The Story of Willard "Home Run" Brown | Featuring the Late Willard Brown

Black Diamonds

SiriusXM

History, Baseball, Black History, Sports, Negro Leagues, Documentary, Equality, Society & Culture, Civil Rights

4.8 • 617 Ratings

🗓️ 7 September 2023

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

He was Ese Hombre. He was Sunny. He was Home Run Brown. He was Special Services for the US Army at the invasion of Normandy. And he was the Negro Leagues' greatest power hitter of the 1940's. Meet Willard Brown, through the stories of Bob Kendrick and the archived voice of Brown himself. Hear how the late Hall of Famer planned to be a Kansas City Monarch from an early age, and ended up rewriting their record books. Hear about his legendary tape-measure shots, and game-winning heroics, his larger-than-life persona in his career in Latin America, and the joy he brought to European troops hitting home runs for the Army in World War II. And don't miss the story of Willard Brown's historic, yet ill-fated, stint as the first Black player (alongside Hank Thompson) in St. Louis Browns history, and why it paled in comparison the competitive levels of the Negro Leagues.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You intend to get your pit.
0:12.0	I don't care what we tell me, and then if they got it close, you could hit it all right,
0:17.0	field, and on left.
0:19.0	We say it didn't make any difference.
0:25.4	Of course, you can hit balls if you get close with that bet you carry.
0:27.9	See, that long, you carry it up that.
0:30.2	I just laugh.
0:30.9	I just laughed.
0:33.8	I just laughed when I said, man, I was just lucky to hit that ball.
0:43.5	This American League statistics,
0:49.2	21 games, a 179 batting average,
1:00.8	tell the most incomplete story possible of a ball player as great as the legendary Willard, Jesse Brown.
1:07.7	His Hall of Fame plaque, however, speaks volumes about the Pioneer who is one of the Negro League's greatest power hitters. As a matter of fact, if Josh Gibson nicknamed your home run Brown,
1:16.1	then you probably got some power.
1:20.2	And Willett Brown had some power.
1:22.9	As a matter of fact, he was likely the most feared power hitter in the Negro Leagues in the 1940s.
1:30.6	Keep in mind, Josh Gibson himself, who tagged Willett Brown with the moniker Home Run Brown, had become ill.
1:40.3	And by the time that Jackie Robinson breaks the color barrier, Gibson, of course, had passed away as a result of a brain tumor.
1:50.1	But please understand, when it comes to Willett Brown, the bigger the game, the better he was.
1:58.2	And while he never got a real fair chance in the major leagues, and Willa
2:03.7	Brown's story is so prolific and so very interesting, in 1947, when Jackie Robinson
2:12.0	breaks the color barrier, we know that there were four other players, all of them from the Negro Leagues, who would
	...

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