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Cannon Briggs

By: Jaxon Gay

For former heavyweight boxing champion Shannon Briggs, the hunger for success doesn’t end when he leaves the ring. Yet even after the bell rang out, Briggs’ bout wasn’t over. He had been fighting his whole life.

“Anybody and everybody that went against me was going to get knocked out fast.” 

Before Shannon was “The Cannon,” he was just a kid growing up in Brownsville, New York. The life he lived was anything but easy. Having never met his father, Briggs spent his early years with his mother, who would do her best to ensure he had everything he needed, from private school to an entire set of collectable Battlestar toys. Behind the Star Wars curtains, his mother was falling apart. 

“She had begun to fall into drug habits that had consumed a big portion of her life,” says Briggs. 

Briggs came home one day, and instead of feeling the comfort of home, he was met with an eviction notice. The sudden change made him homeless. Couch surfing with friends until he happened to stumble upon the Starrett City Boxing Club in Brooklyn, NY. It was there he could focus his anger and passion into something constructive, rather than falling into crime like many of his peers. 

“I miss that comfort, so I was fighting to get it back,” Briggs says. But boxing wasn’t the end goal for Shannon Briggs. Building a legacy that improved the lives of those around him was what he strives for. 

After his retirement, he immediately began investing in businesses. He’s since begun partnerships with Applied Bioscience, started the Let’s Go Champ! clothing line whose proceeds go back to Brownsville, along with a podcast teaching viewers ways to get into entrepreneurship. Briggs is also working with the city of Brownsville to build a Boxing Academy, so more children have an outlet, just like he did. 

“In a hundred years, if a kid can watch my stories and be inspired, I want that.”