The Legend of Leh-Boy

You might have seen him at the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, whooping and flying by on his bike, a young man with a…is that a…oh my god, it is! soccer ball perched improbably on his head. Perhaps you were enjoying a sun-drenched weekend in Prospect Park during the dark days of the pandemic, and he appeared, shimmying his hips and arms with abandon, that soccer ball still incredibly, beautifully, perfectly, balanced.

Or you were walking down Atlantic Avenue one evening, only this time he was stripped down to his underwear, his only other accessory a—you guessed it—soccer ball, as he weaved his bicycle in and out of traffic with abandon. There he is, climbing light poles in Washington Square Park, balancing trash cans in Brooklyn Bridge Park, balancing a trash can while standing on a trash can on the Coney Island Boardwalk.

To the awestruck observers who post photos and video of him online he’s known as “ball guy,” “soccer ball dude,” “the dude that rides around Brooklyn on his bike yawping while balancing that soccer ball on his head.” New York Nico is a fan, having featured him more than once. The New York Post recently devoted an entire story to a video of him that someone else had posted online, identifying him only as an unnamed “street performer.”

If you’ve found his Instagram account (@makemebalance, where he has a relatively scant 5,117 followers given his ubiquity) you know his name—Leh-Boy Gabriel Brown. You know he was born in Liberia, and that in addition to a love for balancing objects both small and large on his head, he has a penchant to sing (off-key) and for adding somewhat perplexing hashtags (#ukraine, #putin, #nfl, #fruit) to each post, as well as referring to himself in the third-person.

Leh-Boy has become a genuine, certified, New York City Character, one of those people who, when you see them, you can only shake your head, a bit baffled, and smile, before immediately grabbing your phone and turning him into fodder for the content machine.

But for the answers to the important, burning questions—such as, when did he realize he had a preternatural gift for balancing a ball on his head?—you have to go straight to the man, the Leh-Boy, himself.

“One day, I just grabbed the ball and just placed it in the middle of my head. And it just stayed there. It never fell at all,” Leh-Boy told me on a recent spring day in Brooklyn, steps from the arch at Grand Army Plaza. At that moment of divine understanding, he was a young child still living in Monrovia, Liberia.

“When I balanced the ball to my head the first time, I realized like, Oh, wow. It was shocking, because it was something that I’d never actually practiced,” he told me.