by Glenn Stout
He did, and over the next 18 months—from May 2015 to November 2016—the promoter arranged a staggering 17 bouts for Brown. The newest addition to Dunkin’s stable didn’t disappoint. Brown not only won every one of those fights but dominated them, taking 14 by knockout or TKO and the other three by unanimous decision. “I pride myself on accurately judging talent, and I think my track record proves that,” Dunkin said at the time. “So believe me when I say Ed Brown is the goods. He is on the road to become boxing’s next big thing.”
Brown’s run caught the eye of executives at premium cable networks like Showtime and had him on the cusp of a world ranking. Nate Jones, a former Olympic and professional boxer and an assistant trainer to Mayweather, agreed with Dunkin. “He was three fights away from fighting for the world championship. Three fights away,” Jones would later tell the Chicago Sun-Times. Big purses, the kind that could dwarf Brown’s E2 settlement, seemed within reach.
Brown’s rapid ascent, his team believes, largely grew out of the positive changes in his life. He’d made a concerted effort to surround himself with better influences. “He would tell me, ‘You can’t survive with negative people around you or bad things are going to happen,’” Hillmann recalls. One benefit of fighting so many bouts in such a compressed time was that he was always training. “When you’re a hundred percent committed to being a boxer, you don’t have time to be in the street,” Hillmann says.
Outside of the gym, Brown kept to himself more. “He was staying in the house,” says Boyd. “But the problem is, when you are popular, sometimes trouble follows you.”
That reality was stark enough that when Cericola started giving Brown rides back and forth to the gym, he learned that the direct route was not always best—not when Brown was trying to stay clear of rival gangs. “He would tell me, ‘Don’t drive down this street, don’t drive down that street,’” says Cericola. “Every morning when I’d pick him up, he was looking over his shoulder, worried who was watching. I could see the stress on him.”
The ring remained Brown’s haven. “To him, it was the safest place, the one place he couldn’t be hurt,” says Cericola. “When he got in the ring, he knew he was okay.”
As 2015 bled into 2016, Brown found himself mentoring other boxers, helping them avoid the pitfalls that nearly sank his career. Boyd, for one, was on the verge of abandoning his dream of fighting professionally, but Brown talked him out of it. “I wasn’t really feeling boxing like that no more,” Boyd recalls. “I had a lot going on. Two of my friends got killed, and I lost some cousins. Ed was there through it all. He kept pushing me, especially when he found out I had a daughter on the way. He was like, ‘Man, you got to step it up now and do what you got to do.’ That’s why our relationship was so tight. He knew how life is out here in Chicago, how hard it is to stay out of trouble. He made me feel that I could do something because he was. He gave me hope.”
By this time, two major developments reinforced Brown’s new outlook. The first was that he’d formed a deeper bond with his father, Ed Brown Sr., who had been in and out of prison for much of his son’s life, mostly on drug-dealing convictions. The father had become a fixture at the boxing gym and at bouts. He hounded his son to leave the streets behind, not make the same mistakes he had. “He’d get so angry,” says Tamika Rainey, the elder Brown’s sister. “He had a fear, like a clock was ticking” (a “death doom,” she calls it) for his son. “Little Ed would always laugh and say, ‘What’s the matter with you, Daddy?’”
The second was Brown’s ongoing relationship with Tiana Phillips, a young woman he met at a Burger King drive-through. Brown was “so goofy,” she recalls. “He would order all this food he wouldn’t even eat just to talk to me. I finally gave him my phone number.” She started going to most of his fights, even to ones in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, and he moved in with her and her mother. Immediately, he was “the life of the house,” Phillips says.
Even with Brown turning things around, Cericola and Dunkin fretted. The streets were still the streets. Bullets could still find him.
In October 2015, they nearly did again. Brown and some friends had rented another party bus, this time to celebrate his 25th birthday. “Him and I agreed that he shouldn’t be out clubbing,” recalls Cericola. The bus was a compromise. The group parked on Jefferson Street in the South Loop, near the Roosevelt Road corridor of big-box stores. At some point, according to the police, an argument broke out and gunfire erupted. Three men were shot. Brown escaped without injury, but the incident was another reminder of the threats Chicago presented.
