by Eric Blehm
Adam’s relentlessness crossed over onto the football field, where he was the star tackler and earned the defensive player of the year award before the Browns moved again, this time to Indian Springs, Nevada. Another job, another school, another sport, and in another blink of an eye, Nevada was a memory, and it was on to Loveland, Colorado. The twins continued to decorate the blank walls of their new rooms with prized art projects from various schools—the backs of which were marked with names, dates, and locations—and Janice and Larry marveled at how well their children had taken to life on the road. Their imaginations blossomed, transforming blank corners in rooms into castles, a tree stump into the plank of a pirate ship, or a scraggly backyard into the perfectly manicured football field of their dreams, with an end zone that begged for game-winning catches.
One snowy Sunday morning in December, the Browns trudged out into the woods and cut down a small evergreen for their living room. They spent the day making ornaments and strings of popcorn, then decorated its boughs to the smell of hot cider with cinnamon sticks simmering on the stove.
“We had pretty much nothing but homemade gifts that year,” says Janice, “but it was so, so much fun. We loved that little tree, and how we dolled it all up with paper ornaments, a tinfoil star, and whatever the kids wanted to hang on it.
“It was lovely. It was … Christmas.”
After two years of bouncing from state to state, Janice and Larry bought a used thirty-five-foot trailer to live in. From campgrounds to trailer parks—and sometimes Grandma Smith’s driveway in Hot Springs—the family continued a nomadic existence, following work around the country and never maintaining an address for more than six months, sometimes as little as two. Larry built bunk beds for Shawn and Adam in a tiny room at the trailer’s rear, while Manda had a cubbyhole within the cabinetry the size of her little mattress, and a curtain for a door. Their parents slept on the foldout couch in the ten-by-ten space that also served as the living/dining/do-everything room.
Six-year-old Adam insisted on wearing his “Arkansas” T-shirt on picture day.
Another two years had passed when Shawn got into a fight at school in Tucson, Arizona. Now fourteen, he had been a trouper through all the moves, but Janice and Larry knew it was time to settle down. It was easier for Adam and Manda, being younger, to make new friends, while Shawn was the quiet kid who was the add-on at the end of every teacher’s roll call and every coach’s roster. As a solid catcher and power hitter in baseball, and a talent in almost any position on the football field, he eventually made friends and a name for himself, but then the family would move and he’d have to start again. His eighth-grade year alone, he went to six different schools—fifteen schools in all over the years.
“Shawn is miserable,” Janice told Larry. “He won’t complain, but he’s miserable.”
Shawn wasn’t the only one worn out by life on the road and the constant struggle to make ends meet. “Well,” said Larry, “if we’re going to starve, let’s do it at home. Let’s go home to Hot Springs.”
The Browns moved back to their house in Arkansas in time for Shawn to enter the ninth grade and Manda and Adam to begin fifth. Janice and Larry started a new business out of the garage—All Service Electric—with any and all jobs welcomed. Janice answered the phone and kept the books: in those nascent months, literally a book. Slowly, as they pinned their business cards on bulletin boards, tucked them under windshield wipers, and handed them out at the local grocery store, the book filled with work orders, each one a celebration.
And for every month spent at the same address, the family sank its roots deeper into the Arkansas soil, which was particularly rich in Hot Springs, a small city of some thirty-five thousand located in the scenic Ouachita Mountains and known for the natural thermal waters that flow from forty-seven springs on Hot Springs Mountain.
The kids reentered the local school system, where Adam’s protective nature began to shine. Each weekday, the twins were dropped off with Shawn and had to make their way past the middle school handball courts in order to get to the elementary school. Any smaller kids within range would be bombarded with tennis balls hucked—and hucked hard—by older kids playing wall ball. “Adam would spread his arms out and side shuffle, guarding me, keeping me in close to him, so the balls couldn’t hit me,” says Manda. “He’d get hit a lot, but he wouldn’t flinch till he got me to safety.”
Adam and Manda, age three, with their big brother, Shawn, age seven.
