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Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. I'm relentless. Here we go. This is the Skip Bayless Show. Episode 68.
This is everything I cannot share with you during the debate show that is undisputed. Today, episode 68, I will tell you why Micah Parsons, my man, my old Micah 11 from heaven, just took a shot at Dak Prescott, a shot I loved. I will also tell you today about my deepest theory concerning John Morant and Antonio Calloway
and the many sports stars who flamed out before them. Today, I will tell you why I actually felt sorry for Tiger Woods when I heard that the Saudis and Live Golf had sued the PGA Tour, our tour, into submission and basically taken it over. And as always today, I will answer several of your questions. And today, I have some doozies.
But first up, as always, it is not to be skipped. So the other day, my man Micah Parsons did say something that didn't get nearly enough attention as far as I was concerned. And I'm going to give it the ride, the best ride that I can give it, because I loved that he said it as outrageous and audacious as it might have been.
And I love that my partner, Shannon Sharp, did not condemn what Micah said, even though my man, Shannon Sharp, has every right to ridicule what Micah said because Shannon played for the 2000 Ravens, the team with which Micah Parsons compared next year's Dallas Cowboys defense to. He did what? That's blasphemy.
No, actually it's not. I will tell you why. Okay, so here allow me to read exactly what Micah Parsons said. And I quote, "You just feel it in the room. Everybody's like, this has got to be the year. Each year I've been here,
We've gone a little bit further, a little bit further. Now I'm hoping we don't have to just settle for some small jump to the NFC Championship game and go home. I'm hoping we go all the way. So am I. And Micah continued. We all know how each other plays. We know how to communicate with each other. That was the difference for that Ray Lewis Baltimore Ravens team. They all came back.
10 starters came back that year. 11 are coming back for my Cowboys next year. Micah continues, they all came back and were like, if they can't score, they can't win. I'm hoping we've got one of those special teams this year, period, close quotes, said Micah Parsons. So yeah, you heard right. Micah Parsons is saying that this coming year's Dallas Cowboy defense is
could be the equivalent of the 2000 Ravens defense, which through its playoff run allowed one offensive touchdown, just one in four playoff wins. And that included a 34 to seven win over the New York football giants in the Super Bowl. The seven in that game came on a giant's kick return. In that Super Bowl, I was there,
Giants quarterback Kerry Collins went 15 of 39, do the percentage math on that, for a grand total of 112 yards. The Giants went two for 14 on third down. Kerry Collins, bless him, was sacked four times and threw four interceptions. And the Giants also lost a fumble. So there were five turnovers detonated by Ray Lewis's defense.
You can certainly make a case that that Ravens D was even more suffocating through its playoff run than the 85 Bears were or the Steel Curtain Steelers were. You can pick any of those years in the 70s or even that 2002 Buccaneers defense that was right up there. It was pushing the Ravens and the Bears and the Steelers. But I'm going to give Ray Lewis's defense a slight edge just in defense.
Total playoff suffocation. We're talking about the most dominant playoff defense of all time. Allowed three points to Denver, the first playoff game. That was at home, Baltimore. Then 10 at Tennessee. I was there. The only touchdown they allowed in the whole run was a two-yard touchdown by Eddie George. Pretty hard to keep out of the end zone. That was the most physical football game I have ever witnessed up close and personal.
Then I was there at Oakland. The Raiders managed to score three points on Ray Lewis and company. And again, I was there seven to the Giants on a kick return in that Super Bowl. So where did my man Shannon get his name Big Play Shea from that playoff run?
In four games, Shannon Sharp caught only six passes. Think about that. Four games, six passes. Ready for this? For 230 yards. Big play, Shea. Had a 58-yard touchdown catch and run against Denver, his old team. That was in Baltimore. He had a 56-yard completion at Tennessee. I witnessed that. He had a 96-yard touchdown catch and run at Oakland.
I saw it with my own eyes. Yet in the Super Bowl, my man Shannon caught a grand total of one for five yards because big play Shea was not needed in that game. The Ravens turned poor Kerry Collins into no play Kerry as opposed to big play Shea. So do you believe that Micah Parsons was just talking out of his, you know, his backside with these comments? No, no, I don't think he was at all.
Do you think this was just basically an immature kid talking? No, I don't think so, even though he just turned 24 a couple of weeks back. I believe this coming year's Dallas Cowboy defense will be the best defense in the NFL come playoff time. Could it be quite as lights out as these Ravens we're talking about were? No.
And that's because in large part, as Shannon said on Undisputed, today's rules don't allow defenses to just terrorize the quarterback the way those Ravens terrorized quarterbacks. And yet again, here's my point. I found this very significant. The more we talked about these comments from Micah, it shocked me more and more. Shannon did not ridicule the comments.
