Bandstanding Brown

Heisman winner's mother would have rather seen her son play in the band

Nov. 21, 2007

By Adam Caparell

CSTV.com


	ADAM CAPARELL Adam is CSTV.com's football editor and national football writer. E-mail here!

Tim Brown's mother never wanted her son playing football. All the helmets and pads in the world weren't enough to protect her boy.

"She hated it," Brown said. "She absolutely hated me playing football, you know. She wanted me to be in the band and, you know, get a scholarship playing the drums or something of that nature."

But Brown's talents were better suited to catching footballs than banging out beats, even though his mother still thought her son was nothing more than a band member in his early high school days.

"She actually didn't know I was playing high school football until my sophomore year," Brown said. "I'd been playing junior high and this was my fourth year of playing and I had a big write up in the paper.

"Sophomore sensation, so, the cat was out the bag at that particular point."

Brown had managed to dupe his mother for all those years rather easily - "Sneaking the permission slips to my father and having him to sign it," Brown joked - even as he made the varsity as a sophomore before his burgeoning ability was impossible to keep from her or Notre Dame.

Brown wasn't the most highly recruited receiver out of Dallas, especially considering his high school didn't win more than a handful of games during his time there. But his talents were evident enough that it earned him a scholarship to South Bend after the Irish spotted him scouting an opposing player. The 6-foot Brown would make his way from Texas to northwestern Indiana where his first introduction to the Irish faithful was memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Having never played in front of more than 300 people in high school, Brown was thrust onto the field, in front of nearly 70,000 people at the RCA Dome in Indianapolis for the opening kickoff of the 1984 season, a game the Irish lost to No. 8 Purdue. Being a freshman, he was nervous. So nervous, in fact, that he fumbled the first time he touched the ball.

"It's a play that really put me on the map, but not for a reason I would want to be on the map," Brown said.

Brown remembers the following week being one of the roughest.

"All the seniors were telling me you must be a great player otherwise they would have run you up out of there," Brown said.

Fortunately, his fumble was not a harbinger of things to come. There was greatness in Tim Brown, greatness that led him to great individual achievement.

Brown finished his career with the Irish as the leader in all-purpose yards with 5,024, and as the 1987 Heisman Trophy winner. But it was his junior season in which Brown really left his mark at the school, which just happened to coincide with Lou Holtz's first season as the Irish head coach.

Notre Dame had been going through some lean years during the 80'sand 1986 was no different. The Irish entered their season finale against USC 4-6 and underdogs against the ranked Trojans. But thanks to a miracle comeback that saw Notre Dame upset USC 38-37, Brown had kicked off his Heisman campaign a season early with a key punt return and 254 all-purpose yards in one of the top performances the season had seen. After the game, legendary L.A. Times columnist Jim Murray wrote that Brown should be the front-runner for next year's Heisman Trophy.

"When you get a guy like that saying, certainly some guys who look up to him are gonna be saying the same thing," Brown said.

That's when the idea of being named the most outstanding player in college football first entered Brown's mind. He also realized that the NFL was a distinct possibility as well. Brown chose Notre Dame in large part because of the education he would receive and he never gave much thought to anything other than football and graduating. He had always figured he'd go back home, settle down and move on with his life after Notre Dame. But that mindset had changed about as quickly as he could return a punt for a touchdown.

Brown entered his senior year as one of the biggest targets in the game, regularly receiving double and sometimes triple coverage. And it didn't help that he was battling two bad shoulders and a broken finger. Things were so bad for Brown that trainers loaded his shoulder pads with extra padding.

"They were literally almost over my helmet," Brown said of his shoulder pads that season.

Brown kept silent about the injuries as best he could. He didn't want to bring any extra attention on himself or more importantly let opponents know he was ailing. He just endured as best he could. He would run out of bounds rather than take a hit just so he could stay in the game. He avoided all unnecessary contact. He would jump for balls a lot of time because he could only reach his arms so high.

"I didn't want to take a shot, didn't want to you know do all that stuff because I just felt as If I could play at all then, you know, I could make it through it," Brown said. "But I think we did the right thing keeping it silent. I think people would have taken some shots at me that would have been unnecessary."

Brown did everything for the Irish that season. He caught passes, returned punts and kickoffs and even carried the ball more than a few times, all while hurt. He averaged 167.9 all-purposes yards per game that season and returned two punts for touchdowns against Michigan State. He finished the season with three punts returned for a score, three touchdowns on kickoff returns, three receiving touchdowns and a rushing touchdown. He was widely considered the most dangerous player in the game and the likely Heisman winner.

But Brown's teammates were concerned that the Irish's 7-4 record was going to affect his chances of winning. In the end, however, it didn't matter. Brown was a big winner over Syracuse's Don McPherson and became the seventh Notre Dame player to win the award.

Brown can still go back to the presentation, still in the back of his mind remember the moment when the winner was announced and what it was like up at the podium speaking to the nation.

"You are up there talking, and hearing `the winner is Tim Brown' and that is all you are hearing," Brown said. "It is something that will continue to resonate in my head forever because at that point your life has changed."

That was a little tough to grasp at first, but maybe not as tough as watching his parents in the audience breakdown in front of him.

"You know, getting in front of the nation, try to make a speech on a spot like that is a very difficult thing to do also," Brown said. "But it is just mind blowing to look out and see your dad crying, the hardest man in America, you know, crying, your mom crying."

Brown's mother was crying tears of joy for certain. Her baby boy was somewhat healthy, soon to be wealthy, and wise, a position he never would have been in had he stuck with the band like she wanted.