Blood Relations

One day a shelf full of chess books in the library at Columbia caught Max's eye, and he devoured this new game the way he had boxing. The universe was too vast and unruly for a man of logic to control. But a chessboard, like a boxing ring, had rules and parameters within which cause and effect could be tested, demonstrated, controlled.

Max's career became a chess game. He pored over it, searching for the move that would maximize his--and his brothers'--advantage two or three moves later. In 1998 he parlayed a highlights reel from Max on Boxing into a job as cohost of ESPN2's Friday Night Fights. He was good. Very good. Decibels and decimals, his family's dinner-table debates in front of a camera. Three years later, at 28, he flew to Los Angeles and strode into a roomful of executives at Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, moguls who steered the careers of Brad Pitt, Nicolas Cage and Adam Sandler and who thought this hotshot young boxing analyst had come seeking guidance in his field. "I have no interest in continuing in sports," Max informed them. "I want to be starring in a feature film in 12 months and accepting an Oscar in a year and a half. And the real reason you'll want to work with me is that then you'll get to work with my three brothers. Just wait until you see what they can do." After raving about Sam's writing and acting skills, Harry's prizewinning short films and Jack's wizardry in musical production, Max turned to a Jewish executive and began speaking Yiddish. Then he left, and everyone just sat there, blinking.

Michael Price, a talent manager dazzled by the performance, knew he had to harness the performer. You, he told Max, could make so much money in broadcasting that you could produce your own movie one day and star in it, so why spend 10 years starving in audition lines? Max saw the logic, and in no time the two of them parlayed his boxing cameos on Pardon the Interruption into a role as fill-in host on the show, parlayed that into a job hosting his own show, Around the Horn, and then turned that into a blockbuster deal to host I, Max on Fox. Everything he plotted ... worked. A man could take hold of his fate.

Funny, what happened one evening in 2003. Max entered Price's office in Hollywood to sign his two-year, $1.66 million deal with Fox. Sam came along to ink his first contract: a $4,600 deal to write 23 columns for foxsports.com, which Max had helped arrange. Price watched in astonishment: Everything was upside down. As Max hastily scribbled his signature in silence, Sam shouted, "Everybody stand back! I'm about to sign my contract! Wait a minute! Photograph!" Sam struck a bonus-baby signing pose, then swaggered out of the office. Max hurried to catch up to him and kiss him on the forehead, his eyes misting with so much pride in his brother's achievement that Price, for the only time in his life, felt cheated to have been an only child.

Here, though, was Sam's quandary: Big brother's credit card in his wallet. Big brother's car in his name. Big brother's fist knocking on corporate doors for him. Big brother's shadow everywhere he turned.

Shaq vs. Kobe: best player in the NBA? Max argued every day and twice on Sundays for Shaq and Sam for Kobe, both knowing, as sons of a shrink, that Shaq was Big Brother Archetype and Kobe was Little Brother Archetype and that they were really arguing Max vs. Sam. And that Kobe had to shove away Shaq, had to prove he didn't need Big Brother to make it big ... just as Sam needed, at least for a while, distance from Max. So the most shocking and most natural thing occurred in February 2004. Sam bid the Brothers Kellerman farewell and moved to L.A.

ON SEPT. 13, 2004, just above latitude 15� north in the mid-Atlantic, easterly trade winds converged and began to rotate counter- clockwise, forming a tropical depression. Jeanne, the second hurricane to target the southeastern coast of Florida in three weeks, started to chug northwestward. James Butler, working as a sparring partner in the Catskills, decided that he could not go home to Florida.

He had just weathered Hurricane Frances in Vero Beach, where he'd lived for nearly a year. He'd delighted aid workers at the shelter where he stayed with his girlfriend, their newborn son and his girlfriend's daughter, ferrying bucket after bucket of water to flush the toilets. But the storm seemed to trigger the mood swings and sleeplessness of his manic depression. He'd left Florida on Sept. 7 and headed to upstate New York.

He needed money. He needed a fight. He needed a place to train where no power lines were down. He'd gained more than 70 pounds during his four months in jail while taking a cocktail of medications for bipolar disorder that made him feel sluggish, then--after dropping much of the weight--lost two of his four bouts in a lackluster comeback. His relationship with his girlfriend was hitting the rocks. His relationship with his new trainer in Vero Beach, Buddy McGirt, who was busy with other fighters, was over. All the Hammer had was talk of a possible fight in California, a career swirling down the drain and almost nowhere to turn, except....

Sam's phone rang. His own career had begun to take off since his move to Los Angeles. He'd acted in commercials with Willie Nelson and Christina Aguilera. He was in talks with MTV2 about hosting a new call-in show. The producers of the HBO series Entourage were so taken with him that they kept calling him to the set, trying to figure out how to work him into their show.