Your brother needs you: The bond that created one of the NFLs best young defenders

Tom Rinaldi didn’t know what he was getting into when the veteran reporter put Stanley McClover in front of a camera at the 2019 NFL Draft in Nashville.

The Carolina Panthers, for whom McClover played from 2006 to ’07 — had just drafted McClover’s brother, Brian Burns, halfway through the first round. Minutes later, Rinaldi approached McClover, who wore a vest and bowtie in Carolina’s colors as though he’d willed the moment to happen.

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Rinaldi, on scene as part of ABC’s draft coverage, asked McClover about his emotions — which came out not through tears, but volume.

“Carolina blue,” McClover said, smacking his chest with his right hand. “I put in that work. Now it’s time y’all go get my little brother.”

McClover looked directly into the camera.

“Listen, I went seventh round, 237th pick,” he added. “My brother went first round, 16. I ain’t gotta say nothing else.”

McClover had plenty else to say — the gregarious Florida native is seldom at a loss for words. But there’s no way he could have articulated it in a 30-second interview — how he’d lost his house and nearly everything else after his own NFL career ended so abruptly, not the least of which was his purpose. Nor how he then rediscovered it by helping prepare his younger brother for his own NFL journey.

That it all had come full circle with the same team was almost too much for McClover to take in.

“The story is crazy,” McClover said, his voice booming over the phone. “How he ends up back in Charlotte, I think it’s one of the better stories in the NFL. I love telling it.”

Burns has always had the look of a basketball player. He gets his long, lean build partly from his father, the 6-foot-6 Brian Sr., who went to Kansas on a basketball scholarship the year after Danny Manning and the Miracles won the national championship under Larry Brown.

Burns Sr. lasted only a few months in Lawrence before returning home to Fort Lauderdale. He met and married the former Angela Payne, who had a son, Stanley McClover, from a previous relationship. The couple had two other children — a daughter, Britashia, and Brian Jr., known as “B.J.” to his family.

Despite his dad’s background, B.J. was not a natural in basketball, though he played through his sophomore year in high school. His early years in youth football didn’t suggest future stardom in that sport, either. Burns was a center until his dad suggested to the coach he needed a position on defense, too.

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“He wasn’t a stud. He wasn’t that good,” Burns Sr. said, “and he fell in love with the game as he got older, which made it better for him. Then his athleticism caught up with his body.”

Burns celebrated his eighth birthday a week before the Panthers drafted McClover in the final round of the 2006 draft. He remembers spending parts of two summers in Charlotte, where McClover, whose nickname at Auburn was “the Predator,” was living large while playing a small role as an end on a Panthers’ defensive line that included a trio of established stars in Julius Peppers, Mike Rucker and Kris Jenkins.

McClover had a nice house in Charlotte’s northeast suburbs, a Hummer and Dodge Magnum on custom rims with surround sound and thumping bass. And custom jewelry, upscale watches, gaming systems and more. “He had all the clothes in the world — Prada, name it, whatever,” said Burns. “He had everything at the crib.”

Aside from enjoying McClover’s material possessions, Burns started gravitating toward football and was excited to go to Panthers’ games and meet star players such as Peppers, Steve Smith, Thomas Davis and DeAngelo Williams.

“I was just having fun,” Burns said. “It was cool to say my brother’s in the NFL.”

Unfortunately for McClover, it didn’t last long. After appearing in 11 games his first two seasons in Carolina, the 6-foot-2, 260-pound McClover was among the team’s final roster cuts in 2008. Houston picked him up the next week, and he was covering a kick in the Texans’ Week 1 game at Pittsburgh when he tore the lateral meniscus in his right knee.

“I was hitting a three-man wedge,” said McClover, referring to wedge blocks the NFL outlawed the following offseason. “I guess I hit it the wrong way and twisted my knee up and tore it.”

McClover was recovering from surgery the next week when Hurricane Ike hit Houston, bringing flooding and 110-mph winds and knocking out power to nearly 3 million people. McClover spent a sleepless night holed up in his bedroom closet before the Texans’ medical staff could make it to his condo development after the storm.

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“They came with pain medicine and barbecue,” McClover said.

After spending the rest of the ’08 season on injured reserve, McClover was back in the Texans’ camp the following summer. But his knee continued to swell up on Houston’s artificial turf field, and he was released in mid-August with an injury designation. He learned of his release from the team’s equipment manager while receiving treatment in the Texans’ training room.

