BREATHE DEEP - PART 1

They say bullshit baffles the brain and I'm as good at baffling brains as the most street wise hustler on the block. Especially my own.

Which is why I found a natural affinity with two-time heavyweight champion of the world, Shannon "Let's Go Champ" Briggs.

Shannon Briggs is a born hustler. I knew that when we first started talking late spring of 2020. And, if I'm honest, he made me feel better about the first Covid lockdown. You don't feel so bad about about the Wu Flu when you got the Brownsville Yeti bigging you up on a facetime call.

"This shit 'bout to blow up champ. We gonna win awards and shit!"

When everyone was locked down in their houses and back gardens, the promise of epic dreams being realised felt more euphoric than normal.

Ironically, I was only meant to pitch a food concept to Briggs on my brother's behalf.

Maybe I pitched it too well.

It all came about as a combination of my brother Reuben sending me random videos of his plant based fast food recipes that he was developing in a little ghost kitchen in Brighton.

He'd asked me to come up with a name for the potential plant based fast food  company which I duly did. I must have come up with a few hundred crazy names all of which he rejected.

At the same time, whilst I was idly scrolling Instagram, I found Shannon Briggs screaming motivational slogans at his followers with his viral videos in which he would often be punching speedballs and beating bags against the wall as well as  downing smoothies in his kitchen to some old school beats blasting.

Then came the lightbulb moment for me.

From his world renowned mantra: "Let's Go Champ!" ...

To "LET'S GO CHOMP!"

My brother said I could have a 20% cut of any future deal if I could arrange a contact with Briggs which I duly did, but I didn't realistically expect anything to happen, nor was I doing it for the money. More for the Don Draper like compulsion of pitching to a random celebrity and seeing if I could pull it off.

Sliding into the Champ's DM's as the expression goes, I got one of those 'Mission Impossible' style disappearing video messages from Briggs from his home in Florida suggesting he was curious to find out about my fast food pitch.

We agreed to arrange a call between him and my brother that Thursday evening (Florida time) but for some reason my brother blinked in the headlights, tired from a long shift in his kitchen and asked me if I'd pitch the project on his behalf.

Having been drooling on a cushion, zonked out from watching a film, I immediately  got my game face on and took the call with the Champ.

Without going into painstaking detail, I pitched him a vision for a revolution in fast food in America and the world which had a special relevance in light of the pandemic and one that would help saves lives rather than contribute to co-morbidity factors that were clearly not helping with regard to the rapidly increasing (at the time) COVID19 death rate.

I talked about how we would name the items on the menu from the glossary of boxing terms and slang. We would have the brawler, the down n' out, the pound for pound and the champ etc

Needless to say, he loved it and was instantly on board as he asked me what I did for a career to which I replied that I was just a lowly, failed screenwriter.

"You're a writer? How'd you like to write the story of my life, champ?"

Clearly things had accelerated quicker more quickly than I had expected. I spent the next few hours reading a rough draft document that the Champ and his wife had written based on his life growing up in Brownsville, New York. From that document I pretty quickly got a sense of what I had to work with.

"I see a kind of Prince and Pauper story where you and your mum go from Atlantic Towers to being practically homeless on the streets. It's Dickensian."

The Champ's face lit up as he told me he'd call me the next day.

After the facetime call, I felt pretty victorious having got Briggs enthused and ready to be involved with the Let's Go Chomp fast food franchise concept and having been offered the opportunity to be his biographer and potential screenwriter for a movie or TV adaptation of his life.

It was, as Ice Cube once rapped, "a good day" and God knows in Covid times they were to be grabbed with both hands.