He was not at all offended by the comparison. He did not try to dismiss Micah as some disrespectful fool of a young player. Shannon knows deep down that my Cowboys defense next year is going to be really, really good. Now, at this point, I think I should remind you
if you've forgotten or maybe don't know, of just how loaded that Ravens defense was. Again, one of the all-time greatest. Ray Lewis, driving force in the middle, flanked by Jamie Sharper and Peter Boulware, no slouches themselves, a linebacker. At safety, he had one of my all-time favorite players in Rod Woodson. We've had him on the show occasionally.
He was later in his career at that point playing more with his mind than his body, but he once ran a 4-2-40, and you want to talk about ball hawk, he might have been the greatest ever, and I know Ed Reed has a case. I would take Rod Woodson over Ed Reed, but that's just me. Pro Bowl corner in Chris McAllister, and then we get to that defensive front, Rob Burnett, Michael McCrary at the ends.
Do you remember Big Sam Adams? What a moose he was. What a load he was, along with an even bigger load in the late, great Tony Saragusa. It's a lot of firepower. It's a lot of muscle. It's a lot of hustle. It's some badass perpetrators that I just read you on this defense. So yet we're saying that I'm actually giving...
Micah, some credibility here that it could be that this defense could measure up in different kinds of ways. Yeah, I'm talking about my own Micah again, 11 from heaven. Can he have Ray Lewis type impact? I think he can. He'll just do it differently. He's going to impact you with speed and quickness and explosive athleticism that was even beyond Ray Lewis.
that much more than Ray's pure power and the fury with which he played. Maybe this defense won't quite strike fear in heart the way Ray's defense did, but let me tell you, I'm not just talking about Micah here.
He's got a whole lot of help, and that starts with the defensive coordinator, who I think is the best defensive coordinator in football, and I'm shocked he's still with my Cowboys because I thought he'd be a head coach. Somehow Jerry keeps pulling those purse strings correctly. Dan Quinn is still my coordinator. Oh, cap on backward Dan Quinn. DQ, as they call him, who's even better than anything you can get at Dairy Queen. My defense is going to be loaded, so I just read you...
The Ravens. Now let's look quickly at my defense. I got Micah as my driving force, obviously. Sometimes hand in the dirt, as they say. Sometimes standing up at linebacker. I got Demarcus Lawrence. I got Osa Odigi Zua wreaking havoc in the middle. Nobody plays harder than Osa does.
And I got my new guy. I got Mozzie Smith. Obviously, I wanted Dalton Kincaid in the draft, but I did land Mozzie Smith. And you want to talk about an anchor, a Reggie White-style anchor, 330 or 340 pounds of pure, raw, natural strength. I got him, and I didn't have him last year. And I think he's going to solidify that defensive front, especially against the run. I think he will be an immovable object.
Then if Micah drops back to linebacker, he's flanked by Leighton Van Der Esch. Again, a mid-first round pick. The Wolf Hunter. He just keeps getting a little better and a little better. He's not Micah, but boy, he's not bad. Damone Clark. Every time I looked up last year, he was making another play. Jabril Cox, who I've loved, has not even gotten on the field yet, but he's going to be in the rotation. I have raved and raved about Stephon Gilmore. Jerry went and stole him for a fifth round pick from Indianapolis. I still can't believe it.
He's still a top five corner. Maybe he's playing like Rod Woodson was in the past, more with head than body, but Stephon Gilmore will have top five corner impact, especially on my other corner in Trevon Diggs. High risk, high reward. He's going to clue. He's going to gamble. He's going to pick it off. He's going to get his pocket picked. I needed a solid bookend corner, and I got the most solid you could ask for in today's game in Stephon Gilmore.
Jordan Lewis is still going to be on the pup list to start camp, but once he gets back from his Liz Frank fracture, trust me, there's no better slot corner in the game. And what about Deron Bland? He started looking like he might be the best slot corner in the game as a rookie last year.
Then I get to safety. I am flat out loaded at safety. I dare you to find two safeties, or I should say three better than my three. Donovan Wilson is as good a safety blitzer as there is in the NFL. Malik Hooker was a first-round pick once upon a time out of The Ohio State, and he's playing like one now in a rejuvenated state. And J. Ron Curse, again, another steal of a free agent. Tall, long, nasty player.
what a triumvirate I have at safety. They were fifth in points allowed last year and you throw Mozzie in there and now Micah arrives as a third year player. I got to tell you, here they come and here they go. Yet for all the chutzpah that was required to make the statement that Micah did, for all the gumption, all the audacity, what also and actually caught my ear
was the between-the-line shot that young Micah was taking at veteran quarterback Dak Prescott. It was a flat-out shot because basically Micah was saying, no matter how bad our quarterback is, no matter how many interceptions he might throw, if the other team can't score, we will still win. That was the Ravens mentality. Huh. Dak last year, you might recall, I'm trying to forget,
23 touchdowns to 15 interceptions, which led the National Football League. In two playoff games, we got to see exactly what Dak is capable of, and then we got to see exactly what he really is. At Tampa, he sent Tom Brady into the sunset. QBR of 97 in that game.
