More than an athlete: The rise of Jaylen Brown

by Cecil Brown

We were at the Oakland Ballroom, 1723 on Franklin Street, on a Friday night in Oakland, California. The large room was packed with people who paid $100 for the occasion. After receiving my armband, I got a glass of red wine and milled around looking for Jaylen Brown.

Like the other 200 people there, I was there to welcome NBA stars Jaylen Brown and Jason Kidd – both Cal basketball greats – who had abandoned their professional rivalry to unite in “The Town” for the announcement of The Oakland XChange, or OXC. OXC is a co-founding chapter of Brown’s newly launched parent company, The XChange. According to its website, the initiative seeks to provide minority entrepreneurs with opportunities in finance, education, technology, culture, media and real estate.

Like millions of fans, I had watched Jaylen on the Celtics during the NBA championship. My friend David Peeples mentioned casually that Jaylen had been my student at UC Berkeley. I replied that Jaylen had a salary of $314 million, the highest of any basketball player. Then somebody sent me an article in which Jaylen announced that he had an organization aiming to build a Black Wall Street in Boston. I heard that he was returning to the Bay Area to build a Black Wall Street in Oakland, too. When you hear about your students who have done extraordinarily well in life, you begin to wonder, both about them and about yourself as a teacher. Was there something different about Jaylen? I couldn’t quite put my finger on it – not just yet!

Just then, I saw him across the room. He had a flat top back then, and now he had dreads, but I recognized him right away. I moved through the crowd, and as I came close to him, he looked down and saw me. I could tell that he recognized me, but he didn’t know exactly who I was. Perhaps he was thinking, “One of my former teachers from Cal – but which one?”

I reached out, shook his hand, and asked him if he remembered me.

“No,” he said. I believed he was being honest.

“You took my class in music – Music 139,” I reminded him, “and you made the music for the video with your classmates.”

“Oh?”

“Your classmates were also your teammates – Roger Moute a Bidias from Cameroon.”

There was a glimmer of recognition.

“Kameron Rooks, Jabari Bird?” He had to remember them. The four of them always came to class together and sat in a row.

“Ah, yes!”

“I’ve been very impressed by your career on the basketball court,” I said, “but even more so off the court – especially in your efforts to save our communities. I’m glad that you’re taking up activism.”

“Thank you, sir!”

“I saw the lecture you gave on French philosopher Foucault. You seemed to understand Foucault very well.”

Now he was laughing.

Just then, the announcer from the stage called the participants. “We would like to call our guest speakers to the stage, beginning with Jaylen Brown!”

Now he looked at me, “Yeah, you put me on the spot! Let’s talk later!”

“Sure,” I said as he turned and walked through the crowd that parted like the Red Sea before Moses.

Onstage, he took the microphone and said, “I want to thank everybody for coming – and I wanna thank you for this award for my community service.”

“What I noticed through the inequalities in Boston are inequalities glaring all over the U.S., which led me here to Oakland,” said Brown in the video. “And Oakland is what I consider a second home, going to school at UC Berkeley. I’ve got a lot of ties …”

“Oakland is rich in its history, entrepreneurship, business, togetherness and organization. So, what an honor it is to be up here, announcing the initiative in Oakland.”

Jaylen added that, as a Georgia native, he grew familiar with the East Bay city because he roomed at UC Berkeley with Ivan Rabb, an Oakland local who played center at Cal from 2015 to 2017.

Listening to him, I was reminded of my own journey at UC Berkeley. I arrived in 1969-70 to teach in the English department. The entire university was in turmoil, with Black students demanding their own department. Being one of the few African-American professors on campus, I joined forces with the African-American students in their fight for a Black Studies Department. We wanted a department that would be financially independent from the rest of the university – a sticking point the administration was reluctant to concede.

After years of struggle, we were finally granted an African American Studies Department, but it remained financially tied to the university and, in many ways, more conservative than we had hoped. The teachers they hired reminded me of Widow Douglas and Miss Watson from Huckleberry Finn. They were prudish, pedantic and heavily invested in standardized testing and the 10-page college paper.

