He didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.
CLARENCE BUDINGTON KELLAND
You’ve probably figured out by now how much I love and admire my mom. I felt the same about my dad, but our relationship was a little more complicated.
My father, Eugene Brown, grew up in Monroe, Louisiana, the oldest of ten kids. By the time he met my mom, he was in many ways the man of the house. His mother had a stroke and was confined to a wheelchair, so he had to quit high school during his freshman year to help support the family. In those days, that meant working long hours in the fields picking cotton. His father worked in the fields too, so he pretty much put my dad in charge of raising his brothers and sisters. Then my dad started having kids, got married, and had his own family to handle too.
It was a lot of responsibility for a young man. I think my dad saw it as just doing what had to be done. It’s where he first developed his amazing work ethic, and his lifelong ability to manipulate and fix things with his hands. He used to tell me he didn’t want me laboring with my hands as he had. I kidded him about that after I got to the NFL: “Pop, I’m working with my hands, just not the way you did.”
After his third child was born, my dad moved the family to Dallas in 1962, hoping for better opportunities. By the time I came along, his routine was set. Every weekday morning, he was out of the house by six thirty and on his way to his job as a construction crew foreman. Then, sometime between four fifteen and four forty-five every afternoon, his blue Buick Riviera rolled down the street and into our driveway. He’d plop into his easy chair for a few minutes, take a shower, watch NBC Nightly News, eat dinner, and take a nap. Then he was off to his second job, managing the Chandlelite nightclub he owned on Dolphin Street. I was nearly always in bed by the time he got home.
The weekends were just as consistent. Even after we moved away from the little fourplex on Copeland, Saturday was Dad’s day to hang out with his “boys” from the old neighborhood. He and his buddies would sit under a tree, drink beer, and tell story after story. Sunday was his day at home. While the rest of us spent the day at church, he puttered around the house. During football season, he always watched his favorite NFL team on TV—the Cowboys, of course. Even after I joined the Raiders, his team was still the Cowboys. Like his routine, some things with my dad never changed.
My dad was what I call “a man’s man.” He wasn’t a big guy, probably five foot ten, but when he walked into a room, people stopped what they were doing to hear what Gene Brown had to say. He carried himself with an air of authority. For us kids—or for anyone else—there was no whining or negotiating once he’d spoken. If Dad announced that we were going to spend the evening standing on our heads, then that’s what we did.
Like my mother, Dad wasn’t one for a lot of talk. He was all about instruction, not conversation. I’m sure that came from so often taking charge of a household with nine siblings. He saw it as his duty to make sure everyone was doing what they needed to do.
I remember one evening when I walked into a room and saw my dad repeatedly slapping one of his brothers, who was sitting at a table, on the back of his head. Dad said, “Don’t you treat your wife like that. Don’t you put your hands on her.” His brother didn’t argue or try to fight back. He just covered his head and said, “Okay, Gene. All right, Gene.” As far as I know, that put an end to that issue.
That’s how it was with my dad. If he saw or heard about a problem, he took care of it. And everyone respected him for it.
Dad wouldn’t hesitate to put his kids in their place either. Growing up, I didn’t get in trouble with him very often, but when I did it didn’t take long for that belt to come out. Even worse, he was ambidextrous. When one hand got tired, he’d just switch to the other.
I’ll never forget the last whipping of my life. It happened when I was eleven. In fact, it was the same summer day that Mama backhanded me for whining to her about the swimming money. By then, we’d moved to our two-bedroom house on Culver Street, on a hill in East Dallas. After getting nowhere with my mother, I’d gone outside and sat on the crumbling cement steps that led to our front door. Feeling frustrated, I began pitching rocks across the street.
I noticed a dog with only three legs walking down the street in my direction. You know, I thought, it would be interesting to see what a three-legged dog looks like when he runs.
I took aim and fired a rock toward the dog. I wasn’t trying to hurt him, just scare him enough to get him moving, but that rock hit him square on the leg. The next moment, that poor dog wasn’t walking or running, but crawling.
Unfortunately, old Mr. Mack, a Baptist preacher, was sitting on his porch watching the whole thing. He got up and walked over to me, shaking his head. “Tim,” he said, “I’m not even going to deal with you about this. I’m going to tell your momma and tell your daddy.”
Oh, no, please, I thought. I’m already in trouble today.
But that’s just what happened. They both heard about it. After my dad got home, the two of them went at me, Dad with the belt and Mama with her words. “Timmy, all you have to do”—slap!—“is do what we ask you to do”—slap!—“and you’ll never get in trouble.”
