The name of a certain AFC cornerback doesn’t matter, because this isn’t his story. He is simply part of a Tim Brown story, and there is always a moral to a Tim Brown story, even if that story doesn’t seem especially moral at the time. Just think of this unnamed AFC cornerback as a bit character in a fable, someone Aesop might have conjured up if Aesop lived in a time when trash talk and cheap shots stirred the masses the way lions and hares once did.

One Sunday early last season, this cornerback came into a game against the Raiders with the idea that he could bully Tim Brown. He would get mean with Brown and get loud with him, and if that failed, he’d simply take him out. There were no limits. Who knows what this cornerback saw when he looked across the line of scrimmage, but we can guess he saw an older man, his face lined with character and the scars of his industry, a man who might consider himself above scratching and brawling all afternoon with a crazy-eyed, hyper-amped cornerback. So, with his path chosen, this cornerback talked and he shoved and he threatened.

He went beyond the normal lip-flapping that old pros such as Brown regard the way a garbage collector might regard a grass stain. He said he’d heard some things Brown had said about him, though Brown says he wouldn’t have said those things “even if I knew them to be true.” Starting before the game and then repeatedly during it, the cornerback told Brown that he intended to dedicate his time on the field that day to ending Brown’s career. There were other words involved, as you might imagine. During the game’s first play from scrimmage, a running play to the side of the field away from Brown, this eager young cornerback turned word into action. He hit Brown from behind and drove him into the back of a Raider offensive lineman. Given the proper physics, the right combination of angle and force, mixed with the innate vulnerability of the human knee, the cornerback’s objective would have been realized. Brown, with a little less luck on his side, would have been back home in Dallas, measuring a scar.

Now, the first thing you have to understand is that Tim Brown considers himself one of the NFL’s leading gentlemen. The second thing you have to understand is that Tim Brown wouldn’t have lasted 14 seasons as an average-size (six feet, 195 pounds) wide receiver who makes his living over the middle of the field if he always acted the perfect gentleman. This is not a gentleman’s game, and the middle of the field is no place for a gentleman. Average-size wide receivers, even ones who are deeply religious and devoted to their families, must plan accordingly.

Brown does not doubt his own manhood every time he gets thrown to the ground, but a direct threat to his livelihood demanded a response. “You want dirty?” Brown asked the cornerback. “I know dirty.” For the rest of the game, it was bilateral dirt. Knowing the cornerback’s objective, Brown went first. He used everything at his disposal -- elbows, knees, fists -- to survive. The cornerback kept up his end, but he found himself doing more receiving than giving. At one point, Brown grabbed the cornerback’s face mask after a reception and didn’t let go. The cornerback responded by attacking Brown, earning himself a 15-yard penalty. “I learned something about Tim Brown that day,” says Raider receiver Jerry Porter. “Tim Brown doesn’t take it if he doesn’t want to take it.”

It wasn’t until after the game, though, that this became a true Tim Brown story. In the postgame maze, he sought out this cornerback, and when he found him, placed an avuncular hand on the young man’s shoulder and looked him dead in the eye. This is where everything changed, with the cornerback looking startled and expectant and Brown preparing to address him. The cornerback needed to be told, you see, needed to be told the truth. And Brown’s willingness to dispense it is what turns this story from a couple of guys engaging in the chest-thump and finger-wag of NFL play into something larger and more revealing.

Brown looked at the cornerback and said, “Whoever it was who got you in this position -- whatever they said to get you to do what you did today -- don’t let them do you that way. Stand up for yourself, because they’re not being fair to you.” And the cornerback stood there and thought about it for a long moment. And then he began nodding his head, slowly at first, then faster.

***

It wasn’t always this easy for Tim Brown. The Raider offense wasn’t always this modern. The coach wasn’t always this evolved. The quarterback wasn’t always this accomplished. Jerry Rice wasn’t always on the other side of the huddle. You look at the cool economy of the Raider offense now, the way it methodically chews yardage, and it’s easy to forget just how bad it was, and how recently.

