Decorated Two-Time Super Bowl Champion, MLB Outfielder Dies at 84

Tom Brown, who left a career in Major League Baseball to join the NFL's Green Bay Packers and won the first two Super Bowls, died Wednesday. He was 84.

Brown spent one season in the Washington Senators' outfield, batting .147 in 61 games in 1963 as a 22-year-old. That would prove to be his only season of baseball at the Major League level.

Drafted by the Packers out of the University of Maryland, he resurfaced on the gridiron in Green Bay in 1964. After one year as a reserve, he was elevated to Vince Lombardi's first-string defense the following season.

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Brown won an NFL championship with the Packers in 1966, then won Super Bowl rings with the Packers in 1967 and 1968 — the first two years in the history of the Big Game. He thus became the first MLB player to win a Super Bowl.

Brown rejoined Lombardi in Washington, D.C., in 1969. His only game with Washington that season would prove to be his last in the NFL.

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The Senators relocated to Texas and became the Rangers after the 1971 season. The franchise relocation and Brown's relatively short career in MLB made his two-way exploits easy to overlook among the few to play both baseball and football at the sports' highest levels.

Still, Brown and Deion Sanders are the only two athletes to win both a Super Bowl and hit a home run in an MLB game.

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During a 2009 interview, Brown recalled his first encounter with Lombardi in 1964. According to the team website, the Hall of Fame coach was anxious to get a look at Brown after he had abandoned his baseball career.

"I met Coach Lombardi on the steps of Sensenbrenner Hall the first day," Brown said in reference to the Packers' dormitory at St. Norbert College. "I had just left baseball with the York White Roses in the Washington Senators' organization. I told Coach Lombardi I'd make a decision by July 1st. So I said, 'OK.' He said, 'We'll send you a plane ticket and we'll see you at training camp.'

"I think I could probably have played major league ball, but not as a starter; probably as a utility player. But I had the opportunity to play with the Packers, and I took that opportunity."

Brown was a member of the University of Maryland Athletics Hall of Fame and an active member in the Salisbury, Md., community he called home. He ran a baseball, basketball, and football league for 6- to 12-year-olds in the area from 1989 to 2015.

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