SAN ANTONIO – As they carefully placed the ribs in the outdoor smoker behind Ballhogg’s Barbecue, Byron Delane Jr. and Marcus Calloway thought back to all the cooking tips they had learned that summer.
But in the restaurant, both learned important life lessons.
“Stop messing around so much, take the work seriously, because I used to mess around a lot,” Calloway said.
Delane said he also grew this summer under the careful supervision of Hubert Brown, the owner of Ballhogg’s.
“This man,” he said, pointing to Brown, “gave me a chance, a simple, good, very good chance to work here.”
This is Brown’s goal in a program he runs every year with the support of the Texas Work Commission and basketball legend George “The Iceman” Gervin.
“I try to teach them how to work in a work environment because for many of these kids, it’s their first job,” Brown said.
Mentoring now plays a big role in Brown’s life, but music also brought him success for a while.
He said he was one of the founders of a record label called 15Five Entertainment that 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 Grammys,” Brown said.
Eventually, however, he felt the need to return to San Antonio to give back to the youth of the East Side neighborhood.
His restaurant is located on E. Houston Street, just around the corner from the Frost Bank Center.
“That’s because I was one of those kids,” he said. “I grew up in the Lincoln Court projects. My mother was on crack.”
Brown said his father, a “real cowboy,” raised him and his brother as a single father.
Although it wasn’t easy for him to stay out of trouble, Brown decided to pave the way for others.
One of his first community projects was founding 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 youth helped build the restaurant from scratch, which included the hand-crafted furniture.
The basketball restaurant displays pictures of former Spurs legends, including Gervin, and there’s even a portrait of Brown hanging in front of the team’s Fiesta logo.
His restaurant’s logo is an interpretation of a famous photograph by Tim Duncan, showing a pig looking over a basketball, its arms tightly wrapped around it.
“We thought, ‘We’re right here where (the Spurs) play. We sell pork. It’s Ballhogg’s,'” Brown said, explaining the unusual name.
When he’s not in the kitchen, Brown says he works for the city of San Antonio and also serves as a community mediator during times of tensions related to gun violence.
He said he has money in mind in everything he does.
“When you’re gone, people won’t remember your money,” Brown said. “They’ll remember how many lives you impacted.”
After this year’s summer jobs program, Brown said he impacted 68 young people. He said that’s how many teens and young people worked at his restaurant and went on to make it in life.
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