Sam Philips is what you’d call a grafter. He is constantly training and pushing himself to improve, not wanting to take even one day off because he says: “I’ll have the feeling that somebody else is working harder than me while I’m resting.”
Born and raised in Devon, the hunger that drives the bboy known as Sheku is as vast and endless as the sea he lives by. It’s been like this for Sheku from when he was 12 years old and came downstairs one morning to see the UK Bboy Championships on TV, with the UK’s Soul Mavericks crew battling against Russia’s Top 9. “As soon as I saw it my first thought was I wanted to compete and beat people,” Sheku tells LK. “That hunger from then has been with me ever since.”
That was in 2009 and the closest thing to a breaking class he had was an after school boys’ dance class, where he says: “Everyone only knew how to do a helicopter, which someone showed me.” With no one to guide him, Sheku became self -taught, learning from videos and training non-stop at break, lunch and after school, even when all the other boys stopped. He recalls, “there were a good 30 boys who started and now I’m the last one standing.”
My main goal is not to get older and think that I could have done better
With no breaking scene in Devon, Sheku started travelling to Plymouth nearby because he says: “Plymouth had a massive breaking scene and the kids were good. They were my first rivals and I was training to beat them.”
Sheku’s competitive spirit was so focused he wouldn’t even say hello to other breakers at competitions, adopting the mentality that: “I wanted to beat everyone and make a name for myself before becoming friends with them, and I had noticed I always struggled to be myself in battles when I was friends with the people I had to compete against, so I just stayed away from them all.”
It took Sheku six years to win his first solo competition, which he accomplished in 2015 at an event in Guildford. Now Sheku’s drive, resilience and mindset has helped him achieve more than 50 breaking competition wins, nationally and internationally.
Grafting for love
To be able to train as much as he wants, Sheku has always looked for a job he could do around dancing, and at one point he worked as a roofer even though he hated the job. Now he works as a barber, a trade his girlfriend taught him, but he admits: “It’s not a job I ever wanted to get into. I just started doing it so that I could break. I don’t really care about the money or fame as long as I get by. I simply want to succeed in breaking and if I get a sponsorship deal that allows me to focus on breaking full-time I would quit barbering.”
But Sheku has always kept a clear perspective on why he is actually breaking and what he wants out of it, and admits: “I knew when I started breaking that it was never going to make me rich and that I was dancing for the love of it.”
Sheku loves training, calling it his “escape and happy place”, and this knowledge of himself keeps him realistic and grounded about everything else, which he says: “I’ve always had in the back of my mind that I’m going to go and get a normal job soon, but as long as I can make things work so that I can carry on dancing I’ll be happy. I just want to keep making a name for myself, win all the events I want to do, and have no regrets. My main goal is to not get older and think that I could have done better in breaking.”
