Aug. 12, 2004
Tar Heel Monthly is the premier magazine devoted to the stories and
personalities behind UNC athletics. Click here for subscription information.
The following is the cover story from the September 2004 issue of
the magazine.
By Adam Lucas
The man in the blue number 72 jersey is wreaking havoc on the football field. The film is rolling, Carolina against Arizona State, and on the screen the Tar Heel center is obliterating the Sun Devil defense one defensive lineman at a time. It is almost cartoonish the way these muscle-bound men bounce off Jason Brown. Carolina's offensive line coach, Hal Hunter, rewinds the film. He is not sure he can believe what he has just seen.
"Jason makes you want to say, `How did he do that?'" Hunter says. "I have seen him do things with his body and dominate players in a way I haven't seen before.
"On the field, he can be one mean, nasty guy."
It is two days later, and the man in the blue number 72 jersey has just finished a photo shoot. The white elastic on the sleeves of his jersey is stretched tight by his biceps. He walks down a back stairwell of Kenan Stadium with his wife. It is one flight of steps to their destination. Suddenly, he notices something important---his wife, Tay, who is studying to be an oral surgeon, is carrying her own backpack.
"Sweetie, let me carry your bookbag," he says.
She demures. He insists. He carries the bag.
Later, he smiles when the scene is recounted to him. Actually, he doesn't just smile. He beams out from under his navy Dickies hat. You are reminded that this is the 6-foot-3, 312-pound man Hal Hunter recently called a "mean, nasty guy," one of the highest compliments any coach can give a player.
"I'll tell you what I am," Jason Brown says, and he looks you right in the eye, still wearing that earnest smile. "I'm a lovey hubby. A lovey-dovey hubby."
*
Jason Brown has been flagged twice for unnecessary roughness. It is his sophomore season in high school, he is bigger than virtually everyone on the field, and he is, in the words of his father, Lunsford Brown, "terrorizing" the other team. The referees are helpless---they have never before seen a high school player capable of hitting someone the way
Jason Brown is hitting people. Offense, defense, he plays both sides of the ball. On both units, he has a tendency to create whiplash in his opponent.
The referee is a rational man. He throws his flag. No high school boy can hit this way. It must be unnecessary roughness.
The first time, Jason's mother lets it go. Deborah Brown is a longtime member of the Vance County school board, a future county commissioner. She remains quiet.
The second time, Deborah Brown bounds out of her seat and is on her way to the field. Let her husband tell the story.
"My wife walked out on the field and people panicked," says Lunsford Brown. "She said to the referee, `Was the ball still alive?' He had no choice but to say that it was. And she said, `Then why did you flag him?'
"He says, `Unnecessary roughness.' She looks right at him and says, `I don't see why. He didn't clip anyone, didn't hit anyone from behind. It was not unnecessary roughness.'
"That was pretty much the end of it."
Jason Brown was called for exactly zero additional unnecessary roughness penalties.
You understand, then, that when Deborah Brown gave orders to her children, they were quick to snap to attention. A woman capable of swaying a football referee is not a woman to be trifled with. She is not particularly loud-spoken, and in fact, sometimes you have to strain to hear her. But you get the impression that she is not used to having to say things twice.
She has deep roots in Vance County, having grown up on a farm and worked tobacco and cotton for most of her childhood. Her future husband had the same experience, having grown up in Yanceyville on a farm that also produced sugarcane. They were used to working from sunup to sundown, used to long, hot, sweaty days and dirty fingernails.
They wanted to embed the same work ethic in their children. Jason was the baby, born seven years after his brother, Lunsford, and four years after his sister, Dana. Before Jason's sixth grade year, the Brown family moved to a sprawling farm outside of the main part of Henderson, 45 acres of land, all needing a caretaker. Grass made up a full 6.5 acres of the family land.
"That grass is mowed every week," his father decreed. "Every week."
Jason became well-acquainted with a lawnmower. His mother knew the grass couldn't be mowed in a day, so she encouraged him to get started on it early in the week. He preferred to do it in a single afternoon, stepping off the school bus on Friday afternoon and going straight to his lawnmower. At first, with a 36-inch Exmark lawnmower, it took him over four hours. Try cutting 6.5 acres of grass with a 36-inch walk-behind mower and see how long it takes you. Funny thing, though. Jason didn't seem to mind. His friends were out doing whatever teenagers do, but cutting the grass gave him time to think. He is a thinker, will tell you even now that he tries to take time every day for self-reflection.
The portion of the land not covered with grass could not be neglected. Trees needed to be cut, mulch needed to be moved. There were chores to do. The children were expected to be productive members of the household.
"Well of
course," his father says. "They lived here just like I did, didn't they?"
There was not much time for sports. Jason followed football casually, knew enough to carry on a conversation with his friends, but not enough to be rabid about any of the state's college teams. His freshman year at Northern Vance, he quit during tryouts, promising coach Randy Long he would return as a sophomore. Long had heard that promise before.
What he hadn't seen before, though, was a freshman willing to give up his lunch period to lift weights in the school's weight room. This kid, this
Jason Brown, who had quit during tryouts, was suddenly gulping down his lunch in five minutes so that he'd have 25 minutes to work on his core lifts.
