retired to the year Larry won POY, the league MVP awards had consistently gone to quarterbacks.

It was supposed to be O. J. Simpson. He was the prototype of the next wave. Tall, fast, with a smile that sold products and launched a movie career before ugliness and horror forever changed his legacy. But in those first years, Simpson was trapped behind an inferior offensive line up in Buffalo and it looked like he might turn out to be another Ray McDonald. Buffalo would get that turned around, but it would take several years.

No, it wasn’t Simpson. It was Larry Brown who began the charge, re-establishing the efficacy of running the ball. Consider this: In 1968, the year before Larry Brown entered the NFL, Baltimore’s Tom Matte finished 10th in the league in rushing with 662 yards. Five years later, in Larry Brown’s MVP and Super Bowl season, the 10th place spot on the rushing list went to Miami’s Mercury Morris – with an even 1,000.  Before Larry Brown, it was common for a single back to hit the 1,000 mark, league-wide. By the time Brown retired, future Hall-of-Famers like Franco Harris, Larry Csonka, and John Riggins were emerging as the new power source of offensive football. They all outweighed Larry by more than thirty pounds.

But no one who watched Larry Brown help resurrect the Redskins franchise in the early ’70s would rate those others above Brown in terms of heart, ferocious competitiveness, or the amazing ability to get more than what seemed to be available. He may not have been as powerful as Walter Payton or as explosive as Marshall Faulk, but he ran kind of like a cross between them. My favorite memory of Brown on the field came in a game against the Jets in the middle of that magical ’72 season. Larry was in the midst of a stretch which would see him score 10 TDs in six games. But the Jets had him bottled up. They held him to under 50 yards on the ground that day. Then, midway through the third quarter, Billy Kilmer tossed a screen pass to Brown out in the flat. 89 yards later, he had scored his TD, as the Redskins pulled away. It was one of those twisting, winding runs that he was so well known for in his prime.

Or was it? I have that memory, but I have not been able to find a tape of the run to confirm it. There is plenty of tape, as in this NFL Films tribute, showing similar runs, and it is possible I am conflating. Larry Brown was always making amazing runs like that. And it leads me to ultimately conclude that it really doesn’t matter if my childhood memory is picture perfect. What we remember more about those heroes of our youth are the feelings they inspired. The pride and the anguish. The lessons of achievement. I loved watching Larry Brown run with the football because it made me feel like I could run with the football. I anguished when he was hobbled and reduced through injury toward the end, because I felt hobbled.

Truth be told, Larry was not the best running back of all time. But he was my first football love. My first hero. The fact that he was an undersized blocking back from a nothing college program who just happened to rise for a while to pinnacle of the National Football League – the fact that he was so very unlikely – that just makes it all the more special.