From fast food to affordable housing, Udonis Haslem is a presence off the court in Miami
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Mr. 305: Hometown Hero
Udonis Haslem has been part of multiple NBA title teams on the court, but his off-the-court work has been equally impressive.
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It sometimes feels like Udonis Haslem might never retire from basketball or leave the Miami Heat. Whenever he does, he will still have his hands full.
He owns Subway stores and Starbucks coffee shops. He brought a pizza joint from Los Angeles to South Florida with the help of Dwyane Wade and launched a fashion line last year. There’s the Udonis Haslem Children’s Foundation for his charitable ventures in Miami and beyond, and JFC Miami Management Holdings, where he’s a partner to operate his many business ventures. He has even, fittingly, formed a partnership with FTX — the cryptocurrency exchange platform whose name now adorns Miami’s FTX Arena — to help with some of the company’s charitable efforts and become more involved in one of his newest interests.
It all stems from a simple mission he has been thinking about since he first made his foothold in the NBA.
“I really wanted to get into an opportunity to where I provide jobs for people,” Haslem said. “I didn’t know where to start.”
The NBA lifestyle is, of course, glamorous, although it took longer for Haslem to get there than most players of his stature. Haslem grew up in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami and won a pair of state titles at Miami Senior High School before going on to play for the Florida Gators. He was a four-year starter in Gainesville, but he was also a 6-foot-8 center and those aren’t in high demand in the NBA, so he didn’t get picked in the 2002 NBA Draft and went to play in France for a year with Elan Chalon of LNB Pro A. It took him until his third season with the Heat to get a $1 million contract and long-term stability in Miami.
With money came friends and family looking for a piece, and how could Haslem resist? He knew their struggles and he knew how hard it could be to escape poverty in his hometown. Eventually, he realized he could help.
“I got tired of handing out cash to people,” Haslem said. “That was the first thing was giving people money — family and friends. I was helping people, but I realized, at the end of the day as I got a little older and a little more wiser, that was just crippling, I wasn’t really helping, I was hurting them in the long run.”
As much money as they make, NBA players cede a certain manner of control when they play in the league. Nowadays, players are businesses unto themselves — they hire chefs, trainers, brand consultants, accountants, etc. — but, ultimately, they’re employees of their team and the league. For the basketball part of their job, they only have a need for so many people on payroll, and those people fill very specific roles.
In 2013, Haslem finally realized he could be a bigger one-man industry.
Before he was a basketball star, Haslem “was a chubby kid” — he was actually even 300 pounds when he got to France — and he “ate a lot of Subway.” His first venture into business was simple: He wanted to open a Subway.
“It literally started with a Subway,” Haslem said. “I felt that if I got into things that I was truly, truly genuinely interested in that I would give it the best version of myself, that I wouldn’t just be doing it for money. I always wanted to get involved in things that I was interested in that I would want to learn for myself, so I would give it the best version of myself.”
He called his accountant and asked him about how Subways run. He opened his first Subway soon after and now franchises four sandwich shops, two Starbucks, a couple of Auntie Anne’s pretzel stores and an Einstein Bros. Bagels. A few years later, he and Dwyane Wade launched Forty-Three and opened 800 Degrees Woodfired Kitchen’s first Florida location in 2018 because they both liked to eat at the pizza place when they traveled to the West Coast for games as teammates.
“That was really like business training wheels for me, learning how to run a Subway,” Haslem said, “then it just grew from there.”
As he has gotten older, Haslem’s ventures have become more magnanimous.
Last year, Haslem’s Haslem Housing Venture partnered with Coral Gables’ Magellan Housing from the Omni Community Redevelopment Agency to build Wynwood Works, a mixed-use apartment complex in the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami, which will include affordable housing. The development, which is being built on city-owned land, will restrict 20 percent of the 104 apartment units to people earning up to 50 percent of the area’s median income.
When Haslem was growing up, Wynwood was far different than it is now. He has seen gentrification take hold in the neighborhood once known as “Little San Juan” and push people out of the now-bustling entertainment district, which bumps right up against the historically Black Overtown neighborhood.
“I understand what’s going on with gentrification and different people being moved around, and different things like that,” Haslem said. “I want to have an opportunity to keep some of our people in their communities.”
This story was originally published December 15, 2021 at 7:00 AM.
