‘Who doesn’t want a Hypeman?’ Brian Burns’ brother, a former Panther, finds new purpose

In 2006, the Carolina Panthers drafted a defensive end from Fort Lauderdale who demonstrated great promise. But in his third season, he showed up at training camp very out of shape, got cut, wrecked his knee while trying out for another team and spiraled into a deep depression.

The player would still sometimes come to Panther practices after his career was over, talking his way past security and hoping to see some of his old teammates. A team security guard then stopped him one day and told the player he couldn’t do that anymore. He was turning into a distraction.

Meanwhile, the player’s home in Charlotte was foreclosed upon. His BMW and Range Rover were repossessed. His NFL career ended at age 24, and by 25 he had blown all of his money. He went back home to Florida and licked his wounds. For close to a decade, he was in a dark place.

That player’s name was Stanley McClover, and only diehard Panther fans have ever heard of him.

“I thought I would play forever,” McClover said as we sat together at a Charlotte diner recently. “But there are 53 guys on an NFL team, and you might know the names of four of them. The others don’t have a household name. They’re just guys. They’re fighting for a job. They’re fighting for their lives. My story is way more common than the big success story.”

In 2019, the Carolina Panthers drafted another defensive end from Fort Lauderdale who also demonstrated great promise. In his third year, that player showed up at training camp in great shape. People think he will be a Pro Bowler, maybe even this season.

That player’s name is Brian Burns.

McClover and Burns are brothers, separated by 13 years. The older one has found his purpose by coaching and cheering for the younger one to do the things he never got to do.

Stanley McClover’s NFL dream never completely worked out. But the 36-year-old has moved back to Charlotte and poured everything he knows into the 23-year-old Burns, determined to see his younger brother take every step, make every dollar, win every award and avoid every pitfall that McClover couldn’t.

“As a brother, Stanley always has my back,” Burns said. “He was always behind me, no matter wrong or right. If I had a bad game or a good game, he was always there. Always a person I could talk to about anything.”

Now the two share the Panthers’ field for every home game, like the one Sunday at 1 p.m. against the New Orleans Saints.

With a personality as bubbly as champagne, McClover has caught on with the Panthers’ entertainment division this season to play a character they are calling “Hypeman.” The Panthers give McClover a microphone at every game, let him run around the field and into the stands, and use him to excite their fans however he can.

“It’s what the world needs,” McClover said of his new role. “Who doesn’t want a Hypeman? I would love to have a Hypeman, you know what I’m saying? I would love to have somebody telling me how great I am every day.”

But isn’t McClover at all jealous of everything his younger brother has accomplished and all the money Burns has already made?

After all, as McClover noted, his signing bonus as a seventh-round draft pick in 2006 was $19,000. Burns is playing on a four-year contract that is worth a guaranteed $13.5 million, according to Spotrac, and his next contract will be far more lucrative than that.

“I helped raise my brother since he was a baby,” McClover said. “I fed him bottles. We’re 13 years apart. Me being jealous of him? That would just be ridiculous. I love him.”

The elephant and the panther

Although McClover only has one actual brother, he calls just about everyone “bro” in conversation. Many fans who meet McClover don’t believe he really is Burns’ brother. (The two have the same mother and different fathers, so they are technically half-brothers.) They just think McClover looks like a big guy who is having fun, and they want to take a picture with him.

Burns, meanwhile, spends his game days chasing quarterbacks, using moves that McClover taught him, in part at a Fort Lauderdale park where they pretended trees and light poles were offensive tackles. Burns is also charismatic when he wants to be, but he is both naturally quieter and more talented than his brother.

“Brian is sort of like the Black Panther himself,” said Angela Burns, mother of both Burns and McClover. “He’s kind of stealthy. He sneaks right up on you. You don’t even know he’s coming. Stanley is an elephant, tearing up stuff and knocking trees down. You’re gonna hear him. They’ve always been like that.”

Ask Burns to describe McClover and he says: “Can I use multiple words? Wild. Crazy. Chaotic. Spontaneous. Impulsive. Anything that has to do with him doing something crazy.”

