Getting to know real Jerome Brown

A young writer's need to connect to an icon of his youth leads to that man's father.

By DAVID MURPHY, Times Staff Writer
Published December 31, 2007

Eagles defensive lineman Jerome Brown moves against the Cardinals in 1990. Two years later, he'd be gone.
	[Getty Images (1990)]

ADVERTISEMENT [Maurice Rivenbark | Times] "It still knocks me for a loop. It affects me," says Willie Brown Jr., visiting his son's grave at Fort Taylor cemetery this month. [Maurice Rivenbark | Times] In his wallet, Willie Brown carries photos of Jerome with Willie's mother, Cora Pope Evans, and as a Philadelphia Eagles player. [Maurice Rivenbark | Times] Along Hale Avenue in Brooksville, a cross marks the place where Jerome Brown and nephew Gus Brown died in a crash on June 25, 1992. "The Lord's gonna do what he wants to do," says Willie Brown. "There's a time for everything. That was his time." [Times files (1982)] The early talent was honed at Hernando High, where Jerome waits for a game against Citrus High in 1982. [Maurice Rivenbark | Times] Willie Brown, driving a van from the Jerome Brown Community Center, wears his son's image on his shirt.

BROOKSVILLE

I had just completed third grade at Barrett Elementary Center in northeastern Pennsylvania when Jerome Brown died.

I do not remember where I was on June 25, 1992, when I heard the news, but I recall the feeling that overcame me. Not grief, not even confusion. It was the realization that for all the trading cards, videotapes and magazines adorned with their images, professional football players are human beings. And when they aren't sacking quarterbacks or catching passes or winning championships, they do ordinary things, like drive cars and visit families and, yes, die.

I told all of that to Willie Brown the other day as we sat in the community center that bears his son's name. I explained the mark that his son, his namesake, Willie Jerome Brown III, had on my childhood. I'm not sure he understood.

The Jerome Brown I knew wasn't composed of flesh and blood. He was composed of pixels, and I often had to angle the television antennae just right to catch a glimpse of him. Some days, you had to strain just to see No. 99 through the static.

My family didn't have cable TV when I was growing up. That's something I have in common with Willie Brown. Here's another: Both of our fathers were pastors.

Willie's father, Willie Sr., lived to be 99 years old. He passed away in 2005, 13 years to the month after 27-year-old Jerome flipped a car on Hale Avenue and brought a screeching halt to a Pro Bowl career and two beautiful lives.

Willie Sr. founded the Josephine Street Church of the Living God in Brooksville. Earlier, he founded the Pasco Station Church of the Living God in San Antonio. He also was a sawyer in Masaryktown, where he raised his 10 children in a house beneath towering oaks.

Willie Jr., now 76, was one of those children. At an early age, he worked with his father at the sawmill, making 15 to 20 cents a day. This was the 1940s. Today, Russo's Hardware stands on the site.

"When I moved to Brooksville, Daddy wasn't making but a dollar and a half a day," Willie said as we drove past the site, "so I had to go to work."

When I had arrived at the Jerome Brown Community Center earlier that morning, program director JoAnn Munford casually asked why I had picked today to sit down with Mr. Brown. In truth, I didn't have a good answer.

The Florida High School Athletic Association had recently compiled a list of the top 100 high school football players in the history of the state. Naturally, Jerome, who dominated from 1979 to 1982 at Hernando High, was mentioned.

But I had wanted to meet Willie long before I saw that list.

Eagles of my youth

I grew up on top of a mountain in northeastern Pennsylvania, where the closest neighbor was 7 miles away. My father grew up in suburban Philadelphia and thus performed the patriarchal duty of passing his love of the Eagles on to his first-born son.

The first game I remember was a 21-7 loss to the Los Angeles Rams in a 1989 playoff game. We were living in suburban Philadelphia, in a parsonage outside the Methodist church where my father served as a minister.

That day, two Eagles defensive linemen combined for 13 tackles and two sacks. One was future Hall of Famer Reggie White. The other was Jerome Brown.

In the 15 years since Jerome died, the Eagles' roster has seen countless incarnations. But the Eagles of the late 1980s and early '90s were the foundation of my childhood.

Every autumn Sunday was the same: church in the morning, a half-hour drive home, and a sprint through the crisp air from the car to the front door and into the living room to position the antennae to catch the signal beaming up from Philadelphia. On weeks when God answered my prayers to keep the sermon short, I made it before kickoff.

Most weeks were good for the Eagles. They had a winning record in every season except Jerome's first, going 42-23 from 1988-91. But they also were a team of unfulfilled promise, earning the cursed designation of one of the best squads never to win the Super Bowl.

The Eagles lost their first playoff game in 1989 and 1990 and then missed the postseason in 1991, despite a defense that ranked first in the league. They won their regular-season finale that year, a 24-22 nail-biter against the Washington Redskins that my father and I listened to on the radio while riding in a van.

