Jim Brown Chastises Tiger Woods For Not Being More Like Jim Brown

Jim Brown, if you’ll recall, may have been the best running back in the history of the NFL. He certainly was the best of his era.
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↵He also stepped away from the game in his prime to pursue an aggressive social agenda, one that has made him an undoubtedly divisive figure. Even though he’s the head of the Amer-I-Can Program, his legacy will probably be more defined by his blaxploitation movie career than his good deeds. So it goes.
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↵He’s still working on that legacy, though, and on an upcoming HBO piece on Bill Russell, he had some choice words for Tiger Woods:↵↵⇥“You know what’s so interesting about Tiger to me?” Brown said. “He↵⇥is a killer, he will run over you, he will kick your ass. But as an↵⇥individual for social change? Terrible. Terrible. Because he can get↵⇥away with teaching kids to play golf, and that’s his contribution. In↵⇥the real world, I can’t teach kids to play golf and that’s my↵⇥contribution, if I’ve got that kind of power.”↵↵This is an (intentionally) unfair statement by Brown, but it also speaks to Brown’s main motivation. He sees the amount of fame and leverage Tiger has and, like with his own life and career, sees it as even more of an opportunity than he himself had. Clearly, he thinks the opportunity is wasted.
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↵But Tiger’s and his motivations are, of course, vastly different. If all Tiger wants to do is play golf, then why not just let him do that? Would he rather Tiger get on camera and spout off lukewarm, underinformed political opinions? We already have Cameron Diaz to do that.↵