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  But in that moment, when God showed His hard justice to Adam and Eve and the rest of us, He showed His mercy too. He might’ve locked away paradise, but He also gave us the keys for something else: the ability to farm and live.

  The life of a farmer isn’t easy, and it’s far from paradise. I feel the sweat on my face nearly every day. I feel my muscles ache and the bone-hard weariness in every fiber of my body.

  But when I grow something, I see a reminder of that holy garden sometimes—the echo of what could’ve been. As a boy, I felt that echo for the first time.

  Life wasn’t easy; I knew that already, even as a kid. My father was gone so much. I knew how hard he had to work to keep a roof over his family’s head and food on the table.

  But I also saw that food grows on trees. I knew, even if I wasn’t able to fully articulate it then, that the food was a gift from God. Not only was my earthly father working hard for us, but our heavenly Father was providing too. No, our lives were no Eden. That garden was gone. But when I watched those apples grow a little bigger each day, I saw God’s provision and plan. Those apples grew, just like we’re supposed to do—in body, and in mind, faith, and trust in Him.

  I didn’t suspect, as a child, that ultimately my future would be so closely tied to growing food that I’d become a farmer, growing crops not that far away from where my grandfather Jasper did. I didn’t know I’d be looking to the dust and the dirt to feed not only my family but countless others as well.

  First I had another sort of field to explore.

  CHAPTER 3

  Brothers

  Most people who become pro-caliber football players loved the sport from the time they were babies. They grew up throwing the football with their dads. They played on Pee Wee teams. They were jocks from the time they could tie their shoes—the cool kids on the elementary playground and in the middle school cafeteria.

  That wasn’t me. I was the fat kid getting bullied by a girl a third my size.

  Her name was Britney, and I lived in terror of her. It was fall 1996, and we were both at Eaton-Johnson Middle School. I was just thirteen. That summer, an Eddie Murphy movie called The Nutty Professor came out. Murphy played a guy named Sherman Klump, a kindly science professor who’d break the weight scales if he ever stood on one. Britney must’ve loved that movie. Or, at the very least, she sure loved telling me how much I looked like Sherman Klump.

  “Sherman!” she’d holler down the halls. “Sherman, Sherman, Sherman! Why are you so fat, Jason Brown?”

  People often think of bullies as the big kids who could just roll up their sleeves and punch the lights out of anyone—and look for any excuse to do so. This skinny little girl couldn’t punch the lights out of a lamp. I could’ve picked her up and snapped her in two like a toothpick. But it didn’t matter. “Sherman!” she’d holler, and my blood would run cold. “Sherman!” she’d scream, and I’d start to blush. Every day she bullied me. Every day she called me names. If I saw her before she saw me, I’d start walking fast the other way. It got to the point that if I was walking from building to building, I’d stop and look around the corner to make sure she wasn’t there, as if she were a rabid dog. I was walking in constant fear.

  If I’d been into sports at the time, maybe she would’ve left me alone. Jocks seem to get passes in school. But I wasn’t a jock. I was about as far away from being a jock as you could be. In fact, I was kind of a loser. I lost at everything I did, it seemed. Especially to my big brother.

  Ducie

  My brother was named Lunsford Bernard Brown II, after my father. But instead of calling him Junior, everyone just called him Ducie because he was number two. He was our family’s free spirit—an artist in talent and temperament. He could draw the most beautiful things in the world, be it a fantastic and elaborate comic-book land or the backyard right outside our house. His hands were always busy with something. If he wasn’t drawing something, he was making something, and as we got older, those hands sometimes put aside pencil and paper and picked up hammer and nails. Ducie knew all about carpentry and stonework and masonry—skills that came in handy when he and I helped our dad with his landscaping business. My brother was a natural creator, a builder. And, in many ways, he helped build me too.

  Ducie was seven years older than I was, and I idolized him. But here’s the deal: he was seven years older, and every younger sibling knows that means that when we were both home looking for something to do, Ducie called the shots.

  He loved to watch Star Trek, so every afternoon that’s what we’d watch. I didn’t think that sci-fi stuff made much sense, and I got pretty tired of seeing Klingons every time we turned on the TV, but I still watched. He loved video games too. He started out with a Super Nintendo and the SEGA Genesis. But when the family got a PlayStation, he found his real passion. He’d play those games for hours—until four or five in the morning sometimes. As soon as his grades would slip, my mother would take the games away, and then his grades would improve. He’d get his games back, and the grades would slip again. And so it went.

  He became a master at those video games, and a kid like me just couldn’t keep up. He’d tell me to play a fighting game with him—something like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat—and he’d just beat me with ease every single time. He knew all the moves. He was so much quicker than I was. Other kids might’ve thought, Well, I just have to practice and get better, but there was no way I was going to practice more than Ducie. It was hopeless. And because he beat me so badly every time we played, it took all the fun out of it for me.