25-33 for 305, four touchdowns, no interceptions. Final score was 31-14. Dak was my idol that night. He even scored a rushing touchdown that night. And on we went to San Francisco, our annual death trap, where Dak threw for a grand total of 206 yards. He threw one touchdown pass to two interceptions.
By the way, his QBR at Tampa was 97. That's about as close as you can get to the top, which is 100. His QBR at San Francisco was 51, which is middle of the road, or as I always say, middle of the pack, DAC. At San Francisco, he twice missed CeeDee Lamb, who was wide open for what could have been touchdowns.
Late in the game, he definitely missed Michael Gallup coming back from his knee reconstruction, just starting to get his legs underneath him at the end of the year. He ran by the 49er safeties, was wide open, and Dak was wide right. That's Dak Prescott. I've known and loved and despised that Dak Prescott.
So just to remind you, the 2000 Ravens won it all in spite of their quarterback, Trent Dilfer. Now, if you remember, Trent was the fourth overall pick in the draft and he'd spent six years in Tampa trying to live up to that. Never could quite. But he came to the Ravens that year.
He wound up starting, he replaced Tony Banks and started eight games, went 7-1 during the regular season. Obviously went 4-0 in the post, but during the regular season, Trent was 12 touchdowns to 11 interceptions. And I'm sure they were thinking about Trent what I often think about Dak. Got to rise above him, got to overcome him.
So in the postseason, Trent Dilfer threw three touchdowns to only one interception. Trent Dilfer averaged in four playoff games 148 yards passing. Think about that, 148, because that was all that was required of him. He just needed to keep the car between the white lines, right? The Maserati between the white lines, because the Maserati was...
Driven, it was powered by the defense, not by the offense. 1,000 horsepower came from the defense. So all Trent was required to do was a little game management. Just don't screw it up. Just don't lose the game, Trent. So has Dak become enough of a veteran star going into... I'm sorry, so has Mike, I should say, have become enough of a veteran star going into year three to take this veiled shot at a quarterback who...
who's now going to be a seven-year starter. I say you bet your boots, Cowboy fans, that this kid is not afraid of anything or anybody, and I love the veiled shot that he took. That's what they're going to have to do is win in spite of their quarterback. He is what he is not. I've just come to live with it, to accept it, to make peace with it. He's a fourth-round pick who, more often than not, plays like a fourth-round pick.
Now, just to be objective about Micah, did I love the way he finished the season last season? I did not. He had 12 sacks in the first 11 games. That'll work. He was on his way to winning defensive player of the year, which I predicted he would win. And then all of a sudden, he hit the sophomore wall. Last six games, grand total of a sack and a half. One sack in the two playoff games. It's just not good enough. It's not who he is. It's not who he'll beat. He got beat up.
Too often he got engulfed, overpowered by way too many humongous offensive tackles. Too often Micah fell victim to getting stung by those sneak attacks by chip blockers from the running back position who'd sneak up and bang away at him when he was least expecting it. But now he says he wants to be more of an impact player than a sack artist. And to me, that was the immature kid talking.
That was the immature kid pouting because he couldn't quite live up to the hype, much of which I admitted I generated. You might remember the video that we produced last year was sensational from DJ Steve Porter, My Oh Micah 11 From Heaven. And for a while he did live up until he couldn't when he got beat up.
He says he's put on about 10 pounds of muscle, good for him. He should be able to better endure this war of attrition that they play every year called the National Football League. I'm looking for my O, Micah, to bounce back and win Defensive Player of the Year next year. I'm looking for the 2023 Cowboys defense to have a very special year, as Micah said that they well could. I'm looking...
for this defense to have a Ravens-like impact, to carry this team at least to the NFC Championship game for the first time in 28 years. I am looking for Micah's defense to save my quarterback from himself.
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and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash Bayless. Just go to Indeed.com slash Bayless right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash Bayless. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Let's get to your question, shall we? This is Quinn from New York. Do you meditate regularly?