That first fall back home, Adam joined the YMCA’s peewee tackle football program—assigned to the fifth-and-sixth-grade team, the Lake Hamilton Wolf Pack. Toward the end of their first practice with pads and helmets, Coach Mike Glisson, known as Coach Nitro, gathered the team, marked off a thirty-by-ten-yard lane, and asked for volunteers for a blocking-tackling drill called Blood Alley. The first kid to raise his hand was Adam Brown, whom Coach Nitro describes as being “not much bigger than a number two pencil.” Deeming Adam either suicidal or “too big for his britches,” he chose a more size-equitable boy, and when practice ended, Adam still hadn’t gotten a turn.
At home Adam said to his mom, “That coach won’t even let me play; he thinks I’m too little.”
“Well, Adam, you know how to make somebody notice you,” Janice replied. “You go back in there and keep trying. They’ll let you play.”
From then on, Adam made it his mission to take on the biggest players of the team every chance he got. “He just wouldn’t quit,” Glisson says.
Coach Nitro wasn’t the only one to notice Adam’s guts and reckless abandon on the field.
“Guess what my teammates called me today,” Adam told his parents proudly one evening after practice. “Psycho!”
In sixth grade Adam was playing touch football on the school playground and, because Adam Brown didn’t do anything half speed, the casual game became rough touch, and then really rough touch. Adam dived for a pass that “Superman himself couldn’t have caught,” says his friend Ryan Whited, and hit the ground chin first.
He got up and ran over to Ryan, mumbling something incoherently, blood dripping from the corners of his mouth. When he opened it and the blood poured out, Ryan could see that Adam had bitten most of his tongue off—all the way through, except for a little flesh on one side. “I’m going to the nurse” was what he was trying to say.
“Anybody else would have been on the ground wailing,” says Ryan, “but Adam didn’t even cry. He just walked to the nurse, went home, and got it sewn back on.”
Every day after school, Manda and Adam would walk from their middle school over to the high school and watch Shawn at football practice.
At Lake Hamilton High School, with around seven hundred students in grades ten through twelve, “Big Bad Shawn Brown” was a star athlete whose ability to crush adversaries both on and off the field was legendary. Shawn played defensive lineman for the Lake Hamilton Wolves—the nose guard—and Adam would say, in his best Mr. T. impersonation, “I pity the fool who tries to run up the middle against my brother.”
Adam was such a die-hard fan of his brother and his brother’s team that the coaches made him the ball boy and gave him a team jersey. “You couldn’t have slapped the smile off his face,” says Shawn. “As far as Adam was concerned, he was hanging out with the NFL.”
One afternoon Adam showed up to help with practice, eyes red from crying. “What happened?” Shawn asked. Adam explained how a junior varsity player had cornered him in the locker room and given him a swirly—shoved his head into a toilet bowl and flushed. “It was disrespectful,” Adam said, staring at the ground.
Lifting Adam’s chin up with his hand, Shawn said, “We’ll see what we can do about that later.”
After practice, Shawn was driving them home when he noticed the JV player’s car parked outside the Busy B’s Café. He pulled over and, with Adam in tow, walked up to the booth where the kid was eating a burger with a buddy. Glancing up, the kid saw Adam and Shawn, and like a deer in the headlights,
he froze. Shawn leaned in and stared him in the eye.
“If you ever touch my little brother again,” said Shawn, loud enough for every patron in the restaurant to hear, “I will break both of your legs.” He stepped away and said again, “Both of them.”
The café was silent. Avoiding Shawn’s ferocious gaze, the JV player nodded his head. Outside in the parking lot, Shawn put his arm around his little brother, who was still grinning. If Adam had looked up to Shawn before, from that day forward he was a giant.
During the summer of 1987 a new kid showed up in Hot Springs. His name was Jeff Buschmann, and he was a football player and a Navy brat who’d been born in Italy, lived at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and bounced around the United States from San Diego and Washington on the West Coast to Florida and Maine on the East. He’d attended six schools, the last in South Carolina, before his father—Commander Roger Buschmann—took command of the Navy recruiting district based in Little Rock.
