Marc Roberts Recaps Shannon Briggs Giving Back To Old Neighborhood

Aug. 19, 2010 - PRLog -- A giant with hair of carrot-colored ropes was autographing pictures for the fifth grade of his old school in Brownsville when one Lilliputian student, looking at Shannon Briggs signature, turned to another and asked:

"Who is he?"

Who indeed is this fellow who drops in on the Risen Christ Lutheran School with photos and posters?

He's an undefeated former Daily News Golden Gloves champion who makes his Madison Square Garden debut Friday night, probably the only boxer on the card who takes piano and French lessons, plays chess, writes poetry and is a master of the Internet.

An old Washington Square Park denizen (the inspiration for the orange-colored Rafa hairdo was Village not 'Ville, he said) who hustled at chess, sold watermelons off the backs of trucks, delivered food to the elderly on the Meals on Wheels program, sold yogurt at the South Street Seaport, did demolition work knocking down old buildings ("I was a hammer guy"), won at Lotto and subsisted on the $5 or $10 a day handouts from his old amateur trainer, Jimmy O'Farrell, at the Starrett City gym.

He was the homeless hometown fighter who spent some nights in the Newkirk Avenue subway station, who had to flop at one friend's house after another "there are degrees of being homeless" and who, upon cutting classes at a Sea Cadet summer camp, was chased through the streets of Bensonhurst for being black.

He talks to a live TV audience about his upcoming bout Friday night with Mitch (Blood) Green even though Green had been replaced by a pushover named Calvin Jones. His manager, Marc Roberts, told him Green was still the opponent. Green, in absentia, sells more tickets than Jones. Briggs is decent enough to know he made a mistake.

He could be one of the great success stories already. His stepfather died in prison, his biological father also deceased abandoned him as a child and his mother had a drug problem.

Briggs could have been not a contender, but a statistic. Despite his surroundings, he has never taken a puff of marijuana or a sip of alcohol and if there's a love story here it is between the fighter and his mother, Margie. Despite her problems, she made sure her only child got a solid education at the one-story Lutheran private school where he was one of only six kids in the class.
"She spoiled me," said the adoring son.
Other athletes buy homes for their moms. Briggs sent his through rehab and proudly reports "she's clean and working as a nurse again." He wins the heavyweight title, his life is an instant movie script.

So who is he? Maybe a fighter.

"Are you going to fight Mike Tyson?" one of the fifth-graders asks.

Roberts, standing in a sea of children last week, said by the end of 1996 or early 1997, Briggs will be ready. His fighter is 6-foot-5, has a lovely jab and has grown increasingly confident under trainer Teddy Atlas. But the jury is still out and no verdict can be returned in a trial by Calvin Jones. Briggs, still only 24, may already be atop the next generation of heavyweights one of whom, it seems, must come from the harsh streets of Brownsville.
The streets didn't get Briggs. He said it was "fear" or "imagination."

"All different religions have laws based on fear, the fear of going to hell," he said. "I was lucky. I had boxing as an out.

"Young kids now, they're not afraid to die, but for stupid reasons. For drug money, for sneakers, for who has the best coat. I had a mother who gave me everything.
"When I missed a lot of school because I had asthma, she'd go to the principal and teachers and beg them to promote me."

Almost around the corner from the Lutheran school where Briggs went through the eighth grade before eventually getting a high school degree at Wingate, stands the Marcus Garvey projects.

"This is the 'hood, the real 'hood," he said in his ready-for-prime-time accent. "Marcus Garvey. They don't play over here."

He pointed to a second-story window, decorated for Christmas, and said that's where he used to watch Muhammad Ali cartoons.

Two blocks down is Amboy Street, where Tyson lived and still visits. Briggs pointed in the other direction to where Riddick Bowe lived. Briggs now lives in the West Orange, N.J., home of Roberts along with his Lutheran classmate and now aide de camp, Troy Taylor. Briggs is almost always surrounded by his friends from the hood.

They spotted his van right away when it pulls up to the neat and well-kept 24-story high-rise at 249 Thomas S. Boyland St. he lived before things went bad and his mother had to move to Marcus Garvey.

Sandy Lindsay, whose husband gave Briggs his first boxing gloves, reminded the fighter "about the time you were running away from home, all the way from the sixth floor to my apartment on the seventh."

"It was like boxing found me," Briggs said.

He had tried other sports, "but was never really any good at any of them." As a kid, he said, he was "short and fat."

He kept at it because Jimmy O as the Starrett City legend is known gave him money.
He doesn't like punching people. Some fighters do, but Briggs said the thrill is "to control the opponent, make him do things he doesn't want to do, frustrate him, make him miss, and then hit him.

"I don't go in there to hurt the guy."

He won a silver medal in the 1991 Pan Am Games, getting a bye to the finals where he was knocked out by Felix Savon of Cuba.

"I had limited experience," he said. "In New York, I felt I was the man, but when I went on the national circuit, these guys had 200-300 fights, they'd be sitting around telling old war stories, fights they had in the junior Olympics."

In Cuba, he spent 24 days seeing sights more than training. He said he was ill weighed 181 pounds to Savon's 220 ("I swear they fooled with the scales") for the 201-pound final. Briggs' nostalgia rests elsewhere.

The van went by the old school and he and Taylor just had to go inside. Everything that seemed so big in the first grade looked so small now.

The kids gathered round the the strange-looking giant whose 'locks scraped the hallway ceilings. One child was scolded.

"Times change," Briggs told the children. "I used to get a spanking."

Mist formed in his eyes as he entered the chapel where the second, third and fourth grade classes used to be jammed. A sign on a wall said: "Lives Touching Forever."

He entered his old first-grade room where junior kindergarten children, three and four years old, were sleeping in their little chairs, heads resting on the table.

"What happened to the cots? We used to have cots," said Briggs.

He turned to Taylor.

"We've got to get cots."

"God bless you," said the teacher.

So who is he? Maybe Margie Briggs did not raise a great fighter. It's too soon to tell. According to the Risen Christ Lutheran School, she raised a good boy.

From the NY Daily News: http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/sports/1995/12/10/199...

# # #

Marc Roberts of Jupiter, Florida, is a successful, self-made entrepreneur who networked and promoted his way to the top. He is the founder and chief executive of Worldwide Entertainment and Sports.