Michael Brown leads newest inductees into Chapel Hill-Lincoln High Sports Hall of Fame

Michael Brown didn’t want to be goalkeeper.

He first came into contact with soccer as a young teenager when his family lived for two years in Peru, and he liked the free flowing game. The idea of being stuck in the goal while others frolicked on the grassy green field had little appeal.

But, when Chapel Hill High School formed its first varsity soccer team in 1972, it needed a goalkeeper, and Brown drew the assignment. The team made it to the state tournament in its first year. In 1973 the team won a state championship, and Brown was named an all-American – thought at the time to be the first from any public high school in the southeastern United States, and definitely the first for a soccer player from Chapel Hill.

“Michael was a very talented goal keeper – a natural athlete with cat-like instincts,” said former Chapel Hill High soccer coach Ron Benson, himself a Hall of Fame member. “He was one of the original young players who fell in love with the game under the tutelage from Kip Ward and the Rainbow Soccer phenomenon here in Chapel Hill.”

Brown will be among the newest members of the Chapel Hill/Lincoln High School Hall of Fame, to be inducted Saturday, April 30, at Chapel Hill High.

“I’m tickled anyone remembers,” said Brown, now known as the area’s most prolific mural artist. “It’s been 43 years.”

Despite his misgivings when first joining an athletics team, Brown said the experience was important to him. The state championship was just a bonus.

“Soccer started to take off in the United States at the tail end of the Vietnam era. It seemed like a lot of people were sick of organized sports. The kids playing soccer back then were exactly like the sort of kids who get into the X Games now,” Brown said. “It tended to attract people who were profound devotees as much as players.”

Brown and his teammates “were like piranhas” in the halls of Chapel Hill High School, chasing down anyone who looked like a candidate for soccer. Exchange students were prime targets. Even if they weren’t able to join the varsity team, fellow students were encouraged to join the fledgling Rainbow Soccer program, which then grew so big it in turn eventually started to feed players back to the high school.

In addition to those aforementioned “instincts,” the 6-2 Brown also had a long reach and an amazing, almost Michael-Jordanesque ability to hang in the air – parallel to the ground – and would flick away shots that otherwise seemed like sure-fire goals. He played, literally, at a different level than opponents. Still, the announcement of his all-American status surprised many, because the sport was dominated in the 1970s by prep school players from the Northeast.

“I can barely remember who I was back then. But that all-American award sustained me when I wasn’t sure I could stand on my own two feet as a young adult,” Brown said. “When I had doubts, it would remind me, ‘Yeah, I can do this.’ That was very important to me.”

Brown said he’s had doubts more than once in the decades since playing at Chapel Hill and at the University of North Carolina. While he may not have intended to be a goalkeeper, he “always wanted to be an artist, since I was a child, before I even heard of soccer.”

Brown did several things after getting his bachelor’s and Master of Fine Arts degrees from Carolina – among them a two-year fellowship at the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, Mass., a stint at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, two jobs that helped him retain his confidence in lean times. He illustrated children’s books and painted sets “for off-, off-Broadway shows,” and there was year viewing art in Spain in 1987.

By 1988 he was back in Chapel Hill, working as plumber with 1973 CHHS teammate and Rainbow player Tim Peck. The two also worked together on large, paper mache puppets/floats that appeared in several local parades, but paying jobs in the arts were drying up. Until some merchants wanted to paint the back of buildings that faced the parking lot at the corner of Rosemary and Columbia Streets.

A member of the town staff, Kendal Brown (not a relative) thought of Michael. “She knew I had paint. ... I got the job and the rest is history,” he said.

Brown composed the starry streetscape (“Blue” 1989) that looks as if one is peering from Rosemary through the building and onto Franklin Street. It caught people’s attention. Soon Brown painted a large pencil (“Is stronger than the sword” 1991) on Henderson Street, “Sea Turtles” (1993) on the eastern side of a parking deck facing Columbia, and and “The Parade of Humanity” (1997) in Porthole Alley.

One of his more creative projects was a gigantic hand in the lunchroom at Estes Hills, comprising multi-colored impressions from every student at the school who dipped their hand in paint before applying their palm to the wall. Like one of Brown’s other favorites, “Musical Youths” (2001) painted on the driveway wall of The Lantern, the Estes Hills hand was painted over by a principal eager to re-do the lunchroom in a new scheme.

“I forgave them,” Brown said.

Brown can afford to be generous. Unlike many painters, he has a steady stream of commissions.

“I did that first mural, and the phone hasn’t stopped ringing since.”

This story was originally published April 23, 2016 at 1:51 PM with the headline "Michael Brown leads newest inductees into Chapel Hill-Lincoln High Sports Hall of Fame."