Jaylen Brown's jersey retirement was a perfect reflection of everything he's become

ATLANTA — As hundreds of Wheeler High School students and faculty members counted down from 10, all Jaylen Brown could do was smile.

When they hit zero, a tarp dropped, revealing a banner with Brown’s name and high school jersey number, No. 0. Wheeler retired the number, honoring Brown, who led them to a state championship his senior season.

“Pretty cool. Pretty surreal,” Brown said at Celtics shootaround on Saturday morning.

Wheeler, located in Marietta, Ga., provided Brown with a foundation for the rest of his life. “I had so many different experiences,” Brown said. “Wheeler's a mix of a lot of different worlds. Working-class people, you got some affluent people, it's a little bit a mix of everything. Different ethnicities. So, my experiences definitely prepared me for life.”

At the time, basketball came first. It was everything. Dreams of reaching the NBA swirled through Brown’s head, and by his senior campaign, ESPN ranked him as the third-best recruit in his class, sitting only behind Ben Simmons, Skal Labissiere, and Brandon Ingram.

But basketball wasn’t the only area in which Brown excelled.

“I was accelerated in math and science,” Brown said. “I came into high school with high school credits already. So, as a freshman coming in, taking classes with sophomores and things like that, a lot of my friends were older.”

Yet, as a high schooler, nothing was more important than making it to the league. And every step he could take to get there was important.

Even if it meant hiding papers from his mom.

“I remember I took the PSAT in my sophomore year, and I scored, like, in the top 10th percentile,” Brown said. “I got all these camps I get to go to, math and science, that I was eligible for, and they gave them to me in my homeroom. And I remember seeing the dates: They were at the same time as the LeBron camp. So, I remember stuffing them at the bottom of my book bag. They never got to my mom. She would’ve probably sent me there.

“And they had a parent-teacher conference a few months later, and they were asking, 'Did you ever get the packages or whatever that we sent? Jaylen was eligible to go. He was a math lead. He was able to go to the Science Olympiad camp.' And she was like, 'No, I never got them.' And I was like, they didn't give them to me. I don't know what happened to them. We going to the LeBron camp.”

Since then, Brown’s priorities have shifted.

Jaylen Brown has turned basketball into the ultimate platform

Basketball is still important. The 2024 NBA Finals MVP has blossomed into one of the league's best players. He’s putting up career numbers this season, and the Boston Celtics have climbed all the way up to the second seed in the Eastern Conference.

But from the moment he stepped into the spotlight, he knew how influential his platform was. All-Star games, All-NBA teams, and trophies fulfilled personal goals, but they also elevated his ability to make a difference in the world around him.

When he returned to Wheeler on Friday, he wanted to share that perspective.

“I just wanted to give some words of wisdom, some inspiration, to let them know, despite their circumstances, they can use their platform, or they can continue to kind of beat the odds,” Brown said, discussing his message to the students at his jersey retirement ceremony. 

“A lot of [the time], when you go into public schools, feel like the system is kind of betting on half of those kids not to succeed. So, just being able to have the awareness, give them the tools, so that they could navigate life a little bit better.”

Brown has spoken out about racial injustice in Boston and across the US, explored the impact of sports on education and society, given a lecture at Harvard University on the importance of self-identity and social empowerment, and more.

These ventures, in part, led him to start Boston XChange, a company dedicated to empowering historically marginalized communities through innovative programming, strategic partnerships, and a state-of-the-art incubator.

Wheeler’s decision to retire Brown’s number was more than a symbol of his basketball excellence. It was emblematic of the change he’s made in the world. Change rooted in his experiences as a student there.

In 2014, Brown sent a tweet from class:

The post has gone viral multiple times, specifically after Brown was drafted in 2016. But on Saturday, he explained the backstory.

“I think it was over 10 years ago. I remember like it was yesterday,” Brown said. “I came into class. I think I had just got back from a camp. It was either Nike camp or something like that, and a lot of the students were just excited talking to me, X, Y, and Z. And I remember, I mean, I was kind of distracting the class, not intentionally, but all the kids wanted to ask me questions and stuff at the time. I was a kid as well, but it was kind of distracting to the class, and the teacher was just trying to get the class organized, so she made a comment. 

“She made a comment, it was like, 'If Jaylen doesn't do his work, I don't care what camp he went to, or whatever the case may be, he's not going he's not going to be successful if he doesn't pay attention to class' or something. I might have said something back, like, whether I pay attention to class or not, I'm gonna make it. And she was like, 'Well, we'll see. I'll see you in the Cobb County Jail.' That was her response. And it was a substitute teacher. And it was kind of a back-and-forth.”

Brown revealed that he sent the aforementioned tweet during his next class, and a school administrator immediately checked in with him. “I was like, 'No big deal.'”

There was no anger in Brown’s voice when he recalled the story. No resentment; just reflection. In fact, Brown’s recollection was paired with understanding.

“I empathize with teachers, because the reality is [that] you have a class that's probably got too many students in it,” Brown said. “And their job is to not only teach the class, but also keep a group of like 30 students behaved, or more, that come from backgrounds that maybe lack resources, that have problems at home, maybe. So, they have other issues that they're probably dealing with at the same time. So, I empathize with teachers because they don't get paid enough to deal with some of the stuff that goes on. But that's kind of what happened. 

“Maybe I could have been, at the time, I could have been more respectful in the sense. But it was just kind of like one of those things where the students were just excited to kind of hear about some of the stuff that was going on for me outside of [school]. I couldn't really control that. But that's kind of what happened.”

Kids in public school aren’t afforded the same opportunities as kids in private schools, and often not even as one another.

“The reality is that a lot of those kids don't have the opportunity or the resources to reach the same level of success,” Brown said. “The opportunities are limited. Only a certain amount of students are going to university, certain amount of students are going to community college. The opportunities dwindle depending on the zip code that you come from.”

That’s why Brown is who he is. The experiences he had at Wheeler were merely a building block, guiding him toward the path that he’s on today.

A life devoted to basketball has given him a platform from which to speak out, take action, and be the change he wants to create.

Statements such as the one that the substitute teacher made back in 2014, however unsettling, didn’t shake him. They simply added another log to an already budding flame.

“Those were the words that were said to me, and I did use it as fuel for the next 10 years, and here we are,” said Brown.