It was the last regular-season game Jerome Brown would play.

Jerome's last game was a month later, at the Pro Bowl in Hawaii. It was the second straight year that Brown was chosen for the NFL's all-star game. Willie and his wife, Annie Bell, watched him play.

They traveled often to games. Brown had starred for four seasons at the University of Miami, less than five hours from Hernando High's Tom Fisher Stadium.

At the end of the 1987 season, the Hurricanes were ranked No. 1 and were playing Penn State in the Fiesta Bowl for the national championship. Miami was heavily favored, but Willie and Annie Bell didn't have the money for plane tickets and hotel rooms in Arizona. Brown, a senior, was months away from NFL riches, and could not fund the excursion.

Several Brooksville residents took up a collection and insisted on paying Willie and Annie Bell's travel expenses. The Browns made it to Arizona. Miami lost.

"After that, (Jerome) said, 'I want to do something for Brooksville,' " Willie said, " 'to show them I appreciate it.' "

No one doubted how much Jerome appreciated his hometown. He hosted annual football camps, bought sports equipment, even broke up a KKK rally at City Hall one day by blasting rap music through his truck's massive stereo system.

"He was as big as a bear," said Munford, of the community center, "but as gentle as a lamb."

Everyone has a story

It wasn't long after I moved to Brooksville that I came face to face with the spirit of Jerome Brown. It happened, as these things sometimes do, by accident.

The hero worship of my younger years had long since evaporated when I began covering Hernando County sports for the St. Petersburg Times. I'd interned for the Eagles a few seasons while in college, traveled with the team and wrote feature stories and game coverage for a Web site and magazine it operated. The more you are around professional sports, the less of a fan you become. It isn't a conscious choice; it just happens.

One day, I was at Cortez Boulevard and Jefferson Street waiting to make a right. Looking over my left shoulder, I saw no oncoming traffic. Apparently, the driver of minivan in front of me did. I accelerated. The minivan didn't.

I pulled over. The minivan pulled over. A married couple examined the ding on their rear bumper and we agreed not to get the insurance companies involved. They took down my number, and I agreed to reimburse them for the minor repair.

We met at a Dunkin' Donuts later that week. I gave them $50. We talked. I was new in town. Brooksville was a foreign place with foreign people, far from Philadelphia, where I had spent most of the previous five years. We drank our coffee and talked about the husband's passion for motorcycles and the wife's days at Hernando High.

The topic of Jerome Brown came up. It always does in Brooksville. The wife didn't know him well, but she kept a scrapbook of stories about him and she cried the day he died.

Jerome Brown made people care about life because Jerome cared about life. Talk to people who knew him and you get the feeling that if he had to leave this earth, he'd do so burning his tires in the process. Stand by the small white cross that marks the spot where his Corvette landed upside-down, killing both him and his nephew, Gus, and you're amazed at the physics of the accident. Even in death, Jerome Brown was larger than life.

Over the next couple of years, I came to realize that everyone in this town has a story about Jerome Brown. Tim Sims, who grew up with Jerome and went on to coach Hernando High's baseball team for 12 years (people say Jerome could have played Division I baseball; his son, Dee, is a Double-A outfielder in the Washington Nationals farm system), broke down in tears the day he heard the news. So did Tim Jinkens, whose Red Mule Pub used to turn into a gathering place for the NFL elite when Jerome would host his yearly football clinic for the youth of Brooksville.

But the most heartfelt, and chilling, anecdotes come from Jerome's father.

The big pink house

Willie Brown still lives in the giant house Jerome built him on the outskirts of town. Head north on U.S. 41 and make a right on Shady Rest Court, and you can't miss it. It has seven bedrooms, a football-shaped swimming pool, and outside walls of pink.

Annie Bell, Willie's first wife and Jerome's mother, died in 2001. Willie now lives on Shady Rest Court with his second wife, Donia Mae Brown. She's a lifelong friend, the mother of baseball star Tyrone Woods, one of the top professional players in Japan.

With each story I heard of Jerome, with each time that I jogged past the community center that bears his name, with each interview I conducted with one of Willie's relatives - granddaughter Bernice Mosby, a forward for the WNBA's Washington Mystics; grandson and namesake (Willie) Dee Brown, the outfielder - I grew more interested in meeting the father Jerome left behind.

One morning, I drove up U.S. 41, made that right onto Shady Rest, and peered into the driveway of that enormous pink house. Willie wasn't home, so I drove back toward town, passing by a pond where, according to a few people, Willie often fishes. I found myself at the community center, directly across from Tom Varn Park, where Jerome used to hold his free football clinics.

