St. Francis de Sales alumnus Reginald “Reg” Butler’s love of basketball started young—likely before he could even tie the laces of his basketball shoes. “At five years old, I took a wire hanger and made it into a hoop,” said Butler. “I put it over my closet door and dunked on it for hours on end. It probably drove my neighbors crazy!”
As he grew over the years—to a formidable 6 feet, 8 inches—so did Butler’s passion for basketball, and his talent. As a Pioneer, he led St. Francis de Sales’ junior varsity and varsity teams, then went on to post double-digit averages at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). His dreams of a capstone senior year were abruptly derailed, however, when he suffered a torn ACL during the third game of the season.
For Butler, the severe injury threatened not just his athletic plans, but his entire identity. “All my life if you had asked me who I was, the first thing I would have said was, ‘I’m a basketball player,’” Butler said. “Now I have this devastating injury and I’m faced with, ‘Who are you if you’re not a basketball player?’” As a first-generation college student, Butler had chosen to major in sociology at IUPUI. He admits, “I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. My plan was always to play professional basketball.”
Thanks to the quick thinking of his team athletic trainer, Butler went under the care of renowned orthopedic surgeon Dr. Frank Noyes at Cincinnati SportsMedicine. “After the ACL surgery, Dr. Noyes said, ‘You know, when I got in there and saw how bad this was, I thought, ‘this guy should never play again,’ but if you do, it will be with a knee better than God gave you,’” laughed Butler. “The whole experience was eye opening because I didn’t have a plan besides basketball. That fear made me work hard to get back on the floor again.”
Hard work—and a new knee—turned out to be a winning combination: Butler finished his IUPUI basketball career as a fifth-year senior, during which he served as team captain, was named team MVP, and received the inaugural Mel Garland Award—the school’s highest student-athlete honor. Butler was inducted into the IUPUI Athletic Hall of Fame in 2018.
Building a Foundation for Success
Born in Lawndale, Butler grew up in a neighborhood overrun with gangs and the constant threat of violence. “It was, and is, a very tough neighborhood to grow up in,” he said. “If you were under the age of 13, the gangs didn’t bother you, but after that, you knew it was coming.” As he got closer to that milestone, his mother promised him that they would move to a safer community. Butler says he will always remember his 13th birthday because that was the same year he and his mother moved into their new home in Jeffrey Manor.
Having attended Catholic grade school his whole life, Butler says he always knew that he would attend a Catholic high school. “My mother really liked Hales Franciscan, but I didn’t want to go to an all-boys school,” he laughed. Instead, Butler followed a family friend to St. Francis de Sales.
It was a massive transition. “I had come from a really poor school on the West Side,” Butler said. “Our classrooms were 16 mobile trailers because the initial school building had been declared uninhabitable. Coming from an all-black school, now I walk into this huge building with 1,500 kids of all sizes and colors...I had no idea what a Croatian was!” Aside from the sheer size and number of people, Butler says that one of his first memories of St. Francis was especially sweet. “When you walked in and turned left to go into the cafeteria in the morning, there was always this amazing aroma of chocolate chip cookies,” he said. “They were huge, and cost a dime. That’s how I would start my day, with a couple of chocolate chip cookies, getting to know people.”
Butler says St. Francis provided him with an introduction to what the world was like in terms of diversity. “There were challenges, but not a lot in terms of racial or ethnic tensions,” he recalled. We didn’t have those inside the doors of the school, despite having been only the third or fourth integrated classes at de Sales when I started in 1974.”
Globe Trotting
After graduating from IUPUI in 1983, Butler traveled to Europe to play professional basketball in Geneva, Switzerland. The experience left an indelible mark on him. “It was my first time abroad, and it was at the same time amazing, so much fun, and so frustrating.” Butler describes Geneva as a “really cosmopolitan city with a lot of wealth.” Fortunately, because Geneva was home to three European basketball teams, the 21-year-old rookie had several compatriots who looked after him. “Having those other American players there was like having three or four big brothers,” Butler recalls. “Three of them were married. They would call me up and ask, ‘Rook, did you eat breakfast?’ And I’d go to their place and eat an American-style breakfast.” The remainder of the day would include weightlifting together, practicing, and then having dinner together—which sometimes meant getting on a train to Paris and staying out all night. “I was really lucky I had those guys,” Butler said. “They took care of me.”
