SAN ANTONIO – As they carefully placed racks of ribs in the outdoor smoker behind Ballhogg’s Barbecue, Byron Delane, Jr., and Marcus Calloway kept in mind all the pointers they had learned about cooking this summer.
Inside the restaurant, though, is where they both learned important lessons about life.
“Not to play around as much, to take work seriously, because I used to play around a lot,” Calloway said.
Delane said he has grown this summer, too, under the careful supervision of Hubert Brown, the owner of Ballhogg’s.
“This man,” he said, pointing to Brown, “gave me a chance, an easy, good, very good chance to work here.”
That is Brown’s goal in a program he runs each year with help from the Texas Work Commission and basketball legend George “The Iceman” Gervin.
“I try to teach them how to work in a work environment because, a lot of these kids, it’s their first job,” Brown said.
Mentoring is a big part of Brown’s life now, but music also brought him success for a while.
He said he was one of the founders of a record company called 15Five Entertainment, which made its mark in the world of hip hop.
“We moved to Atlanta. We wrote the song ‘Blame it on the Alcohol’ for Jamie Foxx. We got Grammy (awards),” Brown said.
Eventually, though, he said he felt the need to return to San Antonio to give back to the youth in the East Side neighborhood.
His restaurant is located on E. Houston Street, right around the corner from the Frost Bank Center.
“It’s because I was those kids,” he said. “I grew up in the Lincoln Court projects. My mom was on crack.”
Brown said his father, a “real live cowboy,” raised him and his brother as a single father.
While avoiding trouble wasn’t exactly easy for him, Brown decided to help pave the way for others.
One of his initial community projects was creating a nonprofit called “Power” to teach young people how to start and run a business.
Brown said some of the youth in that group convinced him to start his own business, Ballhogg’s, with their help. He said the teens pitched in to build the restaurant from the ground up, which included hand-making the furniture.
The basketball-themed restaurant features pictures of past Spurs legends, including Gervin. There’s even a portrait of Brown in front of the team’s Fiesta-themed logo.
His restaurant’s logo, meanwhile, is a take on a famous Tim Duncan photo. It features a hog peering over a basketball with his arms wrapped tightly around it.
“We were, like, ‘We’re right here where (the Spurs) ball at. We sell hog. It’s Ballhogg’s,” Brown said, explaining the unusual name.
When he is not in the kitchen, Brown said he works for the city of San Antonio, as well as a community mediator in times of tension related to gun violence.
Nothing he does is with money in mind, he said.
“At the end of the day, when you’re gone, people aren’t going to remember your money,” Brown said. “They’re going to remember how many lives you impacted.”
After this year’s summer jobs program, Brown said the number of young lives he has impacted is 68. He said that is how many teens and youths have worked in his restaurant and then gone on to be successful in life.