Later, after I’d finished crying and thought for a bit, I went back to Mama. “Were you serious about what you said?” I asked. “To stay out of trouble, all I have to do is what you ask?”
“That’s all, Timmy.”
The light bulb went on in my head. I can do that.
That was the end of my encounters with Dad’s belt, but it wasn’t the last time he and I would square off.
Dad loved to sing in the car and around the house. He had a booming baritone voice. It was always the blues, something from Johnny Taylor or maybe B. B. King. In keeping with the blues lifestyle, he also smoked, drank, and cursed.
Seeing how Dad lived his life, and that he didn’t go to church with us, really upset me. I realized that he didn’t know God and that he wasn’t moving any closer to Him.
One time during an all-night prayer session at church, we all got on our knees to talk to God. Pretty soon I noticed that a bunch of the other kids, including my sister, were crying. I figured I needed to cry too, so I thought about my dad, and soon the tears flowed. The thought of my father not going to heaven was the saddest thing in my life.
Maybe I also should have been sad about the fact that he and I rarely spent time together. We never played catch in the yard or went to a ballgame. But that was just how it was. He was working to take care of all of us, and that was top priority.
I remember only a couple of times when just the two of us did something together while I was growing up. One was when he took me fishing. The other was a crazy scheme when I was ten.
Someone had talked my dad into the idea that I could be a child fashion model. Who knows why he fell for that one, but he did. Mama wanted nothing to do with it. She said, “Gene, you know better. Why are you doing this? Why’re you wasting your money?”
“No, Josephine,” he said, “you’ll see. He’s going to make it.”
So that Saturday, Mama got me dressed in my only good outfit—a green leisure suit—and Dad and I climbed into the Riviera for a day in downtown Dallas. We visited one photo studio after another, each seedier than the last. I’d pose on a bench or a chair while the photographer snapped photos and my dad looked on, apparently seeing dollar signs in his eyes.
The only people who ever made money from that outing were the photographers, but I never complained about it. They supplied me with M&M’s and Snickers bars while I “modeled,” and I got to spend a whole day with my dad—it was great! It also provided our family with a good story. Whenever we needed to lighten the mood, one of my brothers or sisters would say, “Hey, you remember the day when Daddy took Timmy on that modeling thing?”
Mama would chime in, “Gene, what were you thinking anyway?” My dad just chuckled. The fact that he didn’t defend himself made it even funnier, because he usually had an opinion on everything.
What happened a couple of years later between my dad and me, however, wasn’t funny at all. It was late June, when I was almost thirteen. It was a typical night at our home—Mama and my sisters were asleep, my older brother was in his room in the converted garage, and I was lying on the couch in the den, up late watching television. With the entrance to the den behind me, it would have been easy for anyone walking in to think I was asleep.
I didn’t hear my dad come home, but suddenly there he was, back from Chandlelite. He turned off the TV, killing all the light in the room.
“Hey Pop, I’m still watching it!” I bellowed. I got up to turn the TV back on.
Maybe it was the shock of that shout out of the darkness. Maybe he thought I wanted to fight. Maybe he’d just had too much to drink. Whatever it was, I’d pushed him over the edge.
“You coming after me?” he screamed. “I am gonna kill you!”
The shouts continued as he charged back outside and opened the trunk of the car. “I’m getting my gun and I’m going to kill you!”
I knew he had guns in the trunk because I’d seen them many times. My sisters and I used to scope out his trunk for loose change. While my father took a nap, Ann stood guard at his bedroom and Gwen kept watch from the kitchen window. I’d jump in the trunk and grab a few coins out of a bucket, my heart racing. I was always careful not to touch the two pistols, one lying on each side of the bucket.
Now, with my dad’s rage spilling over like lava from a volcano, my heart beat even faster. “Mama, come help!” I yelled. I scrambled into the corner of the den between the TV and the couch, scared for my life. My dad routinely came home with alcohol in his blood and on his breath, but I’d never seen it make him violent. I’d never seen him lay a hand on my mother. Did he really plan to kill me?
At that moment, it seemed entirely possible.
The shouts woke everyone. Mama came rushing out to the driveway. Fortunately, either because it was too dark, he was too drunk, or Mama’s quiet words began to sink in, my dad didn’t find the gun. He started to calm down, at least enough to stop shouting threats that the whole neighborhood could hear.
He didn’t say another word to me that night. I continued to cower in the corner, afraid, confused, and increasingly angry. What had I done to deserve this? Was he crazy? I vowed right then to never take a sip of alcohol if it made you want to kill your own son.