Do I meditate? Hmm. Let me meditate on that question for a moment. No, I don't meditate. As far as sitting still and meditating with my eyes closed, I don't. You'll think I'm crazy when I tell you this, but I actually do believe I meditate while I'm running. Is that possible? I do it. I can either be outside or on the treadmill with my eyes wide open. I meditate. I do some of my deepest thinking while I am running.
endorphin fueled. You know, the truth is the single best thing I could do for my body, for my running, for my lifting, for my golfing would be yoga. I know it. I am shockingly inflexible. That's body and mind, but I am inflexible. I have tried and failed at yoga because I just don't have the patience to
I can be high strung. My motor runs too hot. I have way too much RPM for yoga. But on a more serious note, I do pray. I don't know if that counts, but I pray some every night and a lot every Sunday morning. I definitely have the patience for praying. I do believe in praying. It doesn't make me more flexible, but I do pray. If that counts as a form of meditation, then...
when I do meditate. This is Sal from Holland, Michigan. In what ways has sports changed from when you first covered them to present day? Wow. Not only is that a great question, but that's a question I could write a book about and someday will. I know this is going to be hard to understand, but when I first got into the sports media business, print dominated.
Daily newspapers were king. Obviously, there's no internet. There's very little daily coverage from TV or radio. There was no talk radio whatsoever. No ESPN, no FS1, no daily shows, no studio shows, no Undisputed. So when I first started covering the Dallas Cowboys, when I got to Dallas in 1979, I
I would go out to their practice field at lunchtime when the players were available. And it was like I was entering a multiplex of theaters. I just had my pick. I could go to this movie or that movie or that movie. I could go to the Roger Stavok movie or the Charlie Waters movie or the Too Tall Jones movie or the Harvey Martin movie or the Drew Pearson movie. I could go on and on and on. I had movies to watch everywhere I wanted. I just had to go to that locker room
and say, "Hey, got a second?" Yeah, they had an hour. You could get them like crazy, more than you even wanted to get. I would fill my notebook every lunchtime at the Cowboy Practice Field locker room. And by the way, you would have been shocked to even view what it was in those days. It was a long, low, one-story building with aluminum siding. It looked like it had been constructed overnight.
It was low rent. It was stained, like not carpet. It was kind of like AstroTurf. Just bizarrely wrong for America's team. But Gil Brandt, then the personnel director, did not want his players to start thinking they were big shots and think that they deserved any more money. He wanted to keep them under thumb in a low rent practice facility. But how I loved it out there at lunchtime.
they were all happy to talk one-on-one as long as I wanted. If you wanted to meet them after practice, you want to meet them at their house in the evening, whatever, they would do it because you were all they had as an outlet. If they wanted to make a statement,
There was no internet, so they had to make the statement to you into your newspaper and hope that you got it right and presented it the way they wanted it to. If they wanted to make an image, a public image, it had to come through your feature story, your column that you wrote about them. You could make or break them through your coverage, and they knew it and they catered to it.
And they were some of the greatest lunchtimes of my life because I was kid in cowboy candy store. I probably wrote more features than I should have as a columnist instead of taking stands. The more I...
wrote columns, the more comfortable I got with my voice, my opinion, sort of standing back and looking from above down on all this. And I didn't interact with the players as much because you get caught up. You're human. You get caught up in their lives. You start to root for them. And then you just become a feature writer with a little groupie in you. And I probably fell into that trap early on, but it was a great trap because the world was so different then.
There were no real local TV reporters. They were viewed as nothing but Ron Burgundy's, if you know, Anchorman. Just as buffoonish clowns who'd show up here and there and just needed a second here and there. Their sportscast lasted like 45 seconds a night. Again, no talk radio, no radio shows to go on so that you could actually speak out. It all went into my notebook as I scribbled down quotes.
I didn't even use a tape recorder. I just scribbled down quotes. Nobody ever said I misquoted anyone. Never got accused of that one time. I got it right, but I was it. I was the only outlet that they had. So they obviously tried to butter me up, play up to me, rub elbows with me, be nice to me. Newspapers ruled. That has changed. Now, of course, it's all about the internet.
Now players can control their message and carefully craft their image through the statements they post and the pictures that they post. Newspapers, thing of past. There's still a place for newspapers. There's still a place for reporting. It's not like it used to be. So I used to, as a newspaper columnist back in the dark ages, I used to get maybe, I don't know, 20 or 30, as they used to call it, snail mail letters a week. That's all there was, snail mail.
my box 20 or 30 and and i would get more than anybody else would because i was outspoken i would answer every one of them by hand i would just scribble a note and and i got believe it or not i got more pro than con more positive than negative and i would scribble notes thank you very much for reading and appreciate your sentiment or whatever and sign it and send it off
And I would try to keep count in my head. If the same reader then sent me another one and another one and another one, I would only answer it once or maybe twice. Didn't want to become a pen pal with these people. But now, obviously, all that has gone completely out the window. Now I'm told, I don't follow it, but I'm told that I get canceled like every other night on Twitter. Now...
