Fearless (5 page)

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
.”

E
VER SINCE
A
DAM HAD WATCHED
S
HAWN
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 coaches 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.

A couple dozen guys and girls partied in the warm summer waters Lake Hamilton style, on a flotilla of pontoon boats and speed boats, various inflatables or skis in tow. With ice chests overflowing with cold drinks and music blaring, the girls sunbathed
and the guys showed off with backflips. And in the middle of it all was Adam, life jacket fastened securely. His buddies taunted him, “Dude, Adam, your mom’s not here!” To which Adam replied, “Naw. It’s no big deal. I promised.”

Jeff Buschmann and Adam after running a logging road in the Ouachita woods. Jeff recalls that the stick had something to do with fending off rattlesnakes.

“Adam was like no other kid I ever met,” says Roger Buschmann, who was privy to Adam’s resolve that day. He was even more impressed a few months later when Adam was one of five buddies invited to the Buschmann home for a sleepover. “At two in the morning I heard a knock on our bedroom door,” he says. “It was Adam, holding a phone. Ends up the boys had snuck out to crash a girls’ slumber party but got caught by the mother, who was not pleased when she called me to come get them.”

As Roger Buschmann was leaving the house, he asked Adam why he hadn’t gone with his buddies.

“My parents told me not to leave the house without permission, sir.”

They might be able to out-party Adam, but none of his buddies could beat his crazy stunts. While they’d all jump from the 70 West bridge forty feet into the lake, Adam would add flips and gainers, a forward dive with a reverse rotation. At football camp he was the undisputed belly-flop king, doing five in a row—off the high board.

Then there was his penchant for jumping into (not out of) trees. On his first attempt off a twenty-five-foot-tall bridge into a thirty-foot elm, he missed entirely the branch he was aiming for. The one he did hit snapped, along with others that slowed his fall to the base of the tree, where he landed feet first, a shower of leaves fluttering down around him.

Figuring he’d chosen the wrong genus of tree, Adam tried leaping into a large evergreen off the second-floor deck of a friend’s house a few weeks later. The branch bowed under his weight, then broke. Jeff Buschmann, on hand to witness the carnage, heard a succession of grunts as Adam hit branch after branch on his way down.

“Please don’t do that again,” he told Adam, who walked away bruised but not broken. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

Adam considered his friends—including Jeff, Heath Vance, and Richard Williams—an extension of his family, and they bonded like brothers in what all of them felt was an idyllic country-boy upbringing. Playing football, swimming and boating in the
lake, hiking in the woods, making out with girls, drinking beer, having bonfires, backyard basketball games, house parties, and fistfights—usually with each other—and pulling pranks.

One night when they were sixteen, Jeff, Richard, and Adam rolled a house in an entire case of toilet paper, then tore through the woods to get back to the car they’d left discreetly parked on a different street. Their escape was almost complete when a dark figure materialized by the car, waiting patiently.

Moments later, they were in the backseat of a police cruiser, Jeff and Richard squeezed in on either side of Adam, who kept saying, “My momma and daddy are going to be so disappointed.”