The Owners' Manual | Issue 20 | Winter 2021

I have a story about Tommy (Tiny) Lister, an actor who just recently passed away in the last month actually at the age of 62. He has been in numerous favorite movies of mine, like Friday, No Holds Barred, Batman Dark Night, Fifth Element, and almost always cast as the bad guy. He was probably most famous for being Deebo, the Compton hood bully in Friday. So, I had been spending a lot of time working with my L.A. team on a Transit Center design at the time and it had me traveling from Kansas City, where I lived at the time, to Los Angeles for the week. On one of these trips home, I was on a Southwest Airlines flight from Los Angeles LAX to Kansas City. It had a stopover in Phoenix though where I was to stay on the plane and let passengers deboard. I was first to board and sat in the front row as I was excited to get home.As passengers continued to board after me, amongst the crowd comes Tiny. He is a very large man in real life just as on the big screen. He comes on all smiles, flirty with the crew, and sits down right next to me (I assume for the extra leg room)! I was freaking out.

My time in L.A. that year had allowed me to see a few celebrities by accident. Like how I nearly ran into Flloyd Mayweather and his troll-sized body guards, at Roscoe’s Chicken andWaffles (a famous LA establishment in Hollywood), or on another trip home, I hung out in Las Vegas for a night before heading back during the CMA’s (Country Music Awards) and chatted at the bar with Eric Paslay for about an hour before his 11:15pm set. I had met him at the Blue Bird Café in Nashville 6 months earlier to see him perform on the same night he was awarded a prestige’s song writer award for having 3 #1 hits in a year. Back to the story.Tiny was headed to Phoenix for the weekend as part of his Monster Energy Drink promotion gig at a bike event there. On the flight, he was very open about the details of that side job, and his relationships with other celebrities such as Snoop Dogg over the years. He was a very business savvy person, who would use his celebrity status to network and build up other around him. He told me how filming the wrestling movie with Hulk Hogan, the Hulk actually broke his nose during one of the final fight scene rehearsals, and being a broke young actor at the time, Hulk wrote him a check for $25K to get his nose fixed. So, remember how I mentioned Roscoe’s Chicken &Waffles, so Herb Hudson, at least I think it was him, was also on this flight to Phoenix and mid-flight. He got up and was being a real “ball-buster” to Tiny about not being a promoter for Roscoe’s energy drink anymore and going to promote for Monster. Still can’t believe these two were flying commercial even now! Herb was a dapperly dressed gentleman, with the polished shoes, vest, cool guy hat and all. He reminded me of one of those 50’s night club jazz performers, kind of old school like that. Definitely seemed like someone who was as connected as Tiny was, if not more. Can you imagine running into your old boss on your way to the new gig you left him for?Well that is what this encounter was, and I was sitting talking with Tiny while all this unfolded on him mid-flight! It all seemed very friendly, with an undertone of “you owe me something later”. It was made more awkward since Tiny was wearing all Monster garb at the time. It didn’t seem to bother him at all however, and he just went right back into the stories, like that was all somehow part of his plan to be on this flight in the first place.Anyhow,Tiny taught me that if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you must first have a cool thing to sell, then make friends with Snoop Dogg and hope he tweets about you to his 22 million followers.And just like that, you are the next Marshall Fields, or some more modern day relevant tycoon… Bazos? So, the part of this that gets me, is Tiny was 55 years old at the time, and he shared he had a 5-year-old daughter and beautiful young wife at home at the time. He was a normal person, with a huge heart and hunger for life. He passed away in his home alone on December 10, 2020, just last month! An outstanding man and life he led.Was the coolest flight of my life! Randy Kirschner, Charlotte