I'm told by my wife, Ernestine, who does monitor this, if I actually consumed all the evil aimed at me on various social media platforms, sometimes she'll read me some of them just for our amusement. But if I actually allowed into my psyche all the misinformation, all the out and out lies that she sometimes reads to me, if I let it all sink in,
I'd wind up in a straitjacket on some funny farm somewhere. And I don't have any plans to do that just yet. So I keep arm's length from Twitter, from the reactions. I tweet, but I don't read. And someday I'll write a book about all the above because I'm just touching tips of icebergs.
School is back and Dick's Sporting Goods has what you need to win your year. We've got everything from cleats to sambas, dunks, and more. Plus the hottest looks from Nike, Jordan, and Adidas. Find your first day fits in store or online at Dick's.com. So the other day, speaking of Shannon Sharp, he and I got into a deeper and deeper discussion about the fate of one Antonio Calloway who had been
cut by my Dallas Cowboys. I'd actually forgotten he was there. He's on the practice squad last year. But they cut him the other day after he had yet another run in with the law, this time back in his hometown of Miami. Shannon got pretty worked up. In fact, he got very worked up about what a waste this was, throwing away a career that Antonio Callaway was so blessed to have, not to mention the
the millions of dollars that he's throwing away potential millions that 99.999 percent of the population cannot earn especially at age he's now 26 but from 21 to 26 he had some earning power did antonio he he was he was something at florida i watched him as a kick returner breakaway receiver electrifying but he had problems
He got suspended. He fell in the draft. Cleveland actually traded up in the draft in the fourth round to snatch him. So at age 21, Antonio, out of the fourth round, made $1.2 million. Wow. That's pretty good for 21. So I hark back as Shannon and I were going back and forth across the debate desk. I started thinking back, when I was 22, coming out of Vanderbilt,
My first job paid me in the newspaper business, you ready for this? $190 a week and I was ecstatic because I thought I was rich. I just did the math before I started here today on this. $190 a week, that meant my first year out of college I made $9,880 and I thought I was rich because I had nothing. I'd actually worked
in my hometown of Oklahoma City for the paper I grew up reading, The Oklahoman, as a sort of intern, but I got to do everything the summer before my senior year. I did everything. I could write, thank you, God, and people are on vacation. You want to do this? You want to do that? I'm doing it all. I'm covering games. I'm writing big features. I had the time of my life, and as I was leaving to go back to Vanderbilt, they said, hey, why don't you come work here full-time after you graduate? Sure, why not? I'd love to.
Well, we can't offer you a lot of money. They offered me $150 a week. And to the credit of the sports editor and columnist named Frank Boggs, my idol, my hero, may he rest in peace. He waited until four days before graduation and he called me in my dorm room. I'm so lucky I answered the phone. There are no answering machines yet at that point. I answered the phone in my dorm room at Vanderbilt. Four days from graduation, he said, you can't come here.
You could get stuck here and it's shameful that they would only pay you $150 a week because he told me, you're better than that. You're better than us. I'm going to get you another job. And he got on the phone and he got me another job. I started at the Miami Herald for $190 a week. I flew down there two days later. They tripped it. Nashville, Miami, back to Nashville for graduation.
At the airport, they said, when I went back to the airport, give us a call. They offered me $190. I thought I was rich. So you can see in my head, when I think about Antonio Callaway, I think what I would have given to play any professional sport, especially baseball, when I was growing up, that's all I wanted to be was a baseball player. So if you told me I could play baseball for $1.2 million my first year out of school, thank you, God, for that.
So Shannon said on the air that he just had no sympathy at all for Antonio. And I said, you know, I do feel sorry for the kid. And yet I said, I wish that either Shannon or even I could have talked to him at some point, counseled him, you know, tough loved him a little bit. And Shannon said, you know, these kids today, they just don't want to listen. Well, I know it sounds like we're having sort of grumpy old man talk, those kids today. But
This brings up Ja Morant. Same thing has happened. You know, Shannon said repeatedly, gee, if I could only sit down with Ja, you know, like shake some sense into him. Lil Wayne, I said this on a previous podcast, texted me, he said, hey, can you connect me with Ja? Because I could help him. I've been there. I've done all this. I wound up in prison on Rikers Island. I know what happens. I know where you can go wrong and I know what's right.