  Video games weren’t the only things I lost at. In fact, when I was a kid, it felt like I was the Browns’ biggest loser. Even when I sat down and played cards with other family members—even straight-up games of chance, like War—I seemed to lose every single time. I’ve got bad luck, I’d tell myself. But luck or no, it didn’t do my ego any good—or help me develop a love for games of chance of any kind. As an adult, I’ve been to Las Vegas a couple of times, and I’ve walked through my share of casinos, but my memory of losing as a child is so strong that none of it holds any temptation for me. Zero. I don’t trust my luck.

  Maybe that’s why I didn’t turn to sports right away. That, or the fact that my family just wasn’t interested in them. My grandfather Jasper wanted to give his own children a better education than he had, and my dad had taken that lesson to heart. My parents knew that school—not sports—was the key to success. If athletics entered their minds at all, it was purely an afterthought.

  And even when I did try sports, I didn’t have much luck in that, either.

  My favorite sport is, hands down, baseball, not football. I loved to play baseball—and still do, in fact. I’d even played a year of Little League. So, when I went into middle school, I tried out for the baseball team. I did everything I could to make the Eaton-Johnson Middle School team.

  I failed. I was cut before the season even began. Man, I was crushed. I’d tried so hard. I’d put so much effort into making that team. It might’ve been one of the biggest letdowns of my life.

  All that losing takes a toll on you. By the time Britney was screaming, “Sherman!” at me in middle school, I was at an all-time low in terms of self-confidence. I felt like the least popular kid at school—a total loser in everything.

  You’d think that when Ducie and my sister, Dana, left for college, things would get better. At least I wouldn’t be getting thumped playing War and Mortal Kombat all the time. But I did feel pretty lonely.

  My dad was in Washington, DC. My mom was a real estate agent in the Henderson area and very active politically. She served for sixteen years on the school board and then served another twelve as a county commissioner—the first woman to hold that title, and the first African American too. Those duties kept her away for quite a bit of the time, so I’d come home, make myself a couple of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and w
atch some MTV or maybe a few Brady Bunch reruns. Alone.

  But that time alone wasn’t wasted. I didn’t wallow in self-pity—at least not much. Once The Brady Bunch was through for the day, I had time to start thinking about what I was going to do with my life. Maybe it was boredom. Maybe it was the fact that I always saw my parents working so hard to better themselves and our family. Maybe there was just something in me that pushed me to think about my future more than most kids my age did. Whatever it was, at the age of thirteen, I started thinking about what my priorities should be.

  Faith, I figured, would always be number one in my life. My family had always valued faith so much, and I knew what the Bible said: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33, KJV). That was obviously the best place to start.

  Family came next. I love my family. I knew I’d lay my life down for any of them. I knew, from my father’s absence, how important being with family was to me, so that was definitely number two.

  Third was education. With my upbringing, how could it not be?

  So that was it: faith, family, and education. I committed those goals to memory before I was even shaving.

  But by the time I was heading into high school, I was also tired of being picked on by the Britneys of the world. I was tired of losing all the time. I was tired of being the chunky low man on the social totem pole. So I decided to do something pretty ambitious: I was going to be part of the high school band and try out for the football team too.

  Tooting My Own Horn

  Looking back, it was pretty dumb to do both. We had two-a-day football practices, each one around two hours long. Band practice was nearly three hours. I’d be at school the entire day and into the evening. And after three or four days of that, I knew something had to give. Something was bound to break inside me if I kept going down that path. I had to quit one or the other, and the answer seemed simple.

  Football had to go.

  Football practice was hard, man. It was really physically demanding, and I wasn’t in great shape to begin with. It was mentally demanding too. My coach, Randy Long, saw that I had potential underneath all my extra fat. He told me that I might make the varsity squad as a freshman. As soon as some of the juniors and seniors heard that, they started hazing me.

  At most football practices, you’ll see bags or dummies that serve a variety of purposes. When they’re laid flat on the ground, you hop and hurdle over them and they become great tools to improve footwork. Stand them on end and have a football player brace them from behind, and they serve as tackling dummies. Well, being the big kid that I was, I was often holding and bracing those dummies for some of the other players. Whenever that happened, the older kids would charge at it—and me—like I’d insulted their mothers. They’d try to knock me flat on my back. I got tired of being a punching bag.

  Playing in the marching band was a lot easier. I had experience in it, for one thing: I’d played trombone for my middle school band, and I liked it. And while band practice was long and tiring in its own way, at least I wasn’t going to get many bruises from it. Plus, marching band had (naturally) many more girls. I thought that maybe I’d be able to hang out with some of them.

  At the end of that first grueling week, I walked up to Coach Long and did something I hardly ever do: I quit. I explained to him that I wasn’t ready to be a football player. Not yet.

