Introduced by the Parker Brothers in 1934, the board game Monopoly is the most successful modern board game of all time selling over 275 million copies worldwide. The Depression-era game has been bringing families together for generations for nearly 90 years.
The game is about progressing through many obstacles that live throws in one’s path–sort of like Washington’s Parker Brothers Armon and Jayvon and the game “Blackout” their mother taught them about rising through adversity.
The Parkers grew up Detroit, the Motor City. Despite being 30 minutes from Ann Arbor and hour and a half to East Lansing, neither school offered them scholarships.
Nothing about Armon and Jayvon Parker is identical. To the untrained eye they may look like identical twins but they’re not.
“We’re fraternal twins, not identical,” Armon and Jayvon told RealDawg.com after their commitment. “That means that we came from different eggs–we just happen to look very similar, but we were born a minute apart.”
Very similar? Try spitting images of each other. Try doppelganger. Armon is listed at 6-3 and 320 pounds, Armon is the same height while tipping the scales at 330.
So similar that early on in life that only a mother knew the differences. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t finish each other’s sentences, and both claim that they’re the funny one.
Did they ever try to pull one over on a teacher? They looked at each other simultaneously chuckled and said, “maybe.”
Their identical calm demeanors can be traced to a single event where their mother Shareta showed grace under difficult circumstances early on in their life.
“One day in middle school the boys came home and they thought there was a problem with the lights,” recalled Shareta. “But the truth was our power had been temporarily cut off.”
She took it from being a problem and used it to strengthen her family. With no devices, she kept their spirits high by sharing the moments in those two weeks of darkness. This was Mo Town and the Shareta wasn’t about to sing the Blues.
“We were already a close family unit, but this drew us together even more,” she said softly. “After that when we had nights when there were no devices.”
Shareta would walk in the door say “blackout” and the boys knew what it meant: I miss you and it’s family time.
“Sometimes when life got a bit too hectic and I felt like we weren’t as close as we should be that was our code word,” she said.
For the better part of a decade that became a low-tech life hack to combat the Electronic Age. Having shown her boys how to have peace through adversity the Parkers have been able to weather the flurry of injures.
While Jayvon was making plays, Armon was forced to wait out a knee injury from a pickup basketball game shortly before moving to Seattle. Prior to this season, Armon Parker’s GoHuskies.com bio was filled with ominous information, in triplicate:
2022: Did not see any game action
2023: Did not see any game action
2024: Did not play in any games
That injury kept him off the field for three years. The first two were to heal up and last season he needed to into game shape. Healthy, Jayvon on the other hand, was looking sold in the Huskies’ first 4 games before tearing his Achillies against Rutgers. Born a minute apart they were standing inches apart, unfortunately standing on the sidelines.
Finally, after more than 18 months of conditioning Armon saw the field, recording a tackle against UC Davis. Then in the Apple Cup he notched his first sack for the purple and gold.
Fittingly his sack of Julian Dugger was the final nail in the Cougar coffin when so many times over the past few years it seemed like his injures would be the nail in his.
Now, instead of blackout the Parkers are hoping Jayvon will be back out with his, or as Mo Town’s favorite son Marvin Gaye sang, “Aint No Mountain High Enough”.