The community center had been a dream of Jerome's, the ultimate gift to his community. When he died, those he left behind were determined to make it a reality. Former Eagles tight end Keith Jackson helped raise about $100,000 in pledges from other NFL players. It opened in 2000, after more than five years of fundraising and construction.

Munford, who knew Brown his entire life, has worked there since it opened. She called Willie, and he agreed to meet me at the center.

About 15 minutes later, a large black F-150 with WB99 on the license plate pulled into the center's small parking lot, and an old man ambled out. I introduced myself. My hand disappeared into his. His hands were so calloused, his fingers so weathered, I felt like going home and taking sandpaper to mine.

We went to a side room and pulled out chairs. I asked him if he still thinks about his son. "I can't help it," he answered.

I asked him if random people still stop him on the street. "They say, 'Are you Jerome's father?' I say, 'Yeah, I am.' They say, 'He was a wonderful man.' "

I asked him about his children. He has 20 in all. Eleven are his own, nine are Donia Mae's. There were about 50 people at the big pink house this past Thanksgiving. Children, grandchildren, so many he can't rattle off all their names in one stream of consciousness. Cynthia, Gloria, Ann, Gail, Harold, John, Richard, Cleve, Ernest, Theodore. Wait, there's more.

"It makes me feel good," he said. "And I can sit there and look over them and tell them what to do, and they listen to me."

He laughs, a slow, thick, gravelly laugh, just like his voice. He slaps his knee for emphasis.

I asked him about the NFL draft day, about how it felt for a sawmill attendant-turned-truck driver-turned-mechanic, the son of a minister who made a dollar and a half a day, to watch his third-born son ascend to the National Football League.

"I just felt like I was one of the proudest fathers he'd ever seen. All those years struggling to try to raise him and to do the right thing, and he grows up to be so precious."

I asked about the grave, about how often he visits (three or four times a year). About his routine (he brings flowers). What he thinks about when he visits.

"It still knocks me for a loop," he said. "It affects me. It really does. I think a lot of times, What would it be like if he was still here today?"

I told him I'd never been to the gravesite. I told him that the one time I tried, I got lost.

Willie didn't hesitate.

"I can lead you there."

Jerome, Mom, Gus

The drive from the Jerome Brown Community Center to Fort Taylor cemetery lasts about 15 minutes, winding through rural Hernando County, over rolling hills, under trees dripping with Spanish moss, a left and a right and a couple more rights. Just when you think you're about to reach Georgia, a sign appears.

I was sitting in the passenger seat of Willie Brown's truck as he made a right onto a dirt road, almost a driveway. Willie wore his seat belt for the final few miles of the trip, but only after the factory-installed reminder implored him to do so.

A few years ago, Willie said, a state trooper gave him a ticket for not wearing a seat belt. "I hardly ever wear it," he said. "Now, I have to wear it."

My memories of Jerome Brown's death are composed of headlines and news reports and the black pieces of tape the Eagles wore the following season that cut through the silver wings on their green helmets. Willie's memories are more visceral.

He was driving north on Howell Avenue that day, headed back to Shady Rest. From the opposite direction, he saw a familiar sight: Jerome's Chevy Corvette, its top down, nephew Augustus "Gus" Brown in the passenger seat. Willie waved. Jerome stuck his hand up and waved back.

A few hours later, Jerome was dead. Annie Bell told Willie there had been an accident. Willie couldn't believe it. He told her he had just seen Jerome. They rushed to the scene.

"They wouldn't let us go up there," Willie said, "because they knew it'd killed him."

We pulled into the cemetery, actually just a small plot of land sandwiched between two home sites. Fort Taylor cemetery is one of several African-American cemeteries in Hernando County. Willie's father and mother are buried there. So is his mother-in-law.

Jerome's grave stands in the center, the logos of the Philadelphia Eagles, Miami Hurricanes and Hernando High Leopards etched in each corner. To the left of the gravestone is a pot of flowers Willie brought the last time he visited. He still comes on Jerome's birthday, Feb, 4. To the left is Gus' grave, which features a picture of him, forever 13 years old. To the right of Jerome is Annie Bell's grave.

Willie walked to a vacant patch of grass to the right of his first wife.

"I left this spot here for me," he said.

After a few moments, we climbed back in the truck. I thanked Willie for bringing me. As he maneuvered the truck back down the dirt road, I asked him a question I'd wondered for 15 years.

When a father loses a son at such a young age, in such a random manner, does it ever cause him to question? To doubt?

Willie shook his head.

"I don't doubt," he said. "I put it like this: The Lord's gonna do what he wants to do. He knows everything. There's a time for everything. That was his time."

With that, Willie made a left onto Culbreath Road, and we headed back to town, accompanied only by the humming of tires on asphalt, the chirp of the seat belt alarm ringing through the cab.

Staff Writer David Murphy covers high school sports in Hernando County.

[Last modified December 30, 2007, 20:55:10]