In many ways, both positive and negative, that incident changed my life. For years, none of us in the family said a word about it. We all pretended that it hadn’t happened. But inside, I was torn up.
My dad and I had a pretty good relationship up to that night. But now I was mad at him, and he was different with me too. He told me at least a couple of times over the next two years, “You’re never going to amount to anything.”
I thought about taking revenge—tampering with his tea or leaving nails behind the tires of the Riviera. I could have let my anger out through physical violence or tried to dull the fear and rejection I felt through drugs or my own drinking. Thankfully, I didn’t choose any of those options.
I actually used my anger as fuel for succeeding in the classroom, and later in sports. I wanted my dad to see that he was wrong about me and about how he’d treated me that night. I wanted to hear, “I’m sorry.” My grades were high, but I never did get that apology.
The anger and hurt from that period was something that stayed with me for a long time. It would be many years before it was truly resolved. Even so, I still loved my dad and was still proud to call him my father. He was a good man who had a bad night.
Every boy dreams of growing up to be a man, in every sense of the word. Figuring out what that looks and sounds like might be the primary mission of boyhood. The first place he’s going to look is his dad.
As I write this, my son Timothy Jr. is ten years old. He looks a lot like I did at his age, and probably acts a lot like me too, ready to pick up a ball and play a game on a moment’s notice.
Timothy is like me in another way—he’s always watching and listening to his dad. He probably doesn’t realize it yet, but he’s trying to figure out what it means to be a man.
I ask him all the time, “What’s your name, boy?”
“Tim Brown,” he’ll say.
“That’s right. Don’t you ever forget that. That’s a special name.” Sometimes I add, “And remember, when I’m not here, you need to take care of things. You’re the man of the house.” You can see Timothy’s back straighten and his chest stick out a little more when I tell him that.
I’ve gotten in trouble for that one, though. I was traveling recently, and my wife asked me over the phone, “Tim, what did you say to your son? I’m trying to get him to bed, and he’s lying on your side of the bed telling me, ‘I’m the man of the house.’ ”
The story is funny, but it also shows how serious boys are about taking on the role of a man. When they’re young, Dad is their hero, and they want to be just like him. As they get older, they start to figure out that Dad has good qualities and some that might not be so good. But they’re still watching and listening every second. Their concept of manhood begins with Dad. Sure, they’ll do plenty of tinkering as they grow up, but more than anything or anyone else, he’s the model they start with and stay with.
That’s definitely how it was for me. My father had a huge influence on me. In all my years of living in the same house, I never saw him miss a day of work. Other than summer vacation time, he never took a day off, not even for being sick. It was his job to be there, and he always showed up. I know that example helped drive me when I got to the NFL. It’s why over seventeen years I missed only one practice, and that was for my dad’s heart surgery. My mind-set was, My job is to be at practice. I need to get this done. It’s what a man does.
That came from my dad.
I also watched my father come home every night. Sure, he was always out late managing the nightclub. But no matter how good or bad a day he had, no matter how he felt about his wife or his kids on a particular evening, we knew he was coming home. There was no running around. We knew that if somebody tried to break into our house in the middle of the night, Daddy would be there defending us. We could count on him.
That’s also what a man does. He’s consistent. He protects and takes care of his family.
The truth is that even though there were a few rough spots, my upbringing was just about perfect for me. I learned so much about what it means to be a man by watching my dad. His relationship with God? That was another matter. I had to filter everything he said and did through the realization that he didn’t have a spiritual foundation. In that area, I’m trying to give my kids a different example.
Of course, so many men and boys today didn’t or don’t have any example to follow. Their father was or is either absent altogether or someone whose life has been about poor choices, lack of responsibility, and no understanding of the meaning of manhood. If you’re that man or boy, or if you’re reading this as a mom whose son doesn’t have a real man in his life, I strongly encourage you to get with someone who had or has a good father and is one today. It might be an older man or someone your own age. Either way, don’t be embarrassed to seek help and advice. Ask him, “What is being a good dad all about?” He may even be able to step in himself and spend time with you or your son.
You can only get so much from a book. You’ve got to connect with those who’ve seen it and lived it. They can teach you what you need to know.
Too many sons, and daughters too, are growing up today without a dad or true father figure. The statistics on fatherless families seem to get worse every year. It’s a national tragedy. Boys need their fathers in order to discover what manhood is all about. We need to do all we can to support and guide these soon-to-be men, especially if we’re dads ourselves.
It’s what a man does.