According to Spotrac, McClover’s initial three-year, $1.1 million deal with Carolina included just a $30,650 signing bonus and no other guaranteed money. His career totals: 14 games, eight tackles, one sack — and next to nothing in his savings account.

“I was living. I was young. I did a lot of things I wasn’t educated about,” he said. “You see the money and you’re like, ‘Man, I’m all right. I’m playing football. I’m doing what I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life.’ And you never really think about injuries and all the other stuff that comes with it. And when it hits you, it hits you out of nowhere. Then you’re like, ‘Oh, wow, I’m 24 years old and not playing football no more.'”

McClover lost his house, as well as everything in it. He moved back to Fort Lauderdale, where he went back and forth between living in a friend’s apartment and his mother’s house.

With no job and little money, McClover struggled to provide for his young daughter, Dajah. His mother recalled getting a call from McClover, who told her he was coming to her hair salon. They went into a back room to talk.

“He was like, ‘My daughter said she was hungry, and I didn’t even have enough money for a Happy Meal. So how am I a man if I can’t get my daughter a Happy Meal?’ And he slid down on the floor and he bawled,” Angela said. “He knew the child would eat because she has family, but he couldn’t supply it, and that tore him apart.”

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He sold his other cars in Charlotte, but McClover woke up one morning in Fort Lauderdale to find his Range Rover had been repossessed. He would try to work, but his physical issues limited him. One of his last jobs was as a security officer at Burlington Coat Factory, but he’d leave work with his knee swollen after being on his feet all day.

“There was a time when he didn’t have toiletries,” Angela said. “He used to change out of my car. I helped him as much as I could, being a single mom (with) both of my kids — one in high school, one in college. It was extremely hard for me already, and then I had to tend to him in so many different ways.

“It was hard for me to see him going through what he was going through. … He was so used to a certain type of life, and when he didn’t have it anymore, he didn’t know what to do with himself.”

Besides the financial problems, McClover was struggling with figuring out what was next after the NFL. He said he wasn’t abusing drugs or alcohol, but his post-football life lacked purpose.

“I never got suicidal, but I got in dark places,” he said. “I got in very dark places that held me there for years. … I had to pull myself out of that and be there for my brother, because he was ready to play football.”

By Burns’ freshman year, the former Pop Warner center had become a teenage pass rusher. Burns, who attended three high schools in talent-rich South Florida, saw teammates pulling in scholarship offers to FBS schools and wanted the same for himself, so he sought out McClover.

“After I started getting interest from colleges and I started seeing the older guys, the seniors, getting offers, I was like, ‘OK, I can really do this,'” Burns said. “So at that point, I went to him and I was like, ‘I want to work on my craft. I want you to teach me.’

“That’s when I started getting real good.”

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McClover was a volunteer assistant coach at Dillard High, his alma mater, for Burns’ freshman year. But after Burns switched schools, the pair’s training sessions took on a more intimate feel at Osswald Park, a city-owned park in Fort Lauderdale in the shadow of I-95. Minutes from Angela’s house, the park has a little something for everybody — tennis and basketball courts, a driving range and a shuffleboard court — but no football fields. So McClover and Burns would head to the outfield grass at the Little League field to begin their drills.

“‘The only position I know how to coach you is D end,'” McClover recalled telling his brother. “And he was skinny and small. I was like, ‘OK, I know you’re small right now, but you’re gonna have to be the fastest, quickest thing in the world.'”

McClover passed on a lot of the pass-rush techniques he’d learned from Panthers defensive line coach Sal Sunseri. And it helped that McClover used to literally follow Peppers around the Panthers’ facility, soaking up as much as he could from the future Hall of Fame defender.

Rucker remembers two things from McClover’s time with the Panthers — his smile and his willingness to learn.

“Even though he might not have played 30 years in the league, with his ability — he maximized. He learned. He was willing to learn in the film room,” Rucker said. “And my first impressions with Brian and meeting him … was that he was the same way.”

McClover would purposely schedule the two-hour workouts with Burns to start in the mid- to late afternoon.

“It was hot,” Burns said, “He didn’t really give me no breaks.”

McClover didn’t have a coach’s whistle or tackling dummies, but he made up for it with energy and MacGyver-like ingenuity. After Burns warmed up and did agility drills on the baseball field, his brother would take him to the other side of the outfield fence and line him up opposite a light pole.

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“That was my dummy. That was my offensive tackle. That’s how we worked that spin move — right there on that pole,” McClover said. “There’s trees right by the baseball park, so if I ever wanted to get a guard and a tackle, I’d find me two trees close by and have him work moves on both of the trees, as if they were men.”

