Jimmy Butler of the NBA’s Miami Heat is generating a little heat on his own these days. The small forward player struck gold while inside the Disney resort “bubble” during the 2020 NBA Playoffs.
Who is Jimmy Butler?
“Jimmy Buckets,” as he’s known in the league, was snapped up as a 2011 first-round pick.
American professional basketball player Jimmy Butler III opened his own coffee shop in the NBA Bubble and charged $20 per cup (Credit: ATP / WENN)
A precision passer, Butler toggled between small forward and power forward on teams like the Timberwolves and the 76ers before landing with the Miami Heat.
He is dating Polish-American model Kaitlin Nowak, a graduate of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. The couple had a daughter in 2019, causing him to miss the first three games of the 2019–20 NBA season
Jimmy Butler Brews Up Business in the Disney Bubble
During the 2020 playoffs, the Miami Heat and others were quarantined among Walt Disney World’s deluxe resorts in what some called the “NBA Bubble.”
As the name suggests, the teams were kept in isolation to prevent Covid infections, leaving their rooms only to practice, play, or spend a few private evenings in the shuttered amusement parks.
Coffee entrepreneur Jimmy Butler in Dior during Paris Fashion Week in 2017 (Credit: WENN)
While in lockdown, Butler thumbed through his per diem, which included a stack of $100 bills and a small stack of $20 bills. As a coffee connoisseur, Butler prepared coffee via french press in his suite to satisfy his designer coffee habit.
When teammates got wind of his luxury setup, they began ordering $20 cups of coffee from Butler’s suite instead of settling for the onsite Joffrey’s blends.
Birthplace of Bigface Coffee
Butler jokes, saying he hoped a $20 delivery would result in a “bigface” $100 payment, for which he wouldn’t have had change, raking in the $100 profit. While it never quite worked out that way, the idea for “Bigface Coffee” was born.
He’s since upgraded his equipment to include an espresso machine and reportedly practices his latte foam art at home.
When asked about the state of his “art,” he says that “It’s going absolutely as you think it would be going: terrible.” It sounds like he’d better keep his day job on the court for now.
View this post on Instagram
During his downtime, Butler hits coffeeshops in his spare time, sipping the wares of local baristas and trying to take what he learns back to his machine at home.
Jimmy says as a coffee lover, he’d like to open coffee shops once he retires and said “I really want to sit down and just talk with people over coffee.”
Jimmy Butler Dabbles in Coffee and NFT
Until then, the Houston native continues to hoop it up on the court. You can, however, buy Bigface Coffee online. He’s currently offering a collection of four different blends paired with an NFT.
If you’re not up on digital art collecting, NFT stands for non-fungible token, which can be described as the original ownership of a digital product, such as a video or image.
Jimmy Butler attends the 2014 CMT Music Awards at the Bridgestone Arena on June 4, 2014, in Nashville, Tennessee (Credit: Judy Eddy / WENN)
NFTs have been sold for millions of dollars, with the most expensive NFT on record being sold recently for the equivalent of nearly $530 million for CyberPunk #9998, an image of a pixelated face.
Without debating the merits of NFTs, the Daft Punk series of NFTs makes Butler’s Bigface Coffee NFT sounds like a bargain. Furthermore, it’s unclear if CyberPunk was accompanied by any sort of delicious coffee.
Where Can I Buy Bigface Coffee?
The $500 NFT that Bigface Coffee is offering through Shopify shares the details about each coffee varietal, or coffee from a single origin.
It outlines the flavor profile and other details that a fellow coffee connoisseur would appreciate. The current offerings include beans from Guatemala, El Salvador, Brazil, and Honduras.
View this post on Instagram
His well-researched coffee looks like a great, although expensive product and a unique way to get into NFT ownership.
It seems, though, that “Jimmy Buckets” still has plenty of viable years ahead of him in the NBA, so we may be waiting for a while to get our hands on a freshly brewed cup of Bigface Coffee.