Three Crumpled Dollars

What a Strongman Taught Me About Money

I’ve been trying to trace my relationship with money back to its origin story, but the tape only rewinds so far. Six years old, maybe. That’s where things start to flicker into something I can almost hold.

But the first scene that really sticks—the one with color and texture and a lesson baked into it—comes a few years later, when I was nine, maybe ten, in fourth grade.

At the time, I was balling.

Someone had just given me a turquoise nylon wallet with dark blue trim—the kind that folded over and sealed with a loud, satisfying rip of Velcro. Inside it: three crumpled dollar bills. Not much, objectively. But to me, it was wealth. It had weight. It had identity.

That same week, our school had a special guest: Grizzly Brown.

Grizz wasn’t just some guy passing through. He was a Berkeley legend—a local strongman who would plant his feet between two motorcycles, each trying to peel away in opposite directions, chains in his hands, engines screaming, and somehow hold them both there, spinning in place. To us, he was as close to a superhero as you could get without a cape. Larger than life, but right there in the flesh.

So naturally, my nine-year-old brain came up with a brilliant plan: I’d show him my money.

He’d see me. He’d get it. He’d think I was cool.

I remember timing it so I’d pass right by him. As I approached, I pulled out my wallet, flipped it open, and started counting my three wrinkled dollars like I was doing something serious—something important.

Grizz watched me for a second. Then he leaned in slightly and said, calm and direct:

“Buddy, put your money away. You don’t want anybody seeing that.”

That was it. No lecture. No smile. Just a quiet correction.

Total backfire.

But even then, I could tell—he wasn’t wrong. It landed somewhere deeper than embarrassment. It felt like being let in on something.

Years later, Grizz showed up again in my money story.

By then I was a freshman in college, and it wasn’t going well. I came home for the summer a little lost, a little shaken. I called him and told him I wanted to learn how to box. This wasn’t as random as it sounds—Grizz had been my wrestling coach in junior high.

He said yes. At least out loud.

What I didn’t know at the time was that he had no intention of letting me box.

Instead, we spent the summer lifting weights, day after day. About a week in, he looked at me and said:

“If you’re serious, you should be a bodybuilder.”

Then he added something that stuck even more:

“You don’t box unless you need the money.”

I understood it right away—I just didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to think I was tougher than that. But I knew exactly what he meant. I knew he was right.

Grizz gave me a lot over the years—confidence, discipline, the sense that I could push further than I thought. But he also gave me two quiet, durable lessons about money.

The first: money isn’t for showing. It’s not a performance.

The second: how you earn money matters. Some ways of making it cost more than they pay.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but those ideas have been sitting underneath everything ever since—guiding decisions, shaping instincts, showing up when it would’ve been easy to forget.

Funny how three crumpled dollars—and a man who could stop motorcycles—ended up defining so much.

In memory of Richard “Grizzly” Brown