To Cericola and Dunkin, the solution seemed simple: leave. “You know we can send you somewhere,” Cericola told Brown at one point. “We could put you in the mountains, training with other fighters. We could put you in California. We could put you almost anywhere, with Cameron’s connections.”
Remaining in Chicago—in Garfield Park—was begging for trouble. Who knew that better than Brown? He wore the scars. How many friends had he lost?
“I tried every way to get him to leave,” Dunkin says. “He wasn’t doing anything bad, didn’t break the law. But I had told him, ‘You can be walking down the street there [and be in danger]. You’re living in a war zone. Why do you want to stay?’”
It’s easy to ask that from the outside. But shedding everything you know, what you’ve grown up around all your life, is not so simple. “A lot of these kids have never even left their neighborhood, let alone gotten on a plane,” says Cericola. Adds Hillmann: “Leaving would have been such a monstrous step for Ed. Leaving Chicago is essentially leaving George as a trainer and a father figure. That’s really hard. George really, really loves his fighters, and those fighters love him.”
Brown would flirt with the idea of moving, but then . . . what about his daughter? She was the most important thing in his life. How could he leave her? And what about Tiana? This wasn’t a casual thing. He loved her, her family. And he was only now getting to know his own father.
“If it was me—and this is the honest truth—I wouldn’t leave either,” says Boyd. “Not a chance until I knew I got enough money to take my mama and my brothers and my sisters with me, my daughter and the mother of my child with me. In Chicago, you wouldn’t just want to leave your people behind. That’s like somebody in a scary movie leaving their family in the woods with the killer.”
Brown’s wavering sparked tension between his manager and his trainer. “George and I would fight every day about it,” Cericola says. For his part, Hernandez insists that he wasn’t holding Brown back and that he actually encouraged him to leave—but only if the promises Dunkin was making, about a place to live and training support, were put on paper.
Brown continued to vacillate until an October night in 2016. That evening, Phillips’s brother—who had become one of Brown’s best friends—was shot and killed in an apparent drive-by.
Friends say that his death fundamentally changed Brown. Boyd recalls a conversation he had with the boxer not long afterward. Gone for good, it seemed, was the goofy Ed Brown, the man-child with the bulletproof swagger. “Li’l bro,” Brown told Boyd, “I’m just trying to better my life so me and my family and all of us can get up out of here. That street shit ain’t where it’s at no more.”
And then Brown said something Boyd will never forget: “The next time I get shot, I might not make it.”
One more fight, maybe two, and he’d be out of Chicago.
Friday, December 2, 2016, began for Brown the way most all of his recent days had. He woke up at 8 a.m. and headed out to the gym for a few hours, Tiana giving him the good-bye she always did: “Be careful. I love you.”
That night, he met up with Boyd for a second workout. Brown seemed unusually reflective, Boyd recalls. As they were leaving the gym around 7:30, Brown hugged Boyd and put his hands affectionately on the back of his friend’s head.
“I ain’t the best fighter you know?” Brown asked.
“Yeah, you know you the best fighter I k
now.”
Brown then declared that Boyd was going to win a Golden Gloves title.
“All right, li’l bro, I’ll see you in the morning,” Brown added.
But what Boyd remembers most about that conversation is what didn’t get said. “It’s something we always say in Chicago before we leave somebody: ‘Love. Keep your head up.’ I said, ‘Keep your head up, big bro.’ I was going to say ‘love,’ but then George started talking to us. When I walked away, I was like, Dang, I didn’t get to tell bro ‘love.’ Then he was already in the car, gone.”
Somebody knows why Ed Brown was out that night, on the street at that hour. Somebody knows why he was in the backseat of a sedan with his cousin at the wheel and beside her a friend who’d been with Brown at least two times he was shot.
And somebody knows why death couldn’t wait for him to get out of the city, as so many people had begged him to do. Go before it’s too late. Leave.
The police report put the time of the incident at 1:10 a.m., the location as the 3200 block of West Warren Boulevard in East Garfield Park, a few blocks from the gym. The cousin told police she had just pulled up to the curb on Warren when a silver sedan crept up and its occupants started shooting. Brown was hit in the head, left hand, and butt. His cousin took a bullet to the leg, but nothing life-threatening.
