Tayvon Gray: From the northeast Bronx to the major leagues

Tayvon Gray, a popular Bronx kid, walked into the North Star Cafe on East Tremont Avenue in Crotona earlier this month after getting a haircut from a neighborhood barber shop. Dressed casually in a beige sweat suit, the 21-year-old watched Premier League European soccer on the cafe’s small TV while waiting for his strawberry and whipped cream-topped waffles.

Despite his humble demeanor, the now-professional soccer player with the New York City Football Club (NYCFC) has become a recognizable face in the city’s athletic scene. But he was also once just a little kid from the northeast Bronx.   

A soccer family with Jamaican roots

Gray was raised in a soccer family, he told the Bronx Times at the cafe on Nov. 8. 

Both of his parents immigrated to the United States from Jamaica as children, his father with athletic dreams of his own. (His father was close to reaching the heights of soccer, playing for Southend United F.C., a lower league professional team in England.) 

“We always played soccer growing up,” he said about his dad, twin brother and sister. “That type of stuff was always in my blood.”

When he was a kid, Gray said his father was adamant that he and his brother Kayvon attend schools outside of the Bronx, primarily to get away from crime in the neighborhood they lived in just north of Allerton.

Crime in 2002, the year the twins were born, was surging in the North Bronx’s 47th Precinct where they lived. That year there were 24 cases of murder and non-negligent manslaughter, according to police data.

“He took me away from a lot,” the 21-year-old said. “He just did what was best for me, honestly. He didn’t want me around the wrong crowd, stuff like that.”

Gray’s parents ended up enrolling both himself and his brother into St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark for seventh and eighth grade and later to Alexander Hamilton High School in the Westchester County village of Elmsford.

Apart from being side by side off…