What type of trees were they?

“The big ones,” McClover said, laughing.

“We broke that thing down all the way from the proper stance to get into the three-man technique to how to play on the offensive tackle,” McClover added. “I gave him every fundamental I learned from Sal Sunseri and Julius Peppers and Mike Rucker. I taught him everything I knew. I didn’t care how young he was. I was giving him that NFL verbiage that he needed to hear, in high school.”

Doing a spin move on an immovable object had its advantages and disadvantages. “It hurt,” said Burns, so he learned to use his quick feet and agility to minimize the collisions. Burns also believes his dance moves — developed at barbecues and family reunions, where his dad would bring the audio equipment from his side job as a DJ — were beneficial to his football training.

“With me being able to dance, I caught on quick and that’s when I started getting good at it,” Burns said. “But at first I kept hitting the tree, and it didn’t feel good.”

The two went to the park nearly every day, with McClover shouting instructions and encouragement while his brother fired off the ball in a “get-off drill” or ripped through a series of pass-rush moves. They were joined in later years by Dillard High graduates Randy Ramsey (a Packers linebacker) and Jordan Wright (Kentucky edge rusher), but mostly it was Burns and McClover, some days working into the fading sunlight — and with McClover arguably taking more away from the sessions than his little brother.

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“He was majorly depressed,” Angela said. “And I’m one of them moms that would be like, ‘If you don’t get off your ass, and you’ve got a whole lot to live for, are you crazy?’ I read him the riot act like: ‘Oh my God. You have been blessed with the talent to have played in this league. You have a beautiful daughter. You have a family that supports you. And you’re on your ass whining about what you don’t have and, oh my God, my life’s so tough. Boy, please. …’

“After I got in his butt, I said: ‘Your brother needs you. I don’t have another son. So you’ve got what it takes to make it to the league because you did. Help your brother.’ So he started really, really pouring into B.J.’s life.”

“I felt like somebody needed me, somebody wanted me,” McClover said. “I was still worth something to somebody.”

Burns developed into one of the top recruits in the country at American Heritage, a private school in Plantation, Fla., where Angela worked in the cafeteria and as a crossing guard to defray the cost of attendance for her children. In two seasons at American Heritage, Burns racked up 28 sacks, earned an invitation to the U.S. Army All-American Bowl and was named the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel’s Defensive Player of the Year in 2015.

Like their time training together at Osswald Park, helping his brother navigate the recruiting cycle energized McClover. “When I was going through my recruitment process, that’s when I realized he was coming back to being who he is,” Burns said. “He enjoyed that a lot.”

Burns chose Florida State over Florida and Georgia, then led all freshmen nationally with 9.5 sacks his first season in Tallahassee. After finishing with 10 sacks and an ACC-leading 15.5 tackles for loss as a junior in 2018, he declared for the draft.

Edge rusher was an obvious need for the Panthers, whose 35 sacks in 2018 ranked near the bottom of the league. They also were seeking a successor to Peppers, who had announced his retirement after 17 NFL seasons and a second stint in Carolina. Meanwhile, McClover had his own love-hate relationship with the organization.

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“When I first got cut (in 2008), I came back to Charlotte so many times. I missed it so much. And then it got to a point where they wouldn’t allow me to come on the practice field no more,” McClover said. “That was the knife that went in my heart. … I was so hurt, I didn’t even want to see Charlotte no more. It was like a bad breakup.”

McClover stayed away until David Monroe, the Panthers’ alumni affairs manager, invited him to a legends weekend at Bank of America Stadium in 2018. McClover came to Charlotte, where he caught up with former teammates and told team officials to keep an eye on Burns.

“I think (helping his brother) was a newfound direction for Stanley. It gave him some purpose,” said former Auburn teammate and NFL running back Ronnie Brown. “Being able to redirect that energy, that’s his personality. He likes to see people doing well. He likes to see people having a good time. And I think he saw the opportunity to genuinely help his brother.”

Emotions came to a head at the draft in Nashville, with Burns wearing a Florida State-garnet suit with Spiderman socks and his older brother decked out in Carolina blue.

“The story is crazy,” McClover said. “I love my mom getting an opportunity to talk about it. Because it was something that changed our lives twice — the same place. It’s crazy.”

“Same city, same team, same position — 13 years apart,” Angela added. “Can’t get it no better.”