I said, I'll try. And I reached out to Ja. Would you sit with little Wayne? Would you talk with little Wayne? Wayne would fly to him. He'd fly to Memphis in a heartbeat. Tonight, Wayne would private plane it and go right to Memphis if he thought he could save a career and a soul. I got nothing back from Ja. Didn't expect anything back. So this got me to thinking after Shannon and I concluded, I went home, started thinking about all the
In my career, all the sports stars who have flamed out for various reasons, and then it brought me back to my father. And here's the truth. There are some people you encounter in life, and I'm not putting Ja or even Antonio into this category, but some people are just unsavable. I hope Ja and Antonio are not in this category. But it's true. Some people are just bad people.
maybe a bad heart. I'm not talking about literally, I'm talking figuratively bad heart. And it brought me back to my father. I don't have time to express to you how much we fought with and for him with his alcohol issues. And he just wasn't happy unless he was drunk. He wasn't happy unless he was engaging in unspeakable behavior that I cannot detail for you here today and would not. But
in and out of rehab. We tried, we failed, we tried, we failed. He just didn't want the pressure of having to provide for a wife and three children. He ran a little hole in the wall barbecue restaurant and barely made it some nights and then some nights it would click and we'd have some money. Some nights we were bussed, some nights we had some money. It wore him out, it drove him to drink deeper and deeper into the bottle and he died of cirrhosis of the liver at age 49. So I think back
to some of the classic sports stars. Do you remember Steve Howe? Pitched for the Dodgers. He was a rookie. He was like rookie of the year. Closed the 81 World Series. Closer, left-handed. Just sensationally gifted out of Michigan. And he constantly had alcohol and cocaine issues. Alcohol, cocaine. He got suspended seven times by baseball. Seven times they sort of enabled him, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, to quit.
to get a second chance a third chance a fourth chance fifth seven times he got to come back from cocaine abuse testing positive and finally after the seventh time baseball said that's it you're gone for good forever and ever out and it was back in 2006 he ended up dying in a one-car crash out in the desert out here in southern california with meth in his system then
My buddy Darryl Porter, I don't know if you remember this, but here's another classic case. I grew up playing against Darryl Porter in Oklahoma City. He's on the south side of town over by my father's little hole-in-the-wall restaurant. Darryl Porter played against him in baseball, football, basketball, was a sensational athlete. Could have been the starting quarterback at the University of Oklahoma, was the fourth overall pick in the baseball draft, so he went into the Brewer system, wound up in Kansas City, then St. Louis, MVP of the
in LCS, World Series. He's a starting catcher in the All-Star game. He's pretty good. Wiley Herzog loved him, took him with him from Kansas City to St. Louis. Darryl just loved his cocaine. I got to know him a little bit when he was a player. I never knew him as a grown-up. He was just always a competitor, always better than I was at everything. And yet Darryl Porter,
He just wasn't happy unless he was using. And he was on his way to becoming a broadcaster for the Royals. They loved him. He was right in the pipeline. He was going to become the head color commentator, the analyst. And he overdosed sitting by himself in some park in Kansas City. Do you remember Art Schliester? Gambling problems. Just couldn't beat his gambling problems. In and out of jail over gambling problems. Some people are just...
just beyond saving. Some people just aren't happy doing what we think they should be able to do. I don't know, Antonio. I don't know, Ja, for instance. Are they really happy doing what we see that God gave them the incredible ability to do? Does it make them happier? Does it make Ja happier just to be with his homeboys, be out having fun? I don't know. You say, if you try to...
relate, if you try to impose yourself onto them, you fail because it's hard to know what's in their head. It's hard to know what makes them happy because you're thinking of what would make you happy. Shannon just goes off. How done can you be? Well, maybe that's just who they are. Maybe being a sports star doesn't make them happy. Maybe the pressure is too great on them.
I mean, do you remember what Antonio had as a rookie? Antonio Callaway. Remember, Baker Mayfield was a rookie just taking the lead by storm in Cleveland. Baker loved Antonio. But obviously, Antonio didn't love Antonio and didn't love what he was doing. You just can't project yourself onto an Antonio and say, what was he thinking? Well, he has other things in his head, obviously.
I've got problems, but I don't have those kind of problems. And in the end, I just hope Ja and Antonio don't turn out to be one of those people you just can't reach, you just can't fix, you just can't save. This is Lance from Tempe, Arizona. Did I really hear recently on an episode that you have frozen yogurt for dessert? I thought you avoided all sweets. Lance...
I am not a dietary monk. Every Friday night, you can call it cheat night if you want to, but it's date night for my wife Ernestine and me. We do have a slice of pizza. I go with cheese and vegetables.
And for dessert, yes, we have a cup, just a cup, a little tiny cup of fat-free frozen yogurt from a place out here in Southern California, not far from where I sit, called the Big Chill on Olympic Boulevard. I usually have vanilla or strawberry. Sue me. But remember, Friday is a two-a-day for me when it comes to workouts, as are Monday and Wednesday when I lift weights.
So I do cardio every morning. So on Friday, I will have done my one hour cardio. And then Friday afternoon, I lift. But on Friday, it's always my best lift of the week because I don't have anything to worry about. It's not a school night, so to speak. It's going to be date night and I can just throw myself, body and soul, into my weight workout and I get after it.