Brown’s 937 career receptions have been thrown by 12 different Raider quarterbacks. Long before reveling in the insomniac schemes of Jon Gruden and the silver-templed efficiency of Rich Gannon, Brown was overthrown by Jay Schroeder and Todd Marinovich. He shared a huddle with Steve Beuerlein and Donald Hollas, Billy Joe Hobert and Jeff Hostetler, David Klingler and Vince Evans, Rodney Peete and Bobby Hoying. He played two years with Jeff George in the lost land of the empty statistic.

So, no, the outside world was not always like this.

Even if the 35-year-old Brown, with his low-decibel, old-school charisma, has always been almost exactly the way he is right now.

Brown is one of those athletes who defies critical analysis and logical interpretation. He is an example of why sports can be so compelling and unpredictable: There are faster receivers and stronger receivers and bigger receivers; there are receivers who run more impressively after the catch (though not many) and receivers who look better in a uniform. There are few, however, who understand the game to the degree that Brown does. And as shown by his statistics this season -- 91 catches for 1165 yards -- he can still teach a mouthy cornerback a lesson with his ability as well as his experience.

Brown’s front-of-the-classroom ethic made him an immediate favorite of Gruden. Earlier this season, a Bay Area reporter watched film of an exhibition game with Gruden. One play on the tape caught Gruden’s attention. “Look at this,” he said, rewinding. “Just watch Marcus Knight on this play.”

Marcus Knight is a second-year receiver who spends most of his time during the week running the scout offense. The reporter saw Knight lining up, coming off the line and running a pass pattern. Any nuance was lost on him. But Gruden saw more, and he implored the reporter to see it as well. “God love him,” Gruden said, “he’s running it just like Tim Brown.”

Gruden’s appreciation makes a broader point about Brown’s career: You have to really know to really know. Brown’s achievements seem destined to be absorbed cumulatively, and best appreciated within the game. The catches, the touchdowns, the all-time rankings -- from the outside, they all seem to sneak up on you. He’s fifth all-time in receptions, fifth in TD catches, fifth in receiving yards. Maybe it’s the fact that he is still doing all those things -- still coming off the line with those distinctive tiptoe stutter-steps, still running routes with the exactitude of an anal-retentive cartographer, still catching and scoring and gaining -- that has earned him the widespread appreciation he’s always had within the game.

“For years what I used to say was that I wasn’t getting attention nationwide, but my teammates know what I mean to them,” Brown says. “I’ve always said the best measure of a player is consistency. I’m most proud of that.”

Brown’s profile has surged this year, due in large part to the company he is keeping. When Rice signed with the Raiders, the compatibility question was raised immediately. Could Brown, the longtime focus of everything Raider, coexist with the longtime focus of everything 49er? If it came to it, could Rice, the most prolific receiver in NFL history, defer to Brown? Could they share?

“Anyone who thought I was going to have a problem with Jerry being here doesn’t know me,” Brown says. “When they asked me about it, I said, ‘If he can play, bring him in.’ And it’s obvious he can still play.”

Together, their production has been phenomenal. Through 11 games, they were the NFL’s second most productive duo in yardage and third in receptions. They combined for 16 touchdown catches. “I needed someone like Tim at this point in my career,” Rice says. “We feed off each other.” And what has Rice’s presence meant to Brown? “I haven’t seen a double-team this year,” Brown says, smiling. “Not one. You know how good that feels?”

It’s the difference between being open and being liberated. In the Raiders’ most impressive victory of the season, a thorough 28-10 win over the Giants in the Meadowlands, Brown was responsible for the game’s signature play, a 46-yard touchdown pass in which he caught the ball at about the 30 and outran Giants rookie cornerback Will Allen to the goal line. In other words, the kid couldn’t catch him.

“You put a clock on me and I don’t know what I’d run,” Brown says. “But put me out there with somebody chasing me? Then I do all right.”

