Sometimes you have to fall all the way down before you’re willing to claw your way back up.
Kenan Holley ’98, who recently directed the documentary series “Soul Power: The Legend of the American Basketball Association” for Prime Video, had once seemed destined for the success he’s now enjoying.
In high school, Holley had blossomed his senior year, transforming himself from a “small, nerdy kid” into the star running back and Homecoming king. At Duke, his determination and intensity landed him a role on the football team as a defensive back, and he also starred in “Duke Sports Inferno,” which he helped create with fellow students Ben Tishler ’99 and Brett Goldberg ’99 for Duke Student Broadcasting. After graduation, he went to work for NFL Films, moved to Los Angeles, got married and had two children.
Then it all started slipping away. He stepped away from his career as a TV producer, at one point trying to make it as a rapper. He left Los Angeles and went home to Texas. “I got scared and ran,” he says. “And then my marriage started falling apart. It was the hardest time I ever had.”
Back home in Houston, he took odd jobs, transcribing dictaphone recordings for an attorney, organizing spreadsheets for a company that repaired submarines, and selling copiers.
With no clout and no money, Holley thought he was developing a “bulletproof resilience” to the vicissitudes of life. Then his brother took him out to a club where someone came up to him and said he looked familiar. It turned out they’d gone to high school together. When the guy learned who he was talking to he blurted out, “I remember Kenan Holley. He used to be a big deal.”
Devastated, Holley quietly said, “Not anymore.” And walked away.
“That was my ultimate low point,” he says. A week later, a friend called to offer a production job with NASCAR Media. Holley didn’t relish the idea of working for what he saw as the sports world’s epitome of redneck culture. “But I swallowed my pride because I needed to take that first step back,” he recalls. “Being willing to start over was one of the best decisions I ever made. It revitalized my career but also my entire life.”
In 2014, Holley moved from NASCAR to ESPN, where he spent three years producing and directing before forming his own company in 2018. He also remarried and has a young daughter. The brash and intense youngster who annoyed superiors at NFL Films by playing too aggressively in flag football games is mostly gone. These days, Holley comes across as thoughtful and humble. The flashes of confidence tend to come out mostly when he’s talking about helping others. Last year, he started Athlete2Artist, an informal group bringing together the young former athletes he had been mentoring individually in the TV industry.
It’s fitting, since Holley’s grandmother was a teacher and both parents were professors at Texas Southern University. He and his siblings roamed the TSU campus after school, occasionally sitting in on classes. His sister Danielle went on to become president of Mount Holyoke College.
Their parents exposed them to everything Houston had to offer, from theater to dance to art. Holley always studied the process, trying to understand everything from stagecraft to timing. “And when I’d watch TV my siblings would say, ‘Kenan’s falling into the television again’ because I was so enthralled,” Holley says, adding that he used to borrow his father’s video camera to make movies with his friends.
In high school and at Duke he put that interest aside to focus on football, but he grew frustrated by that singlemindedness and sought a chance to return to his first love of TV and film. He found it in “Duke Sports Inferno,” which he describes as “like ‘Saturday Night Live’ mixed with ‘Sports Center.’”
He created Athlete2Artist last summer to combine his desire to help others with his belief in the power of collaboration. He loves watching his “starting five,” the first cohort, fuel each other’s ideas and enthusiasm, even though they’re from different backgrounds – both in terms of sports (golf, football, running) and career experience (editing, production, marketing). He’s even enlisting his first cohort to help find the next batch of mentees.
“He helps us think about business decisions and how to spend our time, " says Sasha Shapiro, one of the first group who credits Holley with being influential in the growth of his company, Laundreymen Productions.
Another cohort member, Madou Elijah Diarrassouba, who played defensive line at Appalachian State University, benefited directly from Holley’s life lesson about reining in his aggression in the business world. “He taught me not to always go full throttle and how to be a better leader,” he says. (Holley hired both Diarrassouba and Shapiro, who served as an editor on “Soul Power,” as producers on the next docuseries he’s developing, about the Cameron Crazies.)
Another mentee, Jalen Norwood, says there’s an urgency to Holley’s lessons. “He bumped his head a lot before figuring things out,” he says. “He told me his goal was to take the 20 years it took him to learn everything and get me there within five years.”
Holley says that means teaching his mentees about everything from how to read a budget – something he never did until his late 30s – to lessons about life and marriage.
“I’ve finally learned to ease up and relax a little bit,” he says. “But “I want them to learn from the mistakes I made.”