So I feel like by the time we sit down to dinner that I can quote unquote get away with a few more calories. So you got me on this, Lance. I am busted. I do own it. I did eat it and I will. All right, quick story for you. This happened a couple of nights back. Ernstine comes running into my little office. It's about 4.15 Pacific Coast time. And she yells,
You were a Jeopardy question. Okay, so as I've spoken of before, Ernstine and I love Jeopardy. We watch all five shows, usually on Friday night, bang, bang, bang, back to back to back. And Ernstine had, I don't know, six or eight texts from her friends in New York. She has a bunch of friends in New York who were actually watching the live Jeopardy on East Coast time who said I was a Jeopardy question.
So I immediately thought of two recent podcast questions. Number one, you might remember, if you were a Jeopardy question, what would it be? And number two, the other question I answered just a couple of weeks back was, what's left on your bucket list? And I thought at that flashpoint moment, man, that's on my bucket list. I have finally arrived because now there's nothing left to accomplish.
I'm at peace with the world because I'm a Jeopardy question. Then I thought exactly what was the clue that popped up on the board that somehow featured me. I start to fear like he's the biggest jerk on television. Answer is, you know, okay. And then of course my, my second biggest fear would be nobody would buzz in because nobody would have any idea who I was. So
A few minutes passed, then one of Ernstine's closest friends, Francesca, she's a dermatologist in New York, I hope she doesn't mind me saying her name, but I don't think she will. Anyway, she sent an actual video clip of what the clue was. So we were actually able, on Ernstine's phone, to watch the actual clip. The category was actually non-fiction TV,
It was the $1,200 double Jeopardy clue. And all of a sudden, I look up and it's a blast from my past. And I see this. I'm Kerry Champion. After being the moderator between Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless on First Take, I became an anchor on this ESPN flagship show. And Jared, one of the contestants, rings in and says, correctly, what is SportsCenter?
Bingo. Except that hurt because it wasn't really about me. It was about Carrie on SportsCenter. I wasn't really the clue. I was just a part of it. So my life remains unfulfilled and I'm sorry, but my bucket list remains incomplete. This is Joe from Toledo, Ohio, who asks, are you a collector of anything?
Joe, I am not. The only thing in my life I ever even thought about collecting was baseball cards, sometimes football cards. I'm sure everybody bought them. I don't know. I'm not even sure. Do people still buy baseball cards? But I'm sure a lot of us of a certain age bought baseball cards.
But since I was five years old, speaking of my father's little hole-in-the-wall barbecue restaurant, I worked there. And so I earned my money, and I always had some spending money, which I spent crazily on baseball cards because my whole life was playing and watching baseball. Man, I chewed a lot of those cards.
flat pink sticks of bubble gum that came in those packets. This is probably way before your time, but they lost their flavor in like 12 seconds and they turned to just like this awful putty in your mouth, spit it out. But that's what came, a flat pink stick of gum came at the back of the five baseball cards. First one I ever got way before your time, Gino Simoli, who played for my beloved St. Louis Cardinals. And I was ecstatic that I actually got a Cardinal card.
in my first pack of baseball cards. And I didn't really collect them because I didn't like put them together in different groupings of Cardinals and Yankees. I just liked the thrill of opening the pack to see who I got, see if maybe I scored a Mickey Mantle or a Bob Gibson. But then once I got through the rush of
of the opening of the pack, I would take them home and I would immediately dump them into this giant box I had under my bed. I could push it under my bed. What had come in originally was what was called Fort Apache. It was off a show way before your time again called Rin Tin Tin. And Fort Apache was the actual little fort with little toy soldiers that you could set up. I got it for Christmas when I was five and I played with it for probably two days and
It was done. I was finished with it. And yet I kept the giant box that came in and I filled it with baseball cards. It was hundreds. It was probably thousands of baseball cards. Went away to school, to Vanderbilt. One day I got in a discussion with a couple of my suite mates and we were talking about how valuable some of these cards might be. And they said, man, you collected from the time you're... Yeah. And I said, I got some mantles. And they said, you know, those could be worth some money.
So from Vanderbilt one night when I was a senior, I called my mom and I said, hey, do you know where my Ford Apache box is? Do you know where all my baseball cards are? And she said, oh, when you left to go away to school, I threw those out. You threw out my baseball cards? All of them? I mean, I don't know. There had to be five or six Mickey Mantles. I might have had a Mickey Mantle rookie card in. I don't know.
