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The fast and hungry defensive tackle has endeared himself to the town of Green Bay—and to Burger King
By Mark Bechtel
Gilbert Brown likes hamburgers. Not as much as he likes fried chicken, but in Green Bay they don't make fried chicken like his mom does, so he settles for hamburgers. But not just any burger. If the Packers' behemoth defensive tackle is noshing on ground beef, chances are it's a Double Whopper, topped with everything but pickles—"I'm not a pickle guy," he says—and cut in half, for neatness' sake.
"I've been eating that hamburger for eight years, ever since I was in college," Brown says. "You know how you go to college and you ain't got no money and you're sitting around starving, so you take your two or three dollars and you try to make the best of it? Well, I'd go to Burger King and pile all that stuff on it, take the pickles off, cut it in half, and then I'd be grubbing."
Brown's grubbing has put many a BK manager's child through college. Since his days as a 315-pound undergrad at Kansas, he has added about 45 pounds to his 6'3" frame, most of the weight coming by means of the patty. He consumed so many of the customized Double Whoppers last season that Burger Kings in the region marketed the bovine concoction as the Gilbert Burger. Within days, waists all over Titletown were expanding. During the playoffs, the Burger King on Oneida Drive, just a mile from Lambeau Field, sold 150 of the burgers a day, five times the usual volume of Double Whoppers.
Though Brown's size (he has a 24-inch neck, wears a size 66 jacket and is built like something you have to defrost every few months) and feats as a trencherman have made him a local celebrity, this guy is no Chris Farley. Defensive coordinator Fritz Shurmur says Brown is as powerful as any player in the league, thanks to the fact that he can get his bulk moving in a hurry; in an April 1996 minicamp he ran the 40 in 5.07 seconds, a time that gives quarterbacks throughout the league cold sweats. Sprinting is nothing new to Brown. At Detroit's MacKenzie High, in addition to throwing the shot and the discus, he ran the 100- and 200-meter dashes, and he even won a race. "Yeah, the guy ahead of me fell down or grabbed a drink or something," he says.
On the field, Brown's agility comes in handy—at times last year Shurmur had Brown drop into coverage on a zone blitz—but his size is his greatest asset. "There are a lot of 305-pound linemen," Shurmur says. "What he carries makes him unique."
As he stands now, Brown is simply too much for any one man to handle. Should an opposing team commit two players to Brown, it runs the risk of being burned by other Green Bay marauders such as Santana Dotson or Reggie White. Brown finished last season with 52 tackles and one sack—good numbers, not great—but his contributions were not always quantifiable.
"Gilbert should be our MVP," said Packers safety Eugene Robinson before the Super Bowl. "He is totally unselfish, and he breaks a team down all by himself." As if to prove Robinson's point, Brown went out and registered just three solo tackles in Super Bowl XXXI but clogged the middle so effectively that New England was never able to establish its running game. The Patriots finished with a meager 43 yards on the ground.
Teammates and coaches were not always happy to see so much of Brown. He was drafted in the third round by Minnesota in 1993 but didn't survive his first training camp with the Vikings, who waived Brown after a defensive coach said that the tackle was likely to eat his way out of the game. But before Brown could get back to the hotel to pack his bag, the Packers had claimed him.
The trip from Minneapolis to Green Bay gave Brown time to examine his situation. "It was a long drive, so I had a chance to think about what I had to do to turn it around," he says. "I just thought about loving football again. When I was in Minnesota, it just didn't click. I don't know if it was the purple or if it was my coach or what." Brown also realizes that he put himself in a hole by showing up out of shape. "[Getting cut] wasn't a big surprise because I messed up myself. I didn't work hard, I didn't train."
With the Packers, Brown performed well in practice as a rookie, but he barely cracked the lineup, playing in just two games and finding himself riddled with self-doubt. So every Monday during the season he would go to meetings and watch film in the afternoon, then hop in his car and drive eight hours back to Detroit. "I'm kind of a mama's boy," he says. "I would drive home just so I could see her. I didn't really know what was going on, and I needed somebody to get me going."
The jump-start worked. In his second year, Brown became a solid contributor. He played in 13 games before tearing his ACL. In '95, his third year, he again played in 13 games before succumbing to an injury, this time a sprained ligament in his left elbow. Last year he stayed healthy and enjoyed a season that made him the cream of the free-agent defensive lineman crop. Jacksonville made a strong run at him, proposing $3 million per year for three years, but Brown opted to stay in Green Bay for some $330,000 less per year.
"My mom had an effect on me," says Brown. "She said, 'Don't be calling me crying if you make the wrong decision. Make sure you're happy in what you do.'" Brown was further influenced by another female. While signing autographs at a shopping mall near Green Bay after the Super Bowl, he was approached by a young girl who begged him to stay. The tear rolling down her cheek sealed the deal. "The primary reason I stayed is that it's a great place to play," he says. "Most of the time you want to come to work because it's a fun atmosphere. The fans just love football. It's everything around here."
Staying in Green Bay also made it easier for Brown to spend time with his son. Four-year-old Jamal lives with his mother in Kansas City, Mo., which is close enough to Green Bay to allow Brown to see him two or three times a month. When they are together, Gilbert and Jamal do what most fathers and their four-year-old sons do. They play ball, they wrestle (don't worry—young Jamal already tips the scales at 50 pounds) and they watch a lot of cartoons. But their favorite activity? Sharing a Gilbert Burger.
"We both love to eat, so we'll eat more than doing anything else," he says. "The first couple of times I gave my son a hamburger, he'd eat it. Then the fourth or fifth time—and I hadn't said anything about it—he opened up his bun and took the pickles off. He said, 'I don't like those things.'" His dad could only laugh. Gilbert Brown knows what it's like to not be a pickle guy.
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