Ask McClover to describe Burns and he uses multiple words, too — but hundreds of them rather than dozens.

Burns is McClover’s passion project. He so embedded himself into Burns’ first two years in the NFL that, as McClover described it: “I was so deeply rooted into everything Brian did that I could feel it. Like if he had a bad day, I got a bad day. If his leg hurt, my leg hurt. I was that into his life.”

Now, though, Burns doesn’t need quite as much help. He’s matured. There are fewer video games and more film and treatment sessions in his daily routine. And on the field, Burns is already “rare in every way,” as Carolina head coach Matt Rhule recently said.

And so McClover, much like a parent dropping a child off at kindergarten, can feel himself having to pull away a little, whether he wants to or not.

“My brother is 23 years old now, and he’s stepping into the role of a man,” McClover said. “He doesn’t need me as much. So I have come to that crossroads in my life where I had to let him go. And that killed me.”

Over the past months, McClover has instead tried to redirect much of the love and energy he focused on Burns for so long toward the Panther fan base. McClover has an active Twitter following of 8,500, where he labels himself “Hypeman Loochie.” That was originally the name he used when he flirted with the idea of trying to become a rapper. He occasionally gives away Panther jerseys that he buys on his own.

The Panthers noticed McClover’s incessant energy and invited him to be a part of the organization again. He and fellow hypeman Jake Fehling, as well as the team’s recent additions of male cheerleaders and a mixed-reality virtual Panther, are all part of the Carolina entertainment division. That branch of the Panthers is trying new things on game days to give fans new ways to connect to the game. (It also made a big mistake by not featuring the “Keep Pounding” chant in Week 1, but that’s another story.)

“Can I get them into it?” McClover said of the Panther fans. “That’s the question. We’ve been known as a wine-and-cheese crowd. Everybody knows that. I just want to help change the narrative, and I want to do it through love. I just go out there and be myself. Honestly, I don’t have a script. I don’t have nothing but this mic in my hand. They tell me when I can talk, and I try my best to get the crowd pumped.”

A mom working 3 jobs

McClover and Burns had similar upbringings despite their age difference. They were both mostly raised by their mother, Angela Burns, in the Fort Lauderdale area. Each was named after their father. The immediate family actually calls Brian “B.J.,” for Brian Jr. Both fathers were occasionally involved in their sons’ lives, but Angela Burns was and is the family’s rock.

As the boys’ primary emotional and financial support, Angela Burns said she survived on two to three hours of sleep a night for several years when she worked three jobs simultaneously.

“I was a crossing guard at B.J.’s school,” Angela Burns said, “and later on I worked in the school cafeteria when my daughter (Brian and Stanley’s sister, Britashia) was playing basketball there. Once school was over, I would go to work doing hair. I’ve been a hairstylist for 26 years. And then I’d leave, go home and get something to eat and go to Walmart to work.”

McClover became a fine defensive end in high school and got recruited to Auburn. He was a strong player there and was drafted in the seventh round in 2006 by the Panthers on a team that already boasted Julius Peppers, Kris Jenkins and Mike Rucker as starters on the defensive line.

McClover made the 2006 Panthers as a rookie and followed Peppers around, fascinated by the older man’s talent and approach to the game. McClover barely played as a rookie but got into 11 games in his second season in 2007, posting his only NFL sack in one of them.

“It looked like I was gonna start once Rucker retired,” McClover said. “Everything was working out for me. But I would have to blame myself for how I ended up getting cut. Being young, I didn’t realize that your body is your way you get paid. I didn’t realize that you’re a grown man once you make it to the NFL, nobody’s going to babysit you to work out and get in shape. And that’s where I dropped the ball, not being responsible enough to take care of my body and be in shape for that training camp. And that’s the year I got cut.”

Houston picked McClover up after Carolina released him in 2008 and put him on special teams. In his first game, he was told to run down and break up a type of wedge on kickoff coverage that is no longer legal in the NFL.

McClover wrecked his knee trying to do it, and that was it for McClover and football. Every time he tried to practice for more than a day or two on the knee, it would swell up. It still pains him some today.