So that, Joe, was as close as I came to collecting. One last question before I get to my final topic. This is Jason from Louisiana. While there isn't NBA on TV to watch, what time do you typically try to go to bed before you wake up at 2 a.m.? That is a great question. Maybe most people aren't interested, but it's my life. And I don't have a great answer to it because just the night before this taping,
I'm prepping for this podcast. And for once, I didn't have anything. There was nothing on except baseball. I do watch some baseball, but we don't do a lot of baseball on Undisputed. So I'm not riveted. So I actually had time to be disciplined, to try to get to bed, to actually get to sleep by nine. That's what I always shoot for is nine so I can get five hours. I do go home
in the afternoons and try to sleep for an hour and a half if I can steal it. Some days I get away with it, some days I don't. Some days I can stay asleep for an hour and a half, some days I can't. Some days my little Maltese Hazel just wakes me up because she just can't stand it that I'm sleeping in the afternoon because she doesn't get why would dad go in there and sleep? It's daytime. So I did try this night before this taping to get to bed by nine.
And one thing leads to another and my body clock just won't allow it. My body clock is actually for four hours a night. So I typically fall asleep at 10-ish. And that depends on how late the NBA games are going because sometimes it's three hours of sleep I get. But typically it's four. So I tried to actually get in bed. And speaking of Hazel, at the last second, I was right on time. I was dedicated to the process. I'm going to get in bed. And she decides, spur of the moment,
She wants me to chase her. And when she decides she wants to get chased, she is as willful and adamant as any living creature on this planet, including my wife, Ernestine. She demands that I chase her. She's barking at me. She wants me to play chase with her. And I said, okay, you got me. And off we go. And we race all around the house until her tongue is hanging out.
and she calls timeout to go drink water. And only then did I try to get in bed, but now it's 9.15 and by the time I went to sleep, maybe it was 9.30. So that's the best I've done through this whole NBA playoff saga. I conclude with this, the bombshell of the century, if you care about golf and do I ever. I am hardcore, obsessed, addicted. I'm eaten up by golf. I play it.
and I watch it religiously. I haven't watched five minutes of live golf. I haven't missed a single player who defected to live golf. Not Koepka, not DeChambeau, not Dustin Johnson, certainly not Phil Mickelson. They were dead to me as far as a golf fan goes. I did not want to see them playing team golf with shotgun starts while wearing shorts.
I did not live for live. I was fine that they were all allowed to come back and play in the major championships, though I did find myself rooting against them. And I have greatly admired the PGA superstars who turned down hundreds of millions of dollars to stand on principle, to stand for our tour, to in some cases, to stand against the country backing live.
Look, I've said this before, I'm not very political. I don't want to get too political here. I know all about Saudi Arabia's human rights violations, treatment of women, gay people, journalists. I certainly know all about 9-11 and the 9-11 families. I know about using golf as what's called sports washing. Yet I'm also aware that my country, the country I love and live for,
has done a whole lot of business over the years with that country oil business so i'm just trying to keep this to the gulf i love it sounds like what happened was that the saudis and live pretty much just sued the pga tour into submission their pockets were just deeper than our pockets they financially strong-armed their way into a quote-unquote partnership with the pga tour
that sounds suspiciously like the Saudis just bought control of our tour. Under the cover of darkness, our commissioner, Jay Monahan, decided on his own, as far as I read, on his own, to stop the financial bleeding brought about by all the lawsuits. To stop it by jumping right into bed with an entity he has regularly and completely condemned. What? Monahan
did not consult with Tiger Woods, with Rory McIlroy, John Rahm, Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas, Colin Morikawa, didn't consult with anybody, any of the PGA superstars who passed up hundreds of millions of dollars, live dollars, to pledge allegiance to America's Tour. All of our superstars pretty much found out what had just happened from social media.
And I will bet you every one of them remains livid over this live deal. I mean, Tiger reportedly was offered $800 million to jump to live. $800 million. And Monaghan sold out Tiger and all the PGA stars. Monaghan went solo and sold his soul and the tour's soul.
Yeah, I get it. It's possible that some of the live defectors won't get the full payout of their deals. Not sure how that's all going to fall out. But they are going to have their cake and eat it too. They defected. They made far more than they would have on our tour, even though our tour has beefed up its purses and its playing conditions. But now all these defectors eventually will be allowed...
a path right back onto the PGA Tour, which is actually the live PGA Tour. All this is mind-boggling to me as a golf fan. All this, frankly, just makes me sick at my stomach. All of this, frankly, spoils my appetite for watching golf.
you know i'll definitely watch the us open because it's about to be played right out here in los angeles at lacc los angeles country club it's about a block from my my home but this has taken some of the fun even out of that i start thinking my mind spins is it possible that say china could one day start a professional basketball league begin to cherry pick our nba stars
by i don't know doubling tripling their salaries then then try to hijack the entire nba i i guess it's possible that just happened when i would have a month ago told you there was no way wait it it now feels like the saudis and live now run the golf i grew up loving only in america
That is it for episode 68. Thank you for listening and or watching. Thanks to Jonathan Berger and his All Pro team for making this show go. Thanks to Tyler Korn for producing. Please remember, Undisputed every weekday, 9.30 to noon Eastern, The Skip Bayless Show, every week.