Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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against Miami. The following week, Brown made his first start, a 16-0 victory against North Carolina in which he threw a touchdown pass to Gatewood. The next week, in a 28-14 loss to USC, Brown was only 10-of-27 passing while throwing three interceptions, with the Trojans returning one of them for a touchdown. Backfield coach Tom Pagna wrote in the Era of Ara that no Notre Dame player in his time had to endure more on the outside than Brown. Pagna said among the comments he would hear included, "Are they forcing you guys to play a black quarterback?" or "Get that n----- out of there!" Brown improved as a runner and passer as the season progressed, including rushing for 92 yards on nine carries during a 56-7 win at Pitt. A week later during a 21-7 victory against Tulane, Brown completed 15 of 19 tosses for 154 yards with one score while rushing for 66 yards and two touchdowns on the ground. But in the season finale, he fell apart in a 28-8 loss at LSU, throwing three more interceptions. Notre Dame finished 8-2 and placed outside the Associated Press and UPI top 10 for the first time in Parseghian's eight seasons. In an interview with The Harrisburg Patriot-News, 34-year-old Leonard Brown, the older of Cliff's two sons, relayed a story that his father shared for the first time with them not long ago. The night before the LSU game, Brown and a few black teammates took a stroll outside their Baton Rouge hotel for a little relaxation. "At first, the streets were deserted," Leonard noted. "But my dad told me that within a few minutes, word must've spread that they were out there. The streets got crowded. And every guy had a pistol in his waist. "One guy said, 'Don't think this is the only place we'll have guns,' trying to scare my dad, as if they were going to have their guns in the stadium. "He was strong and driven. … Those trials, the way society was then, his parents never being there from a young age, all of it drove him." Brown finished that 1971 season with six starts, completing 56 of 111 passes for 669 yards with four scores and nine interceptions, and he also ran the ball 77 times for 253 yards and two touchdowns. "It's tough to come in as a sophomore like that when you began the season as the No. 3 quarterback, but he gave it everything he possibly could," Pomarico said. "Maybe he was expected to do more than he was able to do because people were used to seeing Theismann." Co-captain Gatewood spent the entire summer of 1971 on campus rather than back in his hometown of Baltimore just to get Brown acclimated for some of the pressures he would potentially face. Gatewood said Brown was bigger, stronger and faster than Theismann and possessed a much more live arm, but the combination of inexperience and breaking a huge barrier eventually wore on him. "It broke him," Gatewood said. "He allowed himself to be talked into, 'Wear your persona as a black man first, and as an athlete second.' That didn't work." Gatewood added that later in college all-star games he became friends with