Darrell Brown's 46-year dream realized

Bittersweet moment for UA's first black football player

University of Arkansas Athletic Director Jeff Long recognizes Darrell Brown during halftime at the Arkansas-Auburn game on 10/8/11.
University of Arkansas Athletic Director Jeff Long recognizes Darrell Brown during halftime at the Arkansas-Auburn game on 10/8/11.

— Darrell Brown stood on the edge of the University of Arkansas’ football field Saturday night, fighting tears.

As men young enough to be his grandchildren collided under the bright lights of Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium, a range of emotions clashed within him.

Bitterness, happiness, satisfaction, sadness - 46 years’ worth of locked doors, turmoil and release. Football, a game Brown had so badly wanted to play on this field in front of all these people, seems so simple. One side wins, the other loses. Teammates are supposed to stick together through it all.

History has a way of tossing rulebooks and dreams aside, though, and in the process presents struggles with consequences far more important than those of a game.

The pains Brown had endured as the first black football to play for the University of Arkansas had been broadcast to the world in the days before their culmination at halftime of the Arkansas-Auburn game. A flurry of press releases and articles heralded a ceremony in which Brown received an honorary plaque and an official Razorbacks football jersey with his name stitched on the back.

Brown’s eyes welled up as he stepped onto the field to thunderous applause and started walking toward athletic director Jeff Long and his assistant Eric Wood. “I looked around and saw this crowd,” Brown says. “A part of my dream was being realized, that I was on the field, I was in a full stadium. Maybe 40 years later, but I was there.”

No one was cheering for Brown in 1965 when the Horatio native walked on to the freshmen squad of the defending national champion Razorbacks. No one much talked to him in the locker room for the first few weeks. Coaches didn’t bother to explain plays to him. For the most part, Brown’s served as a tackling dummy for teammates who repeatedly unleashed 11-on-1 kill-the-man kickoff return drills on him that left all 190 pounds of his 5-11 frame aching.

Teammates, though, didn’t totally ignore Brown during these drills and post-practice wrestling matches in which coaches paired him with opponents 60 pounds heavier. Indeed, they could make quite a ruckus, former Razorback David Hargis told Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports. “It was, ‘Get the n-word, get the n-word.’”

Hargis and a couple others offered some encouragement, but for the most part nobody on the team - not even the trainer - cared when Brown tore cartilage in his thumb and knee during a typically brutal practice three weeks into his sophomore season. He had to limp to the campus infirmary for treatment, and in the ensuing weeks decided to refocus on academics, where he felt he could make more of a difference.

Brown shelved his dreams of playing football, preferring not to look at them during a legal career in which he opened his own Little Rock law firm.

So, yes, some bitterness surged through him while walked off the field, wearing his new cardinal red jersey.

“Because I feel and felt I was an athlete who could have, if given the opportunity, been a full-fledged Razorback," he said.

Sadness, too, that he didn’t realize “his ultimate dream."

Still, he was satisfied that the university at last officially acknowledged his story and presented it is a lesson to the make the future better. He likes that the ceremony keeps “with the theme of recognizing the past, not necessarily dwelling on the past.”

That theme is one reason it doesn’t much bother Brown that long-time athletic director Frank Broyles, the Razorbacks’ head football coach in the 1960s, has only briefly spoken to him, never mentioning the painful practices he watched Brown go through.

“I don’t want Frank Broyles to apologize to me,” Brown says. “I think that’s something he has to live with. There are so many ways to rationalize what happened in those years and so many times we often blame it on the times.”

After standing a while near an end zone during the second half of the Razorbacks’ 38-14 victory, Brown finally returned to his seat.

“People came up to me with tears in their eyes and some would say ‘Forgive us and bless you. We’re sorry, but we’re just so happy to hear your story.’ Some people cried and took pictures with me.”

Brown’s struggle, for decades an obscure footnote in his alma mater’s history, had become deeply etched onto the face of the institution. It’s a story that reverberates on multiple levels, says Rus Bradburd, who wrote about Brown in 40 Minutes of Hell: The Extraordinary Life of Nolan Richardson.

“If anyone can understand what it means to be an underdog, it’s the people of Arkansas. They haven’t had a great national image in the past and Darrell’s a part of that. I think Darrell really embodies that never-say-die spirit.”

His days of wrestling offensive linemen are long gone, but Brown must still grapple with feelings that could very easily boil up as hate without flexing constant prayer and love.

“I still struggle with that quite a bit. But I know that it’s in your heart. If it starts in your heart, and it’s right, then everybody benefits from it. But if it starts in your heart, and it’s wrong, then people get hurt.”

Forty-six years apart, Brown experienced both ends of the spectrum on a football field in Fayetteville.

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