Jaylen Brown, a top player for the Celtics, says he is all about the youngsters and enhancing the Boston area.
At Dorchester’s Fenelon Street Playground, where the Celtics forward is leading a court renovation in collaboration with Northeastern University junior Kaiya Santos and the city’s Parks and Recreation Department, Brown was met by a sizable crowd on Friday.
Brown has been quite busy this summer. He recently returned from a trip to Spain and is still negotiating a contract extension. He would have the highest contract in NBA history if the Celtics extend an offer to him of $304 million over the following five years and he takes the super-max.
But on Friday, Brown didn’t really care about all of that. Youngsters wearing Celtics shirts eagerly greeted and took photographs with their hero.
Brown stated, “It’s always about the next generation.” “I am aware that being an athlete often means being taken out of these environments and placed in places where you are forced to forget about your home towns. I’ve been reluctant to do it ever since coming here. This is only a tiny sample of what’s happening in these Boston locations, but these events will go on as long as I’m here.
A native of Marietta, Georgia, which is about 20 minutes outside of Atlanta, Brown is redesigning and renovating Fenelon Street Playground, which is located a few streets from Franklin Park Zoo, with the help of his sponsorship with Red Bull.
The basketball court will be changed into one with multitone blues, orange, red, and yellow lightning bolts, and quirky zigzags within the next month. Santos, the winner of Red Bull’s “Get In The Paint” competition, submitted the design. The competition asked artists to submit graphic representations of their ideas for the playground’s future.
“It really does feel awesome knowing that my art is going to be helping people because I feel like there’s a big stigma around art and people think that it’s a little silly or useless,” Santos told the Herald in March.
Brown’s commitments to the community have caught the attention of Mayor Michelle Wu, who highlighted how the Celtics’ fan favorite hosts an annual event at the Museum of Fine Arts to raise for social justice-related causes in Boston and across the country.
“I’m just always blown away,” the mayor said of Brown. “He will just show up randomly at a court just to hang out and make sure our young people see themselves reflected in what’s possible in their futures.”
Since joining the Celtics in 2016, Brown has established two organizations: the BRIDGE program, which he and his family created to provide students with opportunities to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; and the 7uice Foundation, which focuses on education reform and other social issues.
“It’s going to be a space where a lot of our young people play and participate,” Brown said of Fenelon Street Playground, “but this space also represents what needs to be done more here in Boston. We don’t just need a fancy court that looks good for kids to play on. We need to close the wealth gap here in Boston. We need to create new jobs, new opportunities, new resources.”
On Friday, a large crowd greeted Jaylen Brown at Dorchester’s Fenelon Street Playground, where the Celtics forward is spearheading a court redesign. (Stuart Cahill/Boston Herald)
