Crew Cutter: Meet Steven Rivera, Team Barber for the Miami Dolphins and Hurricanes
1. Have Clippers, Will Travel
Late on a Thursday evening, former Miami Dolphins offensive lineman Mike Pouncey arrives home from coaching his 11-year-old son’s football team. He drops the football equipment inside his house before heading outside to a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van parked in front.
Inside the Sprinter, the decor is all football: a mural depicting an assortment of NFL stars, a case filled with trading cards, a flat-screen TV silently broadcasting Thursday Night Football. But it’s the van’s central furnishing that Pouncey is here for: a professional-issue barber’s chair, gleaming gold like a throne. More precisely, the ex-NFLer has an appointment with the throne’s owner, Steven Rivera, who lays out the tools of his trade as Pouncey settles into the chair.
As is his habit, Rivera is decked out in University of Miami gear, though not enough to mask the tattoos that adorn his six-foot-tall-frame, representing his Miami-Dade upbringing and his love for South Florida sports teams. Around his neck is a heavy chain from which hangs a custom-made pendant: a diamond-encrusted cyclone accented with a tiny gold scissors set and clipper guard.
The softspoken 38-year-old has been cutting Pouncey’s hair ever since the latter was a junior at the University of Florida. Over the past two decades, as the team barber for the Miami Dolphins and the Miami Hurricanes football squads, he has tended to the heads of Tyreek Hill, Deion Sanders, and Randy Moss, among scores of others. His cutting skills have taken him to the Super Bowl and allowed him to work with players he spent his childhood admiring from afar as a fan.
“I bleed orange and green, so I take pride in the colors of the Hurricanes, and not only them but the Dolphins too,” he tells New Times with unmistakable reverence. “Being able to represent both is a blessing, and I don’t take it for granted at all.”
It has been a long journey to this point for the 38-year-old who originally embarked on a career in law enforcement but is now known far and wide as “Canes Barber.”
2. First Cut
An only child, Rivera grew up moving in and out of efficiencies and duplexes in West Perrine. Both of his parents were undocumented immigrants: Gladys from El Salvador, José from Honduras. “My dad had a stable job, but it just didn’t, you know, pay enough for us to live a nice life growing up,” Rivera says. “I grew up, we call it nowadays, ‘free lunch in school.’ That’s what I would have to depend on when I went to elementary, middle, and high school: the free-lunch line. I would literally be the first one there eating breakfast and lunch — and pray that I have dinner at home.
