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Nine eras. Nine stickers. One guy who can jump seven inches.
Every fact in here is real. That's the joke.
Monroe, Louisiana. Birthplace of Delta Air Lines, the first bottled Coca-Cola, and — "that happened to us" — Duck Dynasty. Also, in Johnny's words, "number one of the things you don't want to be number one in." He showed up in 1991 and got lucky twice: once with geography, and once with a mom who built a children's museum on the city's racial dividing line, so every kid in town could learn and play at the same time. Playing with a purpose. Keep that phrase — he later built an entire career on it.
Delta Air Lines — founded here. yes, really.
first Coca-Cola ever bottled. also here.
Duck Dynasty. "that happened to us."
mom's museum — where the whole thing starts
The original plan was the NBA. The plan had one flaw: Johnny is 5'7" and, by his own measurement, can jump "like maybe seven inches." Then at 14 he saw soccer on TV for the first time and simply decided. What followed was not talent — it was five hours of practice a day, every day, from 14 to 22. It worked: state championships, an All-Star MVP, a college national championship, the #29 shirt, and a professional run across the US… and into a Brazilian jungle. (Next chapter. Buckle up.)
| SHIRT | #29 |
| HEIGHT | 5'7" |
| WEIGHT | 147 lbs |
| VERTICAL | 7 in (self-reported) |
| PRACTICE | 5 hrs/day, ages 14–22 |
| SPECIAL | refuses to quit |
In college, Johnny took a class called History of Soccer. The teacher turned out to be a FIFA agent with a line to a tiny club in a jungle town whose name means something inappropriate in Portuguese. So, obviously, Johnny went. Brazil gave him: teammates for life, a visa "fixer" who vanished with his money — "he kind of just stole my dream, is the way I saw it" — a stretch living in a favela, and one mosquito with a personal vendetta that swelled his eye shut overnight. He woke up, called his mother, and said the four words every mom dreams of hearing from South America: "I can't see."
Ex-soccer player keeps bottle ice-cold in a sock; refuses to tell two bars the same story
Between lower-league soccer contracts, Johnny worked as a manny — a male nanny — for a Main Line family. The father, a man who helped found Redbox, also happened to import Ghoolia: Mongolia's finest vodka, and decided the charming manny should sell it bar to bar in South Philadelphia. ("I'm charming, right? In my own way.") Johnny's insight, which became the foundation of his entire career: everyone communicates in their own way — so every bar got its own truth. All of them true. That's the trick.
house rule: pick the right pitch for each bar. sell all three → 🧦 sticker. (the sock keeps the bottle cold. cold vodka tastes good. warm vodka tastes like vodka.)
Johnny moved to Spain for a Master's in Innovation at UCAM. "I thought I was on the beach. Turns out I was in the desert — an hour and a half from the beach. Google lied to me." He stayed anyway, because of two discoveries: a cohort with 17 countries in 30 people, and a design agency called Rapsodia whose creative process was borrowed from El Bulli — the best restaurant on Earth — where you break an orange down into texture, flavor, and color… and rebuild it as something entirely new. He even wrote a LinkedIn article, in Spanish, titled "Los murcianos son TONTOS" — pure bait; the article is a love letter — and signed it Juanico Saye, Americanico. The Murcians adored it. To this day, Spaniards find it deeply funny that the American learned Spanish in Murcia. Imagine learning English in the bayou and being proud of the accent. He is.
"Vine a Murcia a aprender español y me quedé porque nunca he estado en un lugar más creativo que este."
— JUANICO SAYE, AMERICANICO · LINKEDIN, EN CASTELLANO, 2017Status check, summer 2017: no home, no job, freshly dumped, 27 days left on his visa, sleeping on the floor of an Italian friend named Claudio in the hottest place in Spain, no air conditioning. He sent 105 résumés to four countries. Two called back. One was a yacht-journalism job. The other was IBM — who noticed him largely because his CV photo was Johnny biting an apple. He survived a group interview against twenty taller Spanish engineers ("Cool, well I studied Journalism and can draw alright") by quietly facilitating the entire room, then took the deciding phone call two beers deep on an empty stomach. "It was like the beer was a truth serum." Asked whether he'd be willing to learn to program: "If I can learn Spanish like this in six months, I can learn to program. It's just another language." IBM iX, Madrid. At the time, he did not own a computer.
Back stateside, Johnny teamed up with John Hawley — twelve years Navy — to fix how organizations solve problems. The client list got serious fast: Navy, TSA, Air Force, Army, Ford, Cisco, IBM. Six-hundred-plus workshops facilitated by Johnny personally. Two books. Thirteen courses. A card deck. The pitch is gloriously anti-consultant: "We are not academic. We learned this by doing it." No two-million-dollar PowerPoint and a handshake. And his favorite proof that the method is universal: kindergarteners and Navy SEALs solve problems with the exact same process — he will tell you this to your face, warmly.
Johnny landed in St. Pete and did an extremely Johnny thing: on December 12, 2023, he walked onto the St. Pete Pitch Night stage and walked off with a five-thousand-dollar check the size of a door, for an AI that writes federal contract documents. He's now in Leadership St. Pete's Class of 2026, learning the city the way he learns everything — by showing up relentlessly and reading the people. The people nerd found a city full of people. It's going well.
Dec 12, 2023 — the check. Note the CREATE. shirt. He owns several. We think.
The stage moment. That is a man trying very hard to act like this is normal.
Ask Johnny where the story ends, and he doesn't name a city in Florida. He says Llanes — a fishing town in Asturias where green cliffs drop straight into the Cantabrian Sea. Which is about as far from Murcia as Spain physically allows, a fact every single Asturian will point out the moment they hear the accent. He learned Spanish in the desert so he could one day retire on the greenest coast in the country. That's the whole biography in one sentence, honestly: wrong door, right house.
every conversation in Asturias, forever: "¿aprendiste español… en MURCIA?" — "…acho." — "❤️"
You've collected 0 of 9 stickers. Scroll back up — the album remembers what you skipped.
This certifies that you have witnessed, in full, the improbable life of Johnny B. Saye Jr. — soccer professional, mosquito victim, vodka evangelist, Americanico, accidental IBMer, chip salesman, and people nerd — and can confirm that none of it was made up, which is frankly the hardest part to believe.