MAKING AND SELLING AMERICA’S FAVORITE SPORT, MICHAEL ORIARD

Professional football became Americans’ favorite spectator
sport in the 1960s. It was a decade of great players (as is every decade):
Johnny Unitas and Sonny Jurgensen, Lenny Moore and Gayle Sayers, Deacon
Jones and Dick Butkus, John Mackey and Raymond Berry. Nearly the entire
starting lineup of the Green Bay Packers—Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, Jim
Taylor, Boyd Dowler, Max McGee, Jerry Kramer, Fuzzy Thurston, Jim Ringo,
Forrest Gregg, Ron Kramer, Willie Davis, Henry Jordan, Ray Nitschke, Herb
Adderley, Willie Wood—became household names. Without question, the
greatest of them all was Jim Brown, one of the nfl’s few truly transcendent
players from any era. In just nine seasons Brown rushed for 12,312 yards,
averaging 5.2 yards per carry and leading the league eight times. He was
Rookie of the Year, then league mvp four times; he played in nine Pro Bowls
and missed not a single game—then walked away after the 1965 season, at
age 30, still in his prime but with nothing left to prove. Few stars in any sport
have been so unfettered by their own stardom. Among other interests, Brown
embraced his role as a black man in a barely integrated sport, as few African
American professional athletes of his generation did, at a time when such
actions provoked more anger and resentment than respect. On the field,
Brown was an astonishing fusion of speed, power, and agility, but no one
player, no matter how good, can guarantee championships in pro football.
Brown and Cleveland were perennial runners-up,a

winning just one title, in
1964, an interruption in the run of the Green Bay Packers through the 1960s.