  “I’m out of shape, okay?” I told him that morning. “I’ve got so much baby fat and stuff on me.” I’d spend my freshman year getting rid of that baby fat, I told him. I’d work out and work hard to turn that blubber into muscle. Then, once I was ready, I’d try out for the football team again next year.

  Coach Long didn’t believe me. He looked at me, and I could tell that the only word he really heard from me was quit. If there’s a sin in sports, that’s the biggest. “Once a quitter, always a quitter” goes the cliché, and in that moment, Coach Long pegged me as a quitter. He took my shoulder pads and probably never expected me to walk into his office, for any reason, again.

  Unfortunately, marching band wasn’t all I hoped it would be either. Sure, there were a lot more girls in band, but I soon discovered they were all looking at the football players. Just being a part of the band stuck me automatically in the friend zone. I gave up on dating anyone there—dating anyone, really—for a while.

  Even if Coach Long thought I quit on the team, I hadn’t quit on football.

  I knew I had to get in shape, become stronger, and lose my baby fat. Lifting weights would be the best way to do it, but I couldn’t take a weight-training course my freshman year. The only time I could find to lift weights at school was during my lunch period. We had a half hour to eat, so I’d gobble my lunch in five minutes and go down to the weight room for the next twenty-five. Coach Long was often in the weight room as well, and I tried asking him for help. I wanted to learn some different techniques on how to lift more effectively, more efficiently. He just brushed me off at first.

  “I’ve got players to coach,” he told me. “I don’t have time for you. Go ask someone else.”

  But I kept going to the weight room. I kept lifting. I kept getting stronger. Every day, Coach Long saw me in there, working my tail off, just like I told him I would. Finally, after weeks of this, he started paying attention to me. He started helping me.

  “You’re not getting low enough,” he’d tell me as I tried to squat 315 pounds. “Unlock your hips first and make sure you get parallel.”

  He encouraged me to try out for the track-and-field team that spring, and I did—not as a runner, of course, but as a discus and shot-put thrower. That May—on my birthday, actually—I won the high school state championship in discus by throwing the metal disc 149 feet on a cold, rainy, miserable day. That’s about 15 feet farther than I’d ever thrown. To this day, I still don’t know how I did it.

  With that success, and with the fat that was indeed slowly melting into muscle, the Britneys of the world started looking at me a little differently. Sure, a girl did turn her nose up at me when I came straight from the weight room to the science class. (I’d worked up quite a sweat, and I’m sure I wasn’t the most pleasant-smelling guy to sit next to.) But my classmates could see that I was changing.

  I had just turned sixteen years old. It felt as though my whole life—my whole life in high school, anyway—was turning around.

  No one was calling me Sherman anymore.

  “Be Better Than Me”

  The next year, I tried out for the football team, just like I told Coach Long I would, and I began to excel there. I stayed on the track team, too, competing in both discus and shot put. I eventually won state championships in both. In fact, I won the state championship in discus three times.

  But sports still didn’t crack my priority list. It was still faith, family, education. I might’ve been good at football. It might’ve helped make me more popular at school. But what happened on the football field or at a track meet took a back seat to what I did in class.

  I’ve already said how important education was in our family and that both Ducie and Dana went to college. But my family wasn’t rich, and it wasn’t easy for my parents to send them. I sometimes heard my parents in heated debates over how they were going to afford all that schooling. I didn’t want to put my parents through that a third time.

  If there’s anything that I can do to take that burden off my parents, where they don’t have to worry about paying for college, I’m going to do it, I told myself. I worked far harder in the classroom than I did out on the football field because I was angling for an academic scholarship after high school. I wanted someone to pay me to go to college.

  I wasn’t even thinking about an athletic scholarship. None of my family even considered such a thing. I played football just to widen my social circles a little. For me, footba
ll wasn’t about the thrill of the game or the competition or dreams of playing in the NFL. I wasn’t wired for any of that. It was about being liked.

  That changed one day when Coach Long suggested that academics weren’t the only way a university would pay for my schooling.

  “Jason, what are your goals in high school?” he asked. “What do you want to achieve here?”

  No-brainer, I thought. After all, I had my list of priorities. “Academics are my first priority,” I said. “I want to get good grades. I want to go to college.”

  “So, what about football?” he asked. “What do you want to achieve there?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I just want to play for you and have a good time,” I said. “But my academics always come first, all right? I need that scholarship.”

  I think he almost rolled his eyes.

  “Jason, don’t you know you could earn a scholarship playing football?”

  Just like that, a bell went off in my head. “Seriously?” I asked. Sports were so off my family’s radar that it had never occurred to me that someone might pay for me to go to college to play sports.

  “Seriously,” Coach Long said. “I think you’ve got a great shot at one.”

  That changed the trajectory of my high school career. It wasn’t as if my education took a back seat to football. I still studied hard, still graduated as a member of the National Honor Society. But knowing I had two chances for a scholarship—one in football and the other in academics—made me redouble my commitment to the sport.