Celtics star Jaylen Brown says he is all about the kids and bettering the Boston community.
On Friday, a large crowd greeted Brown at Dorchester’s Fenelon Street Playground, where the Celtics forward is spearheading a court redesign in partnership with Northeastern University junior Kaiya Santos and the city’s Parks and Recreation Department.
Brown has stayed busy this summer, just returning from a trip to Spain, as he remains in negotiations for a contract extension. If the Celtics offer him $304 million over the next five years, and he accepts the super-max, he’d have the richest contract in NBA history.
But none of that really mattered to Brown on Friday. Kids sporting Celtics jerseys excitedly met their idol and posed with him for selfies.
“It’s always about the next generation,” Brown said. “I know as an athlete sometimes you’re removed from these spaces, they put you in these areas where you forget about the communities where you come from. Since I’ve been here, I’ve been refusing to do that. This is just one small example of what’s going on here in these spaces in Boston, but as long as I’m here, these things will continue.”
Brown, a native of Marietta, Ga., about 20 minutes outside Atlanta, is using his sponsorship with Red Bull to redesign and refurbish Fenelon Street Playground, a few blocks away from Franklin Park Zoo.
Within the next month, the basketball court will be transformed into one that features multitone blues, orange, red and yellow lightning bolts, and funky zigzags. The design came from Santos, the winner of Red Bull’s “Get In The Paint” contest, which had artists submit graphic designs of how they envisioned the future of the playground.
“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 founded the 7uice Foundation, an organization that focuses on education reform and other social issues, and the BRIDGE program, which he created with his family to give students opportunities to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
“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.”