***

A gentleman, in this game? A gentleman should last about 15 minutes in this game. Especially at wide receiver. He’ll go across the middle, wear somebody’s hat on his chest, get driven into the dirt and grass, lose every last breath he ever took and then make a decision: graduate school. As a corollary, anyone with Brown’s accomplishments -- did we mention nine straight 1,000-yard seasons? -- can’t possibly pull off the gentleman routine and expect people to believe it.

Brown manages, though. “He’s too squeaky clean for me,” says Raider running back Tyrone Wheatley. “He’s a role model, a great person, someone for the kids to look up to, but he’s too clean for me. Look at the way he’s dressed -- never a thread out of place, never a hair out of place, never anything wrong.”

Throughout his career -- from his storied days as a Dallas prep star to his Heisman-winning stay at Notre Dame, to now -- Brown has carried himself in a dignified, almost regal manner. So much so, in fact, that at times teammates have construed it as condescension. “Tim is the same way on the field as off, in the spotlight or out,” says Marcus Knight. “Some people change, but he doesn’t.”

Brown has also managed to survive 14 seasons in the Raiders organization, the most unusual, the most idiosyncratic -- okay, the stone-cold weirdest -- organization in professional sports.

Every year at the Pro Bowl, Brown used to get the same question from players around the league: “Why don’t you get the hell out of Oakland?” It became sort of a running joke. His own agent and marketing people, stymied in their efforts to get Brown the kind of national exposure granted players of similar or lesser talent -- Cris Carter and Shannon Sharpe, for instance -- often wondered the same thing. The Raiders, slaves to history, are more likely to promote Jim Otto than Tim Brown, and the NFL is traditionally loath to advance the profiles of players employed by Al Davis.

More than any Raider since Marcus Allen, Brown has questioned the sanctity -- and sometimes sanity -- of Davis’ Raider empire. He considered dissent his responsibility, and he wore it like a heavy winter coat. “I always felt I had the heartbeat of the team,” Brown says. “Coming after Marcus, I don’t know if I could say anything, but I came pretty close.” In the most notorious example, after a heinous 30-0 loss to the Chiefs in December 1997, Brown excoriated the team’s offensive scheme and said he would wear a cheat-sheet wristband and call his own plays if nothing changed. Of course, the responsibility Brown feels toward his team has always been entwined with the responsibility he feels toward himself. Deep down, Brown believes the best Raider offense is the one that features, most prominently, Tim Brown.

“If things were going to stay the way they were, I would have forced a change,” Brown says. Gruden, however, won him over with his plan to remodel and update the Raider offense. He told Brown he had the authority to run the team without Davis’ intervention, and if that changed, he would leave. “I’ll hold you to that,” Brown said.

The program has worked. The Raiders came within a game of the Super Bowl last season, and despite their late-season struggles, they enter the playoffs as one of the favorites in the AFC. Last year’s loss to the Ravens at home in the AFC title game narrowed the focus to one goal: the Super Bowl. In the traditional way, time turned disappointment into motivation.

“That week after was miserable,” Brown says. “From that standpoint, it almost makes you want to give it up. Anything that hurts you this bad ... man, you say to yourself, ‘Maybe it’s something I should get away from.’” Instead, Brown instructed a few people close to him -- his brother, father and long-time agent Marvin Demoff -- to inform him if they detect a decline in his ability.

Needless to say, it’s been a quiet season on that front. And, surprisingly, on one other. Asked if the addition of Rice has caused more defensive backs to take the mouthy, violent approach, Brown says, “It’s funny that would come up. Jerry and I were just talking about it. We’ve both noticed something this year: Guys don’t talk. Even corners who usually talk don’t talk. They don’t say anything. It’s like you can see them thinking, ‘Maybe if we just keep quiet, these old guys will just go about their business.’ ”

Or maybe there’s another moral for those mouthy cornerbacks: Respect your elders -- or else.

This article appears in the January 21 issue of ESPN The Magazine.