Crime in Sports - #249 - A Different Kind Of Sandwich - The Sinkingness of Chris Herren

Episode Date: March 16, 2021

This week, we bring you a story of a legacy, unlimited potential, and massive screw ups. His family was an athletic legacy in his town, putting plenty of pressure on him to fulfill his destiny. And he did... well, until he did such a huge amount of drugs that no basketball team would touch him, and he ended up in a crashed car, with a heroin needle hanging out of his arm. A long way from how it was supposed to be. Can he turn it all around, and even make a difference to others, or fade into the shadows of society? Attempt to fulfill the legacy of your family, play for your home town NBA team, and become the poster child for what not to do with Chris Herren!! Check us out, every Tuesday! We will continue to bring you the biggest idiots in sports history!! Hosted by James Pietragallo & Jimmie Whisman Donate at... patreon.com/crimeinsports or with paypal.com using our email: [e-mail] Get all the CIS & STM merch at crimeinsports.threadless.com Go to shutupandgivememurder.com for all things CIS & STM!! Contact us on... twitter.com/[e-mail]/Crimeinsportsinstagram.com/smalltownmurder  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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He is. Yeah, Jim Carrey, when they're having the dance-off there, and by the way, did you notice that that movie was greased with vampires? Because that's what it was. It was just if you made Cha-Cha a vampire.

Right. That's the only difference. He did a great job dancing, though. That's what I mean. He's very good physically. It's very Jim Carrey. It's goofy-looking, but still in the thing. So yeah, check all that out and do that.

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close to that shit so thank you for everything that you do for us out there that said damn it let's get on with this let's do it great we got a plenty plenty of show for you today let's do we're going back to basketball this week but we're gonna it's a little different a little different kind of story not a lot of sports in this at all this is. This is one for a lot of crime and a lot of muck. And it's kind of a mess of a personal life is what we're going to talk about mainly. So it's awesome. We're going to talk about Christopher Albert Heron. Do you know who that is?

Chris Heron. He goes by, doesn't go by like Christopher Albert. Doesn't fit on a jersey, Christopher Albert Heron. It's a lot. Born September 27th, 1975. So, you know, not that old yet. We're not talking about one of the real classic, classic old timey guys here. Born in Fall River, Massachusetts, which will play a very important role in this whole, plays a part.

The town is almost a character in this whole story because yeah the town is the town's obsession with basketball and his family and all this stuff really adds a lot of fuel to the fire just pumping not even fuel coal long lasting you know you're it's gonna gonna get you know red hot and stay there for a while it's not even just gonna burn off i have to give credit to a couple of people here first of all number one is chris himself uh wrote a book that a lot of this is based on called basketball junkie and uh that's by chris harron and this is good to just give you kind of a an insight into his mindset at certain times and shit like that. And then also there's a lot from a book called Fall River Dreams by a guy named Bill Reynolds.

He tried to basically go to this high school basketball program and write a book on this as the team chased a state championship. Oh, that's fun. He's going to write a book kind of like a David Halberstam breaks of the game type of thing. going to write a book kind of like a david halberstam uh breaks of the game type of thing like he's or john feinstein wrote the one about indiana in like 1985 the the hoosier so it's one of those deals i feel like except he tried to do it with children instead which is but not like in a perverted way we're not trying to right we're not calling bill a pedophile or anything here he

just tried to base the book on a children's team. Did he end up getting the happy ending with a championship? I don't think so, no. But, no, they lost in a tournament at the end of it. But this is a weird thing because it's almost like this town in basketball is like they are for high school football in Texas is the best way to describe it. Yeah, like it's an interesting thing. And it makes sense if you if you talk about it a little bit like it used to be from what i understand from what this book tells me the uh the the uh one by bill reynolds that fall river like the turn of the 20th century

was a really kind of a kind of a highfalutin kind of town. People had money there. Like all of the school was built like with a shitload of money. Like everything they had was really good. Like their infrastructure was good. They were one of the first places that wasn't a major city to have telephones, electricity, all that shit. Like people with money were here. So I guess over time kind of broke down more into ethnic neighborhoods like most of the east coast cities do and then i francisco shit like that new york same way all the pockets of of

you know ethnic neighborhoods and by world war ii it really started to take a you know take a turn for the worse because the depression made it so most of the mills were shuttered the uh 80 of the mills that had operated in 1916 were out of business by world war ii beginning 80 yeah so 25 years 80 of the mills are gone so that's your that's your whole middle class you know those are all the people that are middle class people that you that fill in the population of this town that aren't elderly people that they're taking care of or very wealthy people. These are the people who are the tax base here, but not anymore. So this leaves this town as husks of mills and factories that are no longer there. A lot of these old kind of east coast towns had that for

a long time that weird ghost town factories with nobody used to be happening yeah like oh they used to make this over there and now it's just abandoned so uh this uh high unemployment came in but the thing they still loved and still rallied around was high school basketball. So weird. So this makes me think like I tried to compare this because I'm like, OK, they're looking for something positive, a silver lining in their kind of misery here. And they've chosen children's basketball. And like it's got