At a loss
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CLEMSON -– Mike Brown was smiling wide as he walked the field at Raymond James Stadium two hours before the national title game.
After posing for a photo with Dabo Swinney and his family, Brown approached this writer and shook hands. He was told he looked great.
“Yeah, I do don’t I?” came the reply.
Brown was always a background guy, always much more prone to self-deprecation than self-absorption. So this was not his nature.
But when you’re kicking cancer’s tail, when victory over this awful wrecker of body and spirit is in your grasp, some uncommon appreciation of the self is not just acceptable but imperative.
Brown, a 59-year-old Clemson grad who served as Swinney’s agent for his entire head-coaching tenure, flew from Greenville to Tampa the day of that game. And he flew back in the wee hours that next morning, sporting a perma-grin that was even wider than everyone saw before the game, so he could return in time to go through another round of chemotherapy treatments.
Six days ago, Brown went to dinner in Greenville with loved ones to celebrate the final round of chemo that would come the next day. And then Sunday, he awoke with chest pains and dizziness. He was taken to the hospital and didn’t make it out. The prevailing theory is that a blood clot developed from that final round of chemo and killed him.
Al Adams, a Clemson press-box institution and a 1975 graduate of the school, knew Brown for 41 years. After graduation, Adams began working for Bob Bradley in the sports information department. That fall, Brown came from his hometown of Raleigh and started working for Bill Wilhelm as a student trainer under Fred Hoover.
Adams, who yesterday traveled from his home in Forest City, N.C., to Greenville to be with Brown’s family and friends, said Brown was the perfect friend. More like a brother than anything.
“My dad died in 1996, and Mike lived in Huntsville at the time,” Adams recalled. “He drove all the way from Huntsville to Lancaster for the funeral. And then he drove all the way back.”
Last October, Brown suddenly began losing weight and was experiencing regular abdominal pain. He’d recently moved from Atlanta to Greenville, so insurance regulations dictated that he go back to Atlanta to see a doctor. He scheduled a colonoscopy and asked Adams to drive him there.
Brown was full of great stories from all his years as an agent, but you had to pull the anecdotes out of him. So during that trip was when Adams learned about Swinney’s relationship with Cubs manager Joe Maddon, a story Swinney would share with the world two months later.
Brown had been friends with Maddon for a while, and on that two-hour car ride Brown recalled when the Cubs played a series in Atlanta and Maddon invited him to a game as his guest. After the game, Maddon took Brown to his hotel suite for dinner with two other guests: the Cubs’ PR guy, and Bill Murray. The gathering lasted late into the night and morning.
“If you didn’t ask him that question, he would have never told you that,” Adams said. “He just wasn’t a braggadocious kind of guy.”
Brown took a decidedly odd path to the agent industry. He graduated from Clemson with a degree in engineering and eventually landed in Huntsville working for a contractor that was assigned to the Space Shuttle. But he loved sports dearly, and he knew a lot of people. He began representing a few NFL assistants, and before long he was doing well enough to quit his engineering job and pursue it full-time.
Bruce Arians and Mike Mularkey are among his list of NFL clients. In college he represented several Clemson assistants under Tommy Bowden. When West Virginia’s Rich Rodriguez was flirting seriously with Alabama in 2006, Brown was the one doing the negotiating with Tide AD Mal Moore. Another of Brown’s clients was Washington coach Chris Petersen, whose team advanced to this past season’s College Football Playoff semifinal. Brown was that close to having two of his clients play for it all.
When Bowden resigned under pressure in October of 2008, Brown reached out to Swinney and offered his services to Clemson’s new interim coach. In addition to being a Clemson guy, Brown also had in his favor a close relationship with AD Terry Don Phillips.
Brown and Swinney hit it off, and when the coach got the job for good at the end of the regular season Brown was his guy. Like Swinney, Brown had a difficult upbringing; his father left his mother, him and his two sisters at an early age. Swinney also had a grand vision for being more than just a football coach, which meant Brown would be more than just an agent. Sure enough, Brown has been instrumental in Swinney’s philanthropic Dabo’s All-In Team Foundation and has worked closely with Kathleen Swinney to raise money for breast cancer research.
That trip to Atlanta for the colonoscopy brought favorable results when the doctors ruled out colon cancer. But something still was wrong, because of the weight loss and stomach pain. Brown came back to the Upstate and visited with longtime team doctor Larry Bowman, who was skeptical he was OK after running some tests. Swinney called a doctor at Greenville Memorial Hospital, and Brown was in to visit an oncologist the very next day.
The doctors discovered cancer on the tip of Brown’s pancreas. Normally, pancreatic cancer is a death sentence. But the timing of this oncologist visit was vital; the medical staff determined that the early detection created an extraordinarily favorable outlook.
“Ordinarily it would have taken weeks and weeks to get in to see an oncologist,” Brown said that night in Tampa before the game. “Dabo Swinney and Larry Bowman saved my life.”
Yesterday, visitors to Brown’s home saw a copy of the Sports Illustrated celebrating Clemson’s first national title since 1981. The cover was autographed by Hunter Renfrow, who thanked Brown for being all in. The two developed a close relationship since Renfrow arrived at Clemson as an obscure walk-on, each sending the other texts back and forth with prayers and various bits of inspiration. Through Brown’s fight with cancer, through those rounds of chemo that left him weak, Renfrow was there the whole way with words of encouragement.
Over the past month, Brown was bubbly with optimism. He told and retold the story of the intervention from Swinney and Bowman. He recited to everyone the date of his final chemo treatment on Jan. 25.
After that final session, he told the doctors he wanted to ring the bell to celebrate his transition to life as a cancer survivor. They were optimistic but still cautious, telling him to hold off a little longer. He had a surgery scheduled for Feb. 15, and there was still a possibility he’d have to undergo a bit more chemo.
The most enduring image of Brown’s final days came after the win over Alabama, as the team and the Clemson family was finishing its celebration on the field in Tampa. Brown was tired, so he walked off the field and took a seat beside the entrance to the locker room and sat by himself.
Most passersby probably didn’t notice this man of the background, beaming a wide and radiant smile as his client and his team and everyone else basked in the foreground.
Cancer took the man, but it can't take the memory of that smile.
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