Janice had met Jeff’s mother after a football practice and suggested to Adam that he do something with the new kid to make him feel welcome in Hot Springs. But instead of Adam showing Jeff around, Jeff took Adam to the monster of a rope swing he’d discovered by the pylons of the I-70 West bridge over Lake Hamilton. The rope was long, frayed, knotted, and affixed somehow to the underside of the bridge some forty feet above them. Even the intrepid Adam Brown eyed the thing and muttered “I don’t know.” while Jeff dove into the warm water, grabbed the string trailing from the rope, and swam with it to the nearest pylon. “It looks like quite a ride,” he said to Adam as he climbed to the starting point atop the fifteen-foot pylon. “I’ll go first.”
This giant pendulum took its rider full speed toward the water before arcing into the air over the lake. “At the apex you were a good twenty feet up,” says Jeff. “That’s when you let go if you really wanted some air time, or you could just hang on and ride it out. You couldn’t slam into a tree or anything.” According to Jeff, “It was completely safe,” something he told Adam several times, egging him on as he took turn after turn himself.
For whatever reason, Adam didn’t trust the rope, but Jeff had seen Adam on the football field and knew he had the courage. Finally, Adam relented. Climbing to the top of the pylon, he grabbed the rope high at a knot, pulled on it a few times, jumped into the air, and held on for dear life. Down he swooped, and at the lowest point, when the speed was greatest and the rope stretched the tightest, it snapped and Adam hit the calm surface of Lake Hamilton in a watery explosion of arms, legs, and gurgled curses.
“Oh shit!” Jeff said, diving off the pylon and swimming to the water’s edge. “I am so sorry!” he told Adam, who was visibly shaken by the incident but tried to brush it off by saying, “It’s all right; at least now I know what an enema feels like.”
“I don’t get it! How could I do it all those times, and then it snaps right when you try?” Jeff said.
Adam just shrugged.
It’s the only time Jeff would remember Adam backing down from anything or anyone.
Once school started in the fall, Adam introduced Jeff to everyone as his new friend. He told them about “Busch” taking on the 70 West bridge rope swing, something that, Adam admitted, “scared me half to death.” Such praise, coming from Adam Brown, gave the new kid instant street credibility and forged a lifelong friendship.
“At thirteen, when most kids are heartless and downright mean, Adam knew what it meant to be nice,” says Jeff. “He would go out of his way to make you feel good about yourself.” And Adam was friends with everybody. “He transcended cliques. I never heard him say anything mean about anybody, but he always stood up for people.”
During that eighth-grade year, Adam was hanging out with friends in front of the school one morning when a school bus pulled up and students poured out. Most of the kids headed to the front doors, but three boys stopped Richie Holden, who had Down syndrome, and taunted him by calling him names. Smaller than any of the bullies, Adam nevertheless marched over and stood in front of Richie. “If you want to pick on someone,” he said, “you can pick on me—if you think you’re big enough.”
“The three backed off,” Richie’s father, Dick Holden, says, recounting the story as told to him by Richie and his older sister, Rachel. “Adam put his arm around Richie and walked with him through the door, then all the way to his class. Richie never forgot that, and I remember thinking, That Brown boy—he’s something special.”
3
The Wolf Pack
EVER SINCE ADAM HAD WATCHED SHAWN play varsity football in Lake Hamilton High School’s Wolf Stadium under the Friday night lights, it had been his “field of dreams.”
Walking the sidelines as an eleven-year-old ball boy, Adam had fantasized about the day he would suit up, clash against their rivals, and earn his own “stick marks”—multicolored paint streaks on his maroon helmet from colliding with the helmets of opposing schools’ teams. To paint over them was sacrilege.