While Butler describes his basketball experience as unforgettable, he says that it was an experience he had during his down time in Geneva that helped to shape his eventual professional aspirations. “On some of my afternoons I would go down to rue du Rhone,” Butler said. “It was this street lined with amazing boutiques, and you would see these wealthy people drive up in Bentleys or Rolls Royces. When they came out of the boutiques, you knew they had dropped thousands of dollars. I knew I would never have that type of wealth, but I also knew I wasn’t going to make any real money chasing a basketball around.”
Building a New Path
After two years of playing professional basketball in Europe, Butler decided it was time to return home, and set his sights on buying a manufacturing company. “I knew I wanted to make something, because during a recession you make less, but you’re still producing,” he said.
Once back in Chicago, Butler finessed the experience he had gained working at the Museum of Science and Industry over summers in high school, into a job in human resources for the Federal Home Loan Bank. “That was a great job because it gave me exposure to every department in the bank,” Butler said. “I would sit with the VPs if they had a job and pick their brain. I started studying that, and fell in love with the finance business.”
Butler later worked with a fellow IUPUI teammate in his teammate’s merchant banking business. “I was learning how to buy and sell a product, put it on a ship, get documents, get paid, and get a letter of credit. I loved everything about the trading business,” Butler said. Thinking back to that time, Butler recalls that it was during Michael Jordan’s heyday. “A lot of people wanted to ‘be like Mike,’ but I wanted to be like Mark Rich, who was an amazing commodities trader,” Butler laughed.
In 1992, with the backing of a friend, Butler bought MidAmerica Decks, Inc., a corrugated roof company that lives on today in the steel found in buildings including the United Center and the former Goldblatts on State Street.” Two years later, Butler used his wealth of experience to launch his own international trading company, Eton International USA, Inc., which he managed for nearly 18 years. “Building and running Eton International is the foundation for everything I’ve ever done professionally,” Butler said.
For the past six years, Butler has worked for BMO Capital Markets, and currently serves as Director of Global Trade and Banking. He credits much of his success in international business—including travels throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe—to the exposure to different people and cultures he received growing up in Chicago. “We’ve always been a city of neighborhoods, and that means that there’s always something new to explore.”
The Loop is the neighborhood Butler and his wife Lisa currently call home. The two met at the end of Butler’s freshman year of college. “She was three years older than me. I met her that May of 1979, but she would not go out with me until 1981,” he laughed. A proud father of two grown daughters, Butler admits he was concerned that he might lose his daughters to the east coast when one started school at Georgetown and the other at Howard. He is happy to report that he needn’t have worried, as the girls now live together in a condo in Hyde Park, and both work for local communications and marketing companies. “They’re more Chicago than me!” Butler said.
Advice for Today’s “Rookies”
Like many of his former St. Francis de Sales classmates, Butler says he’s excited about the school’s new leadership. “Roni Facen is a Pioneer in every sense of the word; I think that’s going to serve her well,” he said. “I like her vision, her fearlessness, and that she’s a graduate. She’s got blue and gold in her blood!”
Butler acknowledges that today’s students are faced with a lot that he didn’t have to deal with because of the social media environment; however, he says that his hope is that they both dream big and persevere: “I always had really big dreams,” he said. “From there, it’s about perseverance, because there will be bumps along the way, and you can get knocked flat on your behind, but you have to persevere because there’s something out there for you.”
Returning to the social media topic, Butler had one additional piece of advice for current Pioneers. “Look up from your screens from time to time! Look at the skyline, look at the sky. The world is a beautiful place.”