‘Scared to face the world’

McClover’s troubles were exacerbated by the fact he spent his money like the financial well was never going to run dry.

“I felt like I was at the top of my life,” McClover said, “like it ain’t going to hurt me none to drive a nice car. I can afford it. I make good money every week. But when I got hurt, I wasn’t educated enough on how to maneuver my money, not knowing that I’m not gonna get any more.”

McClover went back to Florida, his housing expenses being paid either by close friend and fellow NFLer Ronnie Brown, or his mother. He became clinically depressed. He burst out crying once when he couldn’t afford to buy one of his children a Happy Meal at McDonald’s.

“When football was over, man, I hit that ground hard,” McClover said. “I missed out on a lot of key years with my kids (McClover has three children; none of them currently live with him). I couldn’t face nobody. I was embarrassed, bro. Everyone knew I blew all my money. I tried to work, but my knee sometimes wouldn’t let me. A lot of days I would do nothing. Just sit in the house. Embarrassed. Scared to face the world.”

McClover would eventually go to therapy, which he said was a lifesaver for him. Still, his mother was constantly concerned about his mental state.

“You know how people go into depression and you can’t pull them out?” Angela Burns said. “I was super worried about him. ... It was like: ‘Damn. Am I going to lose my son?’”

Angela Burns also doled out some tough love, figuring McClover needed to find something he really wanted to do.

“He just couldn’t provide for (his children) like he felt like a man should, which made him more depressed,” Angela Burns said. “And I was like, ‘OK, when you get finished wallowing in your misery, go help your brother. He’s playing football and he needs guidance and you’re the big brother. So you need to get off your a-- and get over there. ... And eventually, with that, Stanley found his purpose.”

‘He’s way better than me’

McClover became Burns’ personal trainer and confidant once Burns started taking football more seriously in high school. He made sure Burns asked him to work him out first, though, as he didn’t want to overstep.

“I had to come to him to let him know I was ready to actually start training,” Burns said. “That was in high school. And he took my game to another level, from high school, to college, to now.”

As the college recruiters flocked, McClover helped with those visits, along with Burns’ parents. After Burns went to Florida State, McClover kept close tabs on him. At Burns’ NFL Pro Day, when then-Panther general manager Marty Hurney showed up, McClover told him: “My brother is out there. And he’s way better than me.”

McClover would have been happy for Burns to be in the NFL no matter where it was, but on draft night he wore a Carolina blue suit, silently hoping the Panthers would be the one to complete the family circle and take his brother, too. When a “704” area code showed up on Burns’ phone in the first round of the 2019 draft when it was time for the Panthers to make the draft’s 16th overall pick, McClover said: “I couldn’t even stand up. I had no power in my legs.”

A brother’s dream

Burns had a tremendous first two seasons, ending up with a total of 16.5 sacks. McClover stayed on Burns, though, knowing that his younger brother’s work habits weren’t always perfect.

“I was always on him,” McClover said. “Do this. Do that. I’d text him a lot. Sometimes we’d have hour-long conversations. He got tired of it after a while, saying, ‘OK, another lecture?’ But I’d still lecture the mess out of him. I don’t want what happened to me to happen to him.”

This year Burns wants to at least hit double digits in sacks — he already had one in Carolina’s opening game. He now has played 32 career games for the Panthers and boasts 17.5 sacks. Among Carolina defenders, only Peppers got off to a faster start.

And with each sack, his brother will be cheering him on as Hypeman, getting his own time on the Panthers’ video screens occasionally, too.

“I like that he’s doing that,” Burns said of his brother’s cheerleading role. “It’s funny to see him on the Jumbotron, so I’ve got to kind of get used to that. But I like that he’s spreading happiness, love and just really getting our fans into the game more. They kind of feel closer to the team because he’s doing it, and because he has insight through me.”

For McClover, having Burns live out his dream is the next best thing to living it out himself. When he works the field as Hypeman in the pregame, that dream is so close he can almost taste it.

“Even as much time as passed, even to this day when I’m standing out there, bro?” McClover said. “Oh my God. Oh, I wish I could play. You never can shake it, you know? But then I look at my brother. And that, bro? That’s what gives me life.”