ESPN Anchor Tells Kids How To Break Out

The year was 1999. The place was a Freddie Fixer Parade. And the song was J.T. Money’s ​“Who Dat.”

Friends Chaz Carmon and Darren Haynes were teens on the cusp of manhood, honoring a tradition for many African-American youngsters — having a good time at the parade.

“We met somebody who had the same jeep,” Chaz Carmon, president of the anti-violence community group Ice The Beef recalled Tuesday as Haynes looked on. ​“We were deep in two jeeps. We had guys on the top of the jeep, people hanging out the side of jeep, the windows of the jeep. We were all riding down the street, and we’d stop at a gas station and everybody would just jump out when we’d play this song and start dancing and running around.”

“We’d be riding,” he told a room full of New Haven teenagers at the Amity Teen Center, many of whom were likely born the same year the song came out. ​“We’d be riding down the street. When our part would come up, we’d stop, put it in park.”

Then Carmon, Haynes, and a bunch of guys whom neither man can readily remember jumped out of the jeep. They commenced to running around it in sync with the song.

The teen campers from New Haven and Amity attending an Entrepreneur, Business, Reading and Theater Camp, got a chance to witness that short reenactment of that day by Carmon and Haynes at the Teen Center Tuesday. (Click play on the above video to see the reenactment of Freddie Fixer ​‘99 and performing trios Queen of Hearts and BTD (Born To Dance).)

Haynes, a 1999 graduate of Amity Regional High School and now SportsCenter anchor at ESPN, stopped by to talk about defying odds, choosing friends wisely, getting out of ​“the hood,” and onto the national stage.

In part that meant thinking about who is, and isn’t, in your ​“circle.”

A Tight Circle

“Chaz and I could have broken up our friendship, lost contact years ago,” Haynes said. ​“But we stayed in contact. Back in 1996 playing basketball until 1 a.m. at my parents house, we never thought we would have this connection, where he would have kids like you to help out, and me to come in speak to them. We would have never thought of that, but we stayed in contact.”

Haynes told the teens to be mindful of whom they keep in their circle. He said of an original circle of eight friends he had as a teenager, he’s in contact with only four of them.

That’s because of the other four, one is in and out of jail, one is dead, one had such strong ties to the drug trade here that his life was endangered by the many beefs he had with rival dealers that he moved to Atlanta. The fourth friend lives in Los Angeles.

“Some of the people in your life you know, they’re positive and doing good things — keep them in your life,” he told the teens. ​“My circle of friends now are people who make me better. So think about if your circle of friends makes you better. It’s real, deep in your heart, you probably care about each other. But do you actually make them better? Because if there is someone around you who makes you worse, they’re holding you back from what you can actually achieve.”

Eliza Vargas, 15, asked Haynes how to ​“get out the hood and make it to where they wanted to make it.”

“I think the last thing you just said, ​‘Get out the hood,’ is key,” he said. ​“I had to go to school in Detroit. I believe that your family, your mom and dad, their ceiling should be your floor and you should build on that. And sometimes the best way to strive to achieve bigger and better things is to get out.”

Haynes said that means studying hard to get into college, and in his mind, preferably a college out of New Haven unless it’s Yale University.

“Go to Yale. If you get into Yale, go to Yale,” he said. ​“But you’ve got to get yourself out of the situation. If you’re in the situation, you have a greater chance of being involved in it. While you’re here I can’t stress how big it is to make sure you hang around the right people.”

Best Revenge Is Success

The camp has brought together city and suburban kids this summer. It is sponsored by Jennifer Romanoff, director of the Amity Teen Center; Howard Boyd and Dexter Jones of the new Freddy Fixer committee; Felicia Shashinka from New Haven Parks & Recreation; Thomas Daniels of Fathers Cry Too!; Yoshi B.Child Models; the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven; and Liberty Bank.

Haynes, a former all-state, all-Southern Connecticut Conference and all-conference honors high school footballer, also played basketball and ran track. He went on to play football at the University of Rhode Island, the University of New Haven and Wayne State University, from which he graduated. After sports reporting jobs in Michigan, Texas and Boston, he landed at ESPN in 2014.

A lot of the people in his life told him along the way that he wouldn’t achieve all that, Haynes told the teens Tuesday.

“I basically had a bunch of people in my life who told me i couldn’t achieve things,” he said. ​“When I was your age somebody told me I was too small to play high school football. I ended up breaking records in college. It was my high school football coach who said, ​‘If you’re not receiving [NCAA] Division I football letters, you’re not going to play Division I.’ I ended up getting D‑I scholarships.”

He had a similar experience, he said, when he had the opportunity to ask the head person for hiring all of the people who now appear on the network if he might too work there some day. It was 2008 at a broadcasting conference.

“He said no,” Haynes recalled. ​“And that burned inside of me for years. It’s almost like he said it yesterday; that’s how fresh it is in my mind.”

Six years later, when he got the call from ESPN, the same man who told him no was on the other end of the telephone. He asked the man if he remembered telling him that he wouldn’t ever work at ESPN. The man didn’t.

“I said, ​‘I remember,’” he told the teens. ​“And I remember saying, ​‘I’m not mad at you for saying it. You sparked something in me to drive me to work harder, to prove him wrong. There’s a lot of people who can say that you won’t achieve something. You can get mad at them, you can fight them, you can curse them out — I hope you don’t curse ​‘em out, hope you don’t fight them at all either — but you can pay these people back by your success, by you doing things really well.”

The soon-to-be first African-American inducted into the Amity Regional High School Hall of Fame likened how the teens should look at their goals and how they should consider the naysayers — the haters — to a line from a Beyoncé song.

“Beyoncé has some part of her song — and you ladies may have to help me out — she mentions something about her bank account, or how much money she has is her pay back, you know what I’m talking about..” he said, trying to recall the line.

“Oh, she said ​‘The best revenge is your paper,’” Co-Op High student Eliza Vargas chimed in.

That was the line Haynes was looking for. He wasn’t focused on the money aspect of the lyrics, but on Beyoncé‘s many accomplishments since she and early girl-group Girls Tyme — a forerunner to Beyoncé hitmaker group Destiny’s Child — lost on Star Search.

“If anybody tells you you can’t do anything, make sure you shut them down with your success,” he said. ” I shut down a lot of people who told me I couldn’t do things and I still see them this day and I just smile at them.”

And the teens have big hopes for themselves. Most of the campers are rappers, singers, dancers, actors and future fashion designers interested in working as performing artists.

Before Haynes gave his talk, a trio of three singers known as the Queen of Hearts performed a song a cappella and a trio of dancers known as BTD (Born To Dance) took to the stage to show off their skills.

At the camp, they get to hone their performance skills while also working on reading. Not only do they put on musical performances and act out improv scenes, they also read play scripts.

“They enjoy it, and encourages them to be better readers,” Carmon said.

Thinking back to that Freddie Fixer in 1999, Haynes asked Carmon if he still had ties to the other guys in the jeep. Carmon said he had no idea where any of them are now.

“Associate with people who will hold you accountable and do the right thing,” Haynes said. ​“It will change your path.”