At 75, James Brown readily concedes that “you don’t do this forever.” He just isn’t acting like a man in any hurry to find out when forever ends.
Brown told Sports Business Journal that he’s nowhere near spending his afternoons by the pool in his manicured backyard, joking that he never even learned to swim. The question of retirement brought back an old memory for him — a CBS News assignment that sent him to Pakistan alongside televangelist Marilyn Hickey, who was still preaching at 86.
“I’m not being dismissive of that which I’m doing, because I love what I’m doing,” Brown said. “But Marilyn Hickey, before she passed away, people were asking her why she didn’t retire. She said, ‘Retirement is not in the Bible.’ Whatever gifts and talents I’ve been given, I want to use them to the fullest. When it’s my time to go, I don’t want people looking over, as the proverbial story is, to see all that talent that was unused in the grave. I want to give it all. Whatever that may be.”
Brown has hosted CBS’s The NFL Today since 2006, and the network has shown no urgency to plan around a successor. A contract extension had been in the works as of last summer, when Brown was 74, and his previous deal was set to expire. Front Office Sports reported at the time that Nate Burleson, his longtime NFL Today colleague, was viewed as his eventual successor, but nothing about the reporting suggested CBS was in any rush to make that move. Brown has weathered plenty of change around him in the meantime, including Russell Wilson and Kyle Long joining the fold this fall.
Brown’s own seat has remained untouched amid that churn. He’s spent more than three decades as a CBS News correspondent alongside his NFL Today duties, filling in on the CBS Evening News and contributing to 60 Minutes. He’s used that platform for more than football when he’s felt it necessary. Brown told PBS’s Amna Nawaz earlier this year that he’s delivered commentary on subjects like domestic violence and, in 2022, racism and antisemitism, and that he doesn’t see it as a departure from the job.
“They’re still going to watch the football game,” Brown said, addressing viewers who’d rather he stick to sports. “Turn me off then at the time that I’m giving the commentary, turn the football again back on. But that doesn’t mean that I am supposed to stick my head in the sand and ignore something that is problematic and has been for a while and continues.”
He’s talked about that willingness to speak up as something that hasn’t faded with age. By his own account, neither has his appetite for the job itself. Whatever “forever” ends up meaning for James Brown, he’s made it clear he isn’t interested in making the decision early.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.