Brown was rushed to nearby Mount Sinai Hospital, where doctors operated to reduce the swelling in his brain. He was placed on life support, on which he would remain throughout the night, the next day, and into the day after.
Cericola found out that Brown had been shot shortly after noticing two missed calls. “As soon as I saw that his dad called me two minutes after his girlfriend, I knew something was up,” he says. “The first call I made was to George. He answered the phone and said, ‘Is he dead?’ That’s how he answered, ‘Is he dead?’ I’ll never forget it.”
Boyd received his own call from a friend. “I just had that feeling, especially when they told me he got shot in the head, like, ‘Dang, bro, you just going to leave me like this?’”
Cericola rushed to the hospital. “There was a big crowd outside,” he says. “The police let family and people close to him sit in the emergency room. It wasn’t until the next day that we were able to actually go up, two by two, and see him.”
When he entered, Cericola recalls, Brown was hooked up to machines and tubes. The manager approached his boxer’s bed and whispered, “Fight. Just fight. We love you.” But it was clear to Cericola: “He was already, you know, he was already gone.”
At 4 p.m. on Sunday, December 4—39 hours after the shooting—Brown was declared dead.
Brown’s friends still have questions: Was it a random drive-by? Did a rival gang recognize the car Brown was in and move on him? Was he set up somehow? No arrests have been made, and police have refused to comment on a possible motive.
“You never know why a person might be trying to kill you out here,” says Boyd. “The hate and the envy, that is a big thing out of Chicago. Somebody see you doing good, and they not doing good—they ain’t got nothing or ain’t doing nothing. That’s just how Chicago is.”
Hernandez was so distraught about Brown’s death that he considered retiring—but was talked out of it by his Park District bosses. “I’ve got too much work to do,” he says. Hillmann, too, has thought about Brown’s death a lot and found no solace, no easy answers. “He was conflicted like all of us,” Hillmann says. “The darkness and the light inside of him were at war. All of it might be why he was such a great fighter. Because his whole life was a war, even when he was alone looking at himself in the mirror.”
In January, a little over a month after Brown’s death and nearly 20 years after he first stepped into the boxing gym in East Garfield Park, a tall young man of about 19 wandered through the door of that same building and took in the ring. He was here to see Hernandez, he said. But as hard as he worked to put on a brave face, he was clearly nervous, especially after Hernandez’s welcome, a version of which he’s given to hundreds of young men over the years:
“What the fuck? Who are you?” Hernandez briefly regarded the lanky newcomer, who had a scratchy goatee, baggy sweats, and scuffed high-tops. “This ain’t no amateur hour. These are professionals up in here.”
“I know.”
“You know. What you know? Sheeeeiiit.”
“I can take a punch.”
“Take a punch? You want to give a punch, not take a punch, motherfucker. Can you hang is my real question.”
“I can hang.”
Hernandez put a smirk in his voice. “I got a feeling you can’t. Get dressed. Que paso! I ain’t got time to wait!”
A short while later, after a horn blast, the young man pounded his gloves together and walked toward his opponent, one of the gym pros trained by Hernandez. He parried the first few blows and even landed a couple, but a straight right popped his mouthpiece out. He fought on, even as some of the other fighters yelled at Hernandez to stop the contest. Hernandez waved his hand. Let him go. A few seconds later, the newcomer was on his butt.
He scrambled to his feet and threw a few more punches, then clinched for dear life as blows continued to rain down. When the horn blasted again, a second fighter replaced the first and began pummeling the newcomer, whose white T-shirt was now speckled with blood. Hernandez pretended not to pay attention, chatting with another boxer just outside the ring about a fight from the weekend. When the horn sounded a third time, the newcomer lurched toward the corner, his nose a crimson blossom. “I’m good,” he said as a corner man cleaned him up. After a few minutes, the horn sounded again, and he was back in the ring. Overhead, a pair of black shorts with “BAD BOY” stitched across the waistband hung from a wire.
Hernandez watched out of the corner of his eye for a bit. Then he went into his office and lit a cigar next to that wall filled with photos—photos of bulletproof boys.
