The Ultimate Locker Room

JIM by James Toback. 133 pages. Dou-b/eday. $4.95.

When James Toback (Harvard, magna cum laude, 1966) flew to Los Angeles to interview Jim Brown (Cleveland Browns, summa, 1965), there were some unnecessarily dressy items in his mental luggage: Nietzsche's code about "the genius of the heart," Keats' concept of "negative capability," and that always stylish bit about the pre-eminence of the black's psychosexual powers.

The most important thing in Toback's bag, however, was the jockstrap ego of an ex-college athlete. Within an hour after he met Jim Brown at his home above Sunset Strip, the two were out on the basketball court in Brown's driveway. Down nine to nothing in a ten-point, one-on-one game, the man who walked out on pro football to prove his competence as an actor, businessman and racial leader very softly asks Toback if he really thinks he is going to win. Brown then sinks ten straight, leaving a thoroughly psyched Toback revealed as a born loser.

"The will to submission," Toback calls it. If he forgoes examination of the malady's finer points and racial implications, it isn't because he left his copy of Benito Cereno in New York. It is because Toback got so busy trying to certify his manhood in what he believes to be the black man's terms that submission was soon out of the question. So was the magazine article he had intended to write. But by the time that became apparent, Toback and "J.B." were good friends. This odd book is a fascinating chronicle of that very tense, and--for Toback--challenging relationship.

Had Brown been less sure of his own prowess, he might have seriously scarred the vulnerable young writer. But as a swinging Batman to Toback's cocky Elobin, J.B. proves to be a concerned and even therapeutic big brother. When Toback's wife, the granddaughter of an English duke, leaves him, Brown is helpful though not overly sympathetic. It didn't take much to see that Toback had been confused about which Marl-Dorough country he really wanted to come home to.

Once settled in indefinitely as Brown's house guest, Toback joined the enviable rhythms of a superstar's life. It was the ultimate locker room, a fan's towel-snapping fantasy come true--buddy to the hero, access to exciting places and beautiful people. There are mornings on the tennis court where Toback, an experienced player, barely manages to beat Beginner Brown. There are afternoons at the Black Economic Union, the organization Brown founded to generate capital and talent for Negro enterprises. There are evenings at discotheques that run wildly into all-night parties at J.B.'s with celebrities, athletes and girls in all manner of shapes and shades. At one point Brown and his girl of the moment, Toback and his, engage in mixed doubles on a king-sized bed. The competition never lets up.

Even when Toback composes a news release to defend Brown against what he took to be a fishy hit-and-run charge, Brown comes up with a tougher and more eloquent statement on TV. Only when a drunken soldier at an airport tells Toback that Brown is "nothin' but another nigger," does he find release. He punches the soldier in the mouth, watches him bleed, and then walks away feeling exhilarated and desperately Nietzschean. But Jim Brown would not have had to do that. Jim Toback blew it again.

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