The National Arena League tenure for former NFL wide receiver Antonio Brown with the Albany Empire was a very messy, short one.
Whether it was players and coaches leaving due to a failure to be paid for games played, or Brown’s reported debut on the field with the team being delayed and then canceled altogether because he didn’t fill out the necessary paperwork, his tenure as owner of the Empire — the franchise his father was a star for in the 1990s — was a colossal failure.
Brown eventually had to fold the Empire after the franchise was kicked out of the NAL due to unpaid fees, including a $1,000 fine to Brown for conduct detrimental to the league.
The former star receiver now finds himself in some ugly headlines again Friday, thanks to a deep dive from ESPN on his tenure as owner of the Empire. That messy tenure also allegedly included him threatening to pull a gun on players following a heated conversation regarding a social media post honoring a former player that died last year in Mo Ruffins.
According to original reporting from ESPN’s Anthony Olivieri and Michael A. Fletcher, players were upset that a tribute on social media was quickly deleted. Looking for answers as to why the post was taken down, they couldn’t get one from members in the front office, which led to them confronting Brown at a cigar lounge in Albany.
In the reporting from Olivieri and Fletcher, Brown was with a man named Ryan Larkin, who was a local sneaker entrepreneur that Brown had hired into the front office after taking over as majority owner.
Empire wide receivers Darius Prince and Dwayne Hollis said that the players were there to just talk about their views and tell Brown how they were feeling about the situation. Then, the conversation turned heated, leading to Brown threatening to pull a gun on the players.
“AB looked at Ryan [Larkin] and was like, ‘Hey, man, you still got the AR in the car? Go get it,'” Prince said, according to the original reporting from Olivieri and Fletcher. “Then I was like, I’m not going to allow this dude to walk out of here after you just threatened us. … After he said that, things did calm down and we had a conversation. But the fact is that he threatened us by telling his assistant to grab his AR.”
That’s rather frightening to hear from players, considering Brown at the time was the owner of the franchise and oversaw them. Brown has found himself in plenty of situations involving potential criminal incidents, including multiple alleged sexual assaults — one of which Brown settled in court — as well as settling a lawsuit that alleged he threw furniture off a 14th-floor apartment balcony onto an occupied pool deck, nearly hitting a toddler.
Brown was also kicked out of the team hotel in Albany during the season due to allegedly “smoking marijuana and playing loud music” according to a report from the Albany Times-Union, forcing the Empire to move to a new team hotel that was allegedly infested with bed bugs, according to former Empire head coach Maurice Leggett.
Brown’s tenure was capped off by a heated argument over the phone with players and coaches regarding no pay for two games. Brown allegedly told the players that he had no respect for them, and that they should focus on winning games rather than getting paid, and also allegedly called the players “a bunch of broke arena boys.”
The post-playing days of Brown have been quite a rollercoaster. It got even worse with his ownership of the Empire. The reporting from Olivieri and Fletcher doesn’t paint him in a positive light whatsoever. He hasn’t helped himself either.