As a sophomore, then, his body was beginning to change. He didn't quit this time, made the team and proceeded to demolish most of the opponents he encountered in the high school trenches. The spring of his junior year, he was preparing to board a school activity bus for a ride to Southern Vance, where he was scheduled to participate in a track meet. It was a dismal day, rain whipping against the pavement. Long was sitting in the driver's seat of the bus when he saw Brown preparing to board.
"Stop right there," the coach said.
"Aw Coach, it's raining out here," Jason said.
"You should remember everything about this moment. Remember that it's raining. Remember that you're about to get on a bus. You're going to want to remember this for the rest of your life."
"Coach, it's nasty out here and you're going to keep me standing out here?"
"Jason, I just talked to Coach Browning," Long said. "He wants to offer you a full scholarship to the University of North Carolina to play football."
Long was right. Brown has remembered that moment ever since, can tell you exactly which way the raindrops were falling, what his track uniform looked like. He was going to be a college man.
*
Most of his UNC teammates came from more suburban backgrounds. His first few days on campus, they called him "J-Brown." A simple abbreviation of his name. But as the days passed, as they got to know this manchild who spoke with a bit of a twang, who dressed like he had just come from a logrolling competition, who had grown up fishing on Kerr Lake nearly every weekend with his grandfather, Willie Jefferson, who had a broad smile for everyone he met, a new nickname was born: "J-Bama."
"They told me I was an old country bumpkin, like I was from somewhere in Alabama," Brown says.
He played as a true freshman but began to thrive as a sophomore when John Bunting hired Hal Hunter to coach the offensive line. Hunter's first task as a Tar Heel was to watch every game tape from the 2001 season. What he saw was not particularly good news: he was inheriting a team losing its starting center, Adam Metts, and starting left tackle, Greg Woofter. He needed to solve the center problem with parts that were already on hand.
Enter J-Bama, who had played tackle as a rookie. The position switch wasn't particularly easy; Hunter likens learning to play center and snap the football on every play to a left-handed person learning to do everything right-handed. "Eventually you'll get it," Hunter says. "But it may be ugly early."
Sometimes it was. Brown struggled with the center-quarterback exchange in his first college game at the position, a disheartening 27-21 home loss to Miami of Ohio. Soon after, though, he evolved into a force at the position.
No matter where the Tar Heels played, Brown always had a boisterous rooting section. His father doesn't fly, so Lunsford and Deborah would drive to each road destination. In 2002, they had company. Jason had met someone, a Duke student named Tay Dickens, on April 25. He asked for her number. She declined. He gave her his number, thinking he'd never hear from her.
The next day, she called.
"I really don't know why I called him," she says now. "He had a very commanding presence and was so well-spoken."
They could not have been more opposite. She was 5-foot-3, he was 6-foot-3. She was from San Francisco, he was from Henderson. She was a Blue Devil, he was a Tar Heel. Marriages have broken up over less.
ut something clicked. She loved his smile and his kind nature. He loved, well, he can't narrow it down to one thing, he just loved everything about her. By the middle of next week, he was calling his mother, saying, "Mama, I've met the one." Coming from a son who had never even brought a girl home before, this was a big deal. They still had to meet her, though. And then they had to drive across the country with her. Thirteen hours to Syracuse. Ten hours to Tallahassee. Lunsford driving, Tay in the back, usually sleeping or studying. A typical conversation:
Lunsford: "What are you doing back there, just taking up space and eating my food?"
Tay: "Aw, Dad..."
Lunsford: "I don't know what you're talking about, your dad lives in California."
They recount these trips with laughter.
"We had two choices," Tay says. "We could have either come out of those trips hating each other or loving each other."
They chose the latter. Tay was becoming, whether she knew it or not, a member of the Brown family. And then they decided to make it official. Not with a piece of paper or some vows, but the way the Brown family had always done it.
With coon hunting.
It is, you see, a family tradition. Deborah Brown hunted as a child, so it comes naturally to her. It's as much a social event as it is a sport--only one person has a gun, so the rest of the crowd primarily traipses through the woods, across creeks, through thickets of briers. Just following the coon dogs, enjoying the company of everyone else. When Jason's brother, Lunsford, brought home his future wife, Sherrie, the family took her coon hunting. Tay received the same treatment over Thanksgiving in 2002.
She had spent the first 18 years of her life in the San Francisco area. She'd applied to Cal, Stanford, and Duke, and been accepted at all of them. She was not an avid coon hunter.
"She hangs in there pretty good," Jason's father says. "I would rate her about a five."
Having survived the Brown family initiation, there was little drama left: the couple was bound to get married. Jason did not rush into it. He talked it over with coaches, with teammates, with family members. Bunting asked him to think about the decision for a few days, something that came naturally for Brown. He thought about it. He still wanted to get married.
Some teammates were skeptical. They were 18-to-22-year-olds living the life of a college athlete. There were parties, there were women, there were still plenty of late nights to be had.