In the summer of 1989, Adam finally stepped onto the grass at Wolf Stadium as a player. It was eight o’clock in the morning and already ninety degrees, with T-shirt-soaking humidity, when assistant coach Steve Anderson surveyed the talent that had shown up for practice. Coach Anderson, the offensive line coach at Lake Hamilton, had his eyes peeled for players like Shawn Brown, who was now playing college ball on a partial scholarship at Henderson State University in nearby Arkadelphia. He’d seen the name Adam Brown on the junior varsity roster and wondered if their enthusiastic ball boy from two years before had finally put some meat on his bones.
Adam’s beaming smile was unmistakable. So was his size; Coach Anderson doubted he’d grown at all since eighth grade. Even with pads on, Adam looked like “an itty bitty kid,” says Coach Anderson. “All helmet.”
Toward the end of their first practice, the coaches laid two blocking dummies side by side on the grass, creating a lane or “alley,” and both junior varsity and varsity gathered around to cheer on their buddies during “Alley Drill.” First a coach called out two equal-size players, who faced each other in three-point stances. The whistle blew and they sprang forward, collided, and tried to either bowl each other over or muscle each other out of the alley. “It’s a very physical drill,” says Coach Anderson, “a gut check. Football’s a testosterone sport, and the guys are up there to prove their manhood and who can beat who.”
Historically, the big guys—linemen, linebackers, running backs—gravitated toward this drill while the less aggressive and less meaty types prayed they wouldn’t get called out. The junior varsity guys hung back as far as they could, quiet with the crickets.
Except Adam. Just as in his peewee football days with Coach Nitro’s “Blood Alley,” he was up front day after day, begging the coaches to put him in against the bigger varsity players. “C’mon, c’mon, let me take this one. I got it,” he’d yell. The coaches, whose job included not letting the kids hurt themselves, never called on Adam and he’d ultimately stomp off angry.
“Every day he’d give it a shot,” says Coach Anderson, “until finally, toward the end of summer, he wore us down.”
The usually boisterous team lining the alley was almost silent as Adam faced off against one of the bigger varsity linemen. “On the whistle, they crashed into each other,” says Coach Anderson. “Adam did fire out, but this guy hit him hard, drove him back harder, and rolled him up.”
Fully expecting Adam to limp to the back of the line, Coach Anderson blew the whistle. Instead, Adam jumped up, slapped the side of his helmet, and said, “Let’s go again! You want some more of me?”
The coaches looked at each other, and the team responded with a cry of “Let him go!”
Again Adam was pummeled, and again “he popped back up and jumped into his three-point stance, like he wasn’t going to take no for an answer,” says Coach Anderson.
“Let’s go again—I’m gonna whip you this time,” Adam grunted through his mouthpiece.
After the third time, the coach
es called the drill, surprised that Adam wasn’t beat up enough to stop on his own. Before heading off the field, Adam ran over to the offensive lineman he’d been pitted against and thanked him for not going easy on him.
The four coaches present that day knew they’d witnessed something remarkable. Says Coach Anderson, “That one little sophomore taught our whole team more about character in a few minutes than any of us coaches could have in an entire season. He wasn’t going to be the big star lineman that his brother was, but what impressed me was this kid was not scared. He was determined that he was not going to let his size keep him from doing whatever he wanted to do.”
Adam’s tough, daring reputation was rivaled only by his propensity for kindness. He went out of his way to give Richie Holden, the boy with Down syndrome, a high-five whenever he saw him. At school functions he’d ask the wallflowers to dance, and there wasn’t a woman in Hot Springs who opened a door for herself if Adam was in the vicinity. And he always stood up for the underdog—never realizing that because of his size he was one himself.
Just before tenth grade started, Adam was invited to a boat party at the Buschmanns’ lake house. Despite the fact Jeff had become one of Adam’s closest friends, Janice was having reservations about allowing her fifteen-year-old son to attend. To say Janice neither trusted Adam’s swimming ability nor liked the idea of a bunch of teenagers in boats out on the lake was an understatement, but he begged until she agreed he could go—as long as he wore a life jacket. He promised he would.