William “King” Hollis

William "King" Hollis was sleeping outside a gas station when a stranger asked him how much he charged to speak.

Hollis met Brad Banyas at a Super Bowl party and watched the brand from a distance for a while before asking to come on. Banyas had been trying to book him since the show started and says Hollis was supposed to be the first guest. Hollis kept apologizing for the delay, which Banyas points out is rare from somebody with that much moving. By the time they recorded he had a distribution deal with Empire and a show in development at Fox Sports.

He grew up in Pontiac, Michigan. His mother was a heroin addict and his father a career criminal. He describes the first mornings of summer, when he was the only one awake, walking outside and looking down at crack pipes, needles, blood stains and bullets, then looking up at the sky and seeing somewhere to go. He learned to be a man, he says, before he became one. The word King came out of the projects too. He was in the living room watching the Michael Jackson video Remember the Time with his mother, saw Eddie Murphy in the costume and asked her what that was. She said that is a king. He has called people King ever since, and he went and studied it afterward: a crown does not make a king, what he does for people does.

He was homeless in Reading, Pennsylvania, sleeping outside a Turkey Hill gas station. An interim defensive line coach for an arena team had seen him talking to a group of her players, and one day he pumped her gas. She told him he spoke well and asked him to come talk to a group of her kids. He walked there in a dingy collared shirt and dirty slacks, carrying a pistol, and had a young man in tears inside five minutes. He was walking back to the Abraham Lincoln Hotel to kill himself when his phone rang, seven or eight steps from the door. She asked what he charged. He said seventy five dollars, maybe a hundred, because he had no idea what a speaking fee was. She booked him for an assembly of 500 kids, and he got a standing ovation the first time he ever spoke.

His son King is five months old, and Hollis says the boy is watching him grow into a man while he helps the boy do the same. His younger brother, who played at Akron, was adopted by Bonnie Dutton after their mother died; she taught Hollis what a care package was and took two big Black kids to Red Lobster while strangers stared. The book he brought to the studio is aimed at children, so they learn to tell their story out loud in a classroom with a counselor in the room who can hear where the pain is. The Darkest Hour went to number two on the spoken word chart. He cut it in 48 hours during a snowstorm in Cleveland, and it moves through the prison kiosks, which is who he made it for.