Grandmother gave Brown a chance

SAN FRANCISCO – His mother was 13 when she became pregnant with him. When Anthony Brown was 3 months old, she got in a car with a boyfriend and ran away, leaving him with his grandmother. He’s never met his father.

The Oregon State senior receiver grew up in Compton, Calif., which was ground zero for the United States’ crack epidemic of the 1980s and ‘90s. The homicide rate there is eight times the national average. There are gangs, and racial violence, and when Brown goes home from college on breaks, he often discovers someone he grew up with was sent to prison or shot and killed.

Football game?

Sure.

Oregon State and Maryland will play in the Emerald Bowl today. Brown’s Beavers will attempt to win their ninth game of a season that once looked headed nowhere. But if we’re talking about real American victories, and important celebrations, maybe we should talk first about Brown.

He sat out practice Wednesday at City College of San Francisco with pulled muscles in his groin and legs. If he doesn’t heal, the Beavers receiver might not play a single down in the last football game of his college career. But he’s young, smart, African-American and will earn his degree in the spring, leave football, and go hunting for a job helping inner-city kids.

So Brown ends up as some of the best currency this country has.

“His wishes were always to please me,” said Josephine, his grandmother.

It’s why he followed her rules, and did his homework, and stayed out of trouble. It’s why he went straight from school to band practice to home. It’s why, every Sunday, when Josephine sang in the church choir, there was Anthony, who learned the piano at 7, right beside her, playing piano in front of the congregation.

Josephine, 70, took care of Anthony. She fed him. She clothed him. She helped him with his classwork, and shuttled him to music lessons, and sports practices, and to church. What did Josephine do for herself?

“She helped make sure I turned out right,” Brown said.

They still talk on the telephone every night. He tells her about football practice and his ethnic studies courses. She tells him about going to the grocery store with his grandfather, Allen, and how they decided to paint their house on Cherry Street a color called “Miami Peach.” While Anthony’s mother drifted in and out of his life over the last decade, when it came time to list “parents” on his Oregon State biography this season, Anthony wrote “Josephine and Allen Brown.”

His story isn’t clean and tidy, though. Life almost never is.

In 2004, Brown missed the Oregon game and State’s Insight Bowl win over Notre Dame for his role in an incident involving a reserve National Guardsman in Corvallis. Last season, he missed three games for an undisclosed violation of team rules, which raised questions from his grandmother about what he was doing with his life, and where he wanted to go with it.

“Those mistakes helped me decide to grow up,” Brown said.

He was known then as Anthony Wheat-Brown.

This season, he came back as Anthony Brown and led OSU in receptions (39) and yards (550).