The Black Studies Department, in an effort to justify its existence to the broader university, stuck rigidly to these academic conventions, stifling any breath of creativity among the students. They looked down on athletics, considering them an embarrassment. Athletes were not generally the best students, and if they didn’t maintain a certain GPA, they were ineligible to play. Many struggled to write a 10-page college essay on their own. But I remembered my own difficulties with writing and sought a different path.

When Jaylen came to UC Berkeley as a freshman in 2016, I was teaching in the African American Studies Department. When I saw that my roster included four athletes from the UC basketball team, I winced. Athletes always presented a challenge – not because of their abilities, but because of the expectations placed on them. They were there, after all, because the university saw them as a source of revenue.

I met with these four athletes and told them I didn’t believe in the 10-page paper and that it wouldn’t be necessary to write one for my class. Instead, I asked them if there was anything else they could do that would substitute for the traditional reading and writing assignments.

I had decided to take a different course, one that would allow for creativity and innovation. I was prepared to teach a course in what I called “interdisciplinary digital humanities.” I wanted to teach electronic music. I had learned that the best computer program for this was Ableton, headquartered in Berlin, Germany. Earlier that summer, I flew to Berlin and met with the two engineers who had produced most of the Ableton software, the most successful music technology in existence.

Back home, I went to the Music Department at UC Berkeley. The chair of the department, Ben Brinner, was a friend – I had studied under him for my PhD – so he was agreeable to my plans. We hired three teaching assistants who knew the Ableton program, and we set up 30 computers for the students to practice their music. I enrolled my basketball players along with 30 others, with the idea that they would create music on Ableton.

I wasn’t at all surprised when most of my students said they enjoyed making music. “I make beats,” Jaylen said, confirming a thesis I’ve always entertained – that there is a strong connection between sports and computer science. I was going to talk to some of our leaders, like Rev. Jesse Jackson, who wants to improve the rate of Black people in Silicon Valley. One way to do that, I believe, is to have classes that allow students to be creative in digital humanities. Being able to explore music on your own could lead you to a computer science class, which could position you to be hired by digital companies like Google or Apple.

I met frequently with the four basketball players at a café called Strada. Jaylen was always busy, taking graduate classes in Spanish, chess, and practicing acoustic guitar. I kept up with Roger Moute a Bidias, who sent me an email that I still read today, mentioning the influence the class had on him. At the end of the semester, the four basketball students had produced a film, and Jaylen had made the music for it.

At the end of the class, I had gotten to know Jaylen better. In addition to my class, he was taking graduate-level classes, playing chess, speaking Spanish, and engaging with anything that had to do with technology, venture capitalism and economics. One student described him as a chess player, pianist, musician, fashion icon, philosopher, academic, lecturer, polyglot, future author, philanthropist and mogul.

His music, composed on the Ableton computer, confirmed my belief that there is a strong connection between sports and computer science. I liked the film and the music very much, so I gave them all an A or A-.

It may have been the next semester when I received a note from Roger that Jaylen had been recruited by the Celtics. He was going to give a farewell presentation in Harmon Gym. He had played one year of college basketball for the California Golden Bears and was named first-team all-conference and Freshman of the Year in the Pac-12 Conference. Declaring for the 2016 NBA draft after his freshman season, he was selected by the Celtics.

“Thank you for coming out today,” he addressed us from the podium. “I look out and I see friends, I see family, professors, coaching staff, teammates and even media. I appreciate you guys for showing support this year. I’ve grown so much since I’ve been here …”

The room erupted in applause.

Novelist and educator Cecil Brown, UC Berkeley professor and director of the George Moses

Horton Project at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford University, is also known as the close friend, screenwriter and biographer of Richard Pryor and as the author of “The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger,” “Stagolee Shot Billy” and most recently “Pryor Lives: How Richard Pryor Became Richard Pryor: Kiss My Rich Happy Black Ass.” Brown can be reached at browncecil8@gmail.com.

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