With Burns establishing himself as one of the NFL’s most dynamic, young pass rushers over his first two seasons, McClover’s role has shifted a bit. As the “Big Bro of the Best DE in the NFL,” McClover refers to himself as the Panthers’ “Hype Man” on his Twitter page, which he updates often with photos of Burns and videos of McClover talking excitedly about the 2021 season. Brian affectionately describes his brother as “a class clown, center of attention, loud as hell.”

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Despite playing most of his rookie season with a broken wrist that required surgery during the Panthers’ bye week, Burns has collected 16.5 sacks over his first two seasons — more than any other Panther besides Peppers (19). Among players from the 2019 draft, only Raiders defensive end Maxx Crosby (17) has more sacks. With his athleticism, explosiveness and length — Burns is listed as 6-5, although Burns Sr. says he’s matched his father at 6-6 — Burns’ hype train is growing.

“There’s not very many guys as athletic that can do as many things as he can in this league,” Panthers defensive coordinator Phil Snow said. “To me, his ceiling is really high.”

“He’s very elusive, very athletic, tremendous explosion off the ball,” Panthers tackle Taylor Moton said. “He’s got all the tools to be one of the greatest in the game.”

Burns, who just turned 23 in April, seems poised for double-digit sacks and his first Pro Bowl berth, especially with the arrival of free-agent edge-rusher Haason Reddick. But Burns prefers not to share his personal goals publicly.

“I just feel like it’s a jinx. I feel like if I say it too much or tell too many people, I won’t accomplish it,” said Burns, whose four-year, rookie deal is worth a guaranteed $13.5 million. “My brother and my mom know. It’s not really a secret. People know what you want to get done.”

Angela and  Britashia have moved to Charlotte, while Brian Sr. lives in Fort Lauderdale, where he’s a delivery contractor for Crate & Barrel. McClover is also in Fort Lauderdale and visits Charlotte often.

Asked where he stays in Charlotte, McClover laughed: “If I want a good meal, I go to mama’s house,” he said. “If I want a good time, I go to bro’s house.”

McClover has done some mentoring and volunteer coaching in the Fort Lauderdale area, but his first priority remains Burns. The two watch film together via FaceTime on Tuesdays and Fridays during the season. On game days, McClover texts his brother throughout the first half, telling him things he’s noticed. Burns will reply with a thumbs-up at halftime.

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McClover, 36, is in a much better mental space these days. He began attending counseling five years ago as part of the NFL’s benefits package for former players.

“You get like eight free visits with therapy,” he said. “I took all my eight and I did another eight, and I did as many as I had to to get to the point where I can accept and live my life regular like anybody else.”

Eight years ago, the NFL started the Legends Community, an initiative to keep ex-players connected and to celebrate their business and charitable accomplishments. Rucker, the director of the Legends’ Southeast region, said McClover’s post-NFL journey is not uncommon.

“Everybody’s going to go through a transition. It’s just how quick you can pull your parachute and how hard or how soft your landing is gonna be,” Rucker said. “But everybody’s gonna fall. It’s just how quick you pull that ripcord.”

Burns said he’s noticed a big change in his big brother.

“I feel like the therapy and all the counseling really helped him because those first couple years was rough,” he said. “He’s a lot like me in that aspect, as far as he wears his emotions on his sleeve. So if something’s bothering him or something’s on his mind, you see it. It’s blatant.”

Angela still dabbles in hairstyling, but “B.J. says I’m retired now.” Britashia, 26, is a daycare director and recently became engaged. B.J. is an ascending NFL star, and McClover is a proud father of three children.

Things are looking up. Plus, football season is nearly here.

“Saturday, you should see Stanley perk up,” Angela said in a booming voice. “He’ll go get a haircut. He gets all excited because Sunday football’s coming. Six o’clock in the morning Stanley’s calling everybody: ‘It’s game day, baby!’ It’s game day!'”

McClover’s bond with his brother may have contributed to Burns’ blossoming NFL stardom, and in the process it may have redeemed a career that didn’t work out the way he envisioned.

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“B.J. gave him all the purpose in the world. If there was no B.J., there probably wouldn’t be a Stanley here right now, being honest,” Angela added. “Stanley probably would have went so deep in depression, we probably wouldn’t have been able to pull him out. … He couldn’t get his head around that he didn’t do what he wanted to do in football. He couldn’t get that out of his system. …

“When B.J. was playing ball, that gave Stanley all the motivation in the world to get (his) life together. So B.J. saved Stanley. B.J.’s saving Stanley right now.”

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: Kevin C. Cox, Jacob Kupferman / Getty Images)

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