Before creating some of Miami’s greatest parties, Michael Gardner had a long climb to the top of the club scene

If you know Michael Gardner today, you know him as the businessman, the baller, the buddy to your favorite performer, the absolute boss of the party scene. So then you might be surprised to know he used to live in the back of a barbershop.

This was 20 years ago. He was 25, and it was rock bottom for Gardner. Gardner remembers: “The barbers would come in in the morning and say, ‘How do you always beat us in here every day?’”

Nowadays he runs some of the biggest nightclub events in Miami, organizes a major music festival, does the afterparty for Chris Brown concerts and has celebrities like Diddy, Mariah Carey, Jay Z and Beyoncé show up to his events. But getting there? It’s a story that includes some serious sucker punches.

BEHIND THE BALLER

While growing up in the tiny Illinois town of Centralia, Gardner had an early love for basketball partnered with an undying belief that he’d become the next Michael Jordan. A mix of passion and talent landed him a scholarship to the University of Miami. After he got here, he started hanging with UM football players, and they took him to his first nightclub. “It was like what I had seen in ‘Scarface’ in real life Miami, palm trees, sandy beaches, nightclubs.”

His junior year, the team was up in D.C. to play Georgetown, and Gardner was out until sunrise. Gardner found his coach sitting on his hotel bed, and the coach cut him.

Getting dumped for ignoring curfew, it still wrecks Gardner. “I can see if I had done something really bad, but I had just missed curfew,” Gardner says. “Now you’ve taken my life away from me.”

A CALL TO FAME

Looking for something new, Gardner put together a weekend event with Ice T and Don “Magic” Juanas paid celebrity stars. “Oh man, it was a disaster,” Gardner recalls now. “It was the worst. Nobody showed up, and I lost the money I borrowed.”

He tried it again, this time hitting up the celebrities who got their hair cut at the barbershop where he had been sleeping: Alonzo Mourning, Lamar Thomas and Jason Taylor. “I tasted a little bit of success with it,” Gardner says.

The key to it working was what would end up making him successful: he paid attention to every detail. He founded his nightclub party companyHeadliner Market Group in 2001. Nowadays he’s best known for LIV On Sunday, a blowout at theFontainebleau Miami Beach billed as “The World’sGreatest Party.” He also runs the after-parties for Chris Brown shows, which means traveling the country to make sure when Brown walks in, the place is crazy.

Six years ago, he took over running the Overtown Music & Arts Festival, which grew from a neighborhood event to drawing 10,000 people in 2019. He’s also building out his first club called Harlem Square, a three-story lounge and cigar bar. It’s not the insane party he once would have planned — at 45, Gardner has different ideas of what defines an exciting night out.

These days, Michael Gardner keeps a live-in-the-moment attitude, focusing on the reaction he sees from people at his events having a good time. His favorite moment is the end of the night when people are filtering out, the sun rising over Miami Beach, and another one of “The World’s Greatest Party” nights behind him.

This story was originally published December 10, 2019 at 4:37 PM.