Lee Jenkins
Don’t Try to Change Jimmy Butler
from Sports Illustrated
The self-titled Garbage Guy from small-town Texas who grew up on Spam and syrup sandwiches, who waited tables at Denny’s and mowed lawns in basketball shoes, who played one game of AAU (“travel ball,” he called it) and never left the bench, who received a single scholarship offer out of high school from Centenary and a partial from Quinnipiac, who started in junior college only after two regulars failed drug tests, and who faxed his letter of intent to Marquette from a McDonald’s sinks into a tan leather banquette on a Gulfstream III bound for Silicon Valley. Jimmy Butler is on the phone with his new head coach in Minnesota, Tom Thibodeau, who of course was also his old head coach in Chicago. They talk every day, often multiple times, about what food the Timberwolves should order for training-camp spreads and what hotel they should book in New Orleans. Butler prattles on about rush-hour traffic patterns.
But this August afternoon they are evaluating free-agent backup point guards, and Butler makes the case for a veteran he has been courting. “We spoke today,” Butler says. “He’s ready. He’ll do everything I do. He can live in my house if he wants.” The engine whirs, the plane rises, and Butler tells Thibodeau he will call back when his private flight from Los Angeles lands in San Jose. Butler is a bold-faced headliner now with 24-hour access to the coach and team president, two rented houses in the Minneapolis suburbs, dominoes engraved with JIMMY BUCKETS, and practice basketballs etched with the question, CAN A KID FROM TOMBALL BE MVP? Chicago is where Butler became a two-way wing and three-time All-Star, but he felt like the Bulls still looked at him as the 30th pick in the draft, that anxious rookie who chirped from the bench, just loud enough to hear, “I can guard that dude! I can do this!” The Wolves, on the other hand, viewed him purely as the keystone of the NBA’s next contender.
How Butler sees himself is more complicated. On a short stroll through downtown Palo Alto, in search of a caramel macchiato with an extra espresso shot, strangers whisper his name as he passes. Most hoop elites are identified by no mo
re than two syllables: LeBron. KD. Steph. Russ. Kawhi. CP. Beard. “I’m always Jimmybutler,” he muses. The formality suits him, a superstar who used to be a sideman and still grapples with the transition. “How is a star treated?” he wonders. “I don’t know. I’m learning like everyone else, and it’s a helluva curve.” Butler flies in a Gulfstream but drives a Toyota minivan with a BABY ON BOARD sticker across the back, even though he is single with no children. He put up 52 points in a game last season against the Hornets and 40 in a half the season before against the Raptors, but his preferred final score is 2–0. His favorite time of year is “grimy season,” an unspecified stretch of summer and fall when he braids his hair, grows his beard and works out twice a day, hot yoga in between. “Bandannas and buckets,” he crows. “That’s the heart. That’s the hustle.”
Butler grinds in the middle of a Western Conference crucible. Instead of lying down for the dominant Warriors, several clubs geared up, the Thunder pairing Russell Westbrook with Paul George, the Rockets flanking James Harden with Chris Paul, and the Timberwolves combining Karl-Anthony Towns with Butler. While George and Paul are upcoming free agents, Butler is under contract for two years, giving the T-Wolves a rare opportunity to dent the West hierarchy.
On the eve of his introductory press conference in Minnesota, Butler stewed over reports claiming he had been a stormy presence and abrasive leader in Chicago, the kind of accusation big-market franchises traditionally leak about exiled alphas after mindless trades. “I ought to go out there tomorrow and be like, ‘If you got a problem, here’s my number, call me,’” Butler vented. Ifeanyi Koggu, a close friend who handles Butler’s business phone, laughed nervously. “That would be funny,” Koggu replied, “but not a good idea.” Butler commandeered the iPhone 7 in their suite at the Loews the next morning and changed the outgoing voice-mail message from an automated greeting to a personal one. “Jimmy Butler, sorry I couldn’t get to the phone, but leave your name and number and I’ll hit you back. If you got any beef, definitely leave a message.” During his presser at Mall of America, in front of 2,500 hungry souls waiting on the second coming of Kevin Garnett, Butler broadcast the digits to the world.