Brown, diminutive at five feet three inches tall but nevertheless a centre-forward, grew up in the house at the corner of John St. and Sheman Ave. and began his football at seventeen still locally to Kearny, with Ford and then West Hudson Athletic. Then at nineteen he was recruited by Paterson F.C., local still but across the Passaic River before returning for a total of four seasons to his bank  of the stream at Erie and then Harrison Soccer Club, the same club with the name-change, as it entered the professional American Soccer League (ASL) as a founder member. 

In the meantime his own father had become an (part)owner of the Newark Skeeters, which he then joined for a year from 1923 before in 1924, aged twenty-four, he moved to New York to play for its newly-formed Giants, the Paterson F.C. franchise as it was relocated to The Big Apple and re-named. And his stay of effectively seven campaigns at the club was to prove the most productive. He would make two hundred and fifty appearances give-or-take, scoring at three goals every four games. And in the 1925-6 season he was awarded three caps, all against Canada, one lost, two won, which might have been added to in 1930 at the World Cup, he was what the American refer to a "on the roster" but had to stand down because of injury, raising the same question as of Archie Stark. What might have been the outcome of the lost and infamous semi-final had he or they been playing?   

Davey Brown's top-flight career, although he would play on until retirement at thirty-six in 1935, would in reality come to an end with the gradual collapse of American, professional soccer over the three years from 1928 and the Giants' withdrawal from the ASL in 1931. And post-1935 he then seems simply to have settled back into family life in his home-town. As a young man he had begun work outwith football as a Green-grocer's Assistant but then worked as a Wire Weaver before training as an Electrician, working in the Clark's thread-mill in the town. And he had married young, in 1918, at nineteen to local-girl, Anna Adamson, a year younger than he. They were to have five children.      

Davey Brown was to die still in Kearny in 1970 at the age of seventy-one, to be buried in the local Arlington Cemetery. And Anna would be laid alongside him seventeen years later on her death again in the town in 1987.