"He was one who didn't go out much,"
Darian Durant says of Brown. "He would go to practice, watch film, go back to his room. You see a lot of freshmen who come in and want to experience college life. He didn't mess around with that. He was very mature."
On July 25, 2003, on the Brown family farm in Henderson, he officially became a husband. Tay Dickens was now Tay Brown, bound into
Jason Brown's future forever. Just in time for one of the worst days of his life.
*
"We were sitting in the kitchen and it was just a typical Sunday,"
Jason Brown says.
He is describing September 21, 2003. The news is rife with accounts of continuing hostilities in Iraq, where his brother, Lunsford, is stationed. The brothers correspond regularly by email. Sometimes Lunsford--who is known to his family as Deucey, because he's named after his father--will write things that are hard for Jason to read, like when he tells his younger brother that if something happens to him in Iraq, he wants Jason to look after his wife, Sherrie, and three-month-old daughter, Amber.
They are not things a brother wants to read. Jason doesn't dismiss them, but he doesn't ponder them, either. His brother will come back. He must. Amber is too little, too precious to grow up without a father. The Brown family is strong, it is a unit. Bad things do not happen to families like this.
"I was at home with my wife,"
Jason Brown is telling you. "I was getting ready to go over and watch film. My mother called and wanted to get in touch with Coach Bunting. I gave her his number and then said, `Why do you need to talk to Coach Bunting? If you have a message for him you can relay it through me.' She said no.
"She was also trying to get in touch with my sister, who was staying with my aunt. I talked to my sister still not knowing what was going on and I thought something suspicious was going on. You never think of the worst case scenario. You never think some of the worst news of your life is about to happen."
The tears are coming now. This is not something you know how to handle, not something you expected. Tears are streaming from the eyes of the 6-foot-3, 312-pound man in front of you, and you are not sure whether to look away or pat him on the back. He does not stop, the words keep pouring out.
"I called my mother back. I said, `Tell me right now, I have to know.' But before she could even open her mouth, I knew what it was. I had been thinking about it for more than an hour and suddenly I knew. I said, `It's Deucey, isn't it?'"
It was Deucey. He'd been killed near Baghdad, and suddenly Amber didn't have a father, Sherrie didn't have a husband, Jason didn't have a brother.
His mother had wanted to get in touch with Bunting so the head coach could deliver the news in person rather than Jason having to hear it over the phone. He arrived almost immediately, along with
Corey Holliday, the squad's director of student-athlete development. Bunting and Holliday drove Brown back to Henderson, stayed with the family for most of the day. Tears were shed. Stories were told.
"It was an eye-opener for me in terms of how strong families can still be," Bunting says. "It was easy to see why Jason and his sister are such great people."
rown returned to the Tar Heels quickly, coming back to Chapel Hill on Tuesday. He played the following Saturday against NC State, and for one of the first times in his career, remembers almost nothing about the game.
"All I remember is a bunch of Carolina blue and a bunch of State red and besides that everything is blurry," he says. "I knew I was playing football but I was just going through the motions."
After another lackluster performance against Virginia, Brown regained his drive against Arizona State, when he again was ready to toss around opposing defenses. On the field,
Jason Brown was back. Off the field, he wasn't.
He developed a renewed interest in tavern puzzles, intricate metal contraptions originally forged by blacksmiths. Once he'd solved all those puzzles, he regained his interest in coin collecting. After the season, when the regular pace of practices and games were no longer there to comfort him, he bought a horde of 15,000 wheat pennies on eBay and proceeded to catalog every one of them.
As he tells you this, he knows you are analyzing it, knows there has to be an explanation for his behavior. But you don't have to search for it. He already knows.
"There was no music or movie that would pacify me," he says. "I'd done tavern puzzles and my coins earlier in my life. I think when I started to do the puzzles I was looking for answers. I look back now and see I was trying to solve something in my life. Solving those puzzles would give me so much joy. It was a relief when the answer popped in my head. I had worked something out and found the solution.
"With my coins, it was very quiet and I had time to think about everything. It was a real time of self-reflection."
Jason Brown still wears his brother's bullet-pierced dog tags.
*
The Kenan Football Center weight room is one of the most macho places in a very macho building. Players toss around 45-pound weights like the normal human tosses around coins. There is grunting, there is bellowing, and there is thumping rap music.
In the middle of this cacophony on a sweltering summer afternoon sit Jason and Tay Brown. Jason is having his picture taken, Tay is observing. The duo have just finished a joint photo shoot, after which Tay jumped down from her perch on top of a landing into Jason's arms, prompting her husband to swing her around and say only, "I love my Tay."
Now, though, there is no smiling. When they are in character, football players have a mortal fear of having their photo taken while they are smiling. They would rather run gassers on the hottest day of two-a-days than pose for a smiling photo.
The photographer is firing off frames, making a half-circle around the burly center. Jason's wife is trying to get him to laugh.
"You're trying to get me to look compassionate. I'm not compassionate," Jason says, and he almost growls.
Tay giggles.
Adam Lucas is the
publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and can be reached at
alucas@tarheelmonthly.com. To subscribe to Tar Heel Monthly and receive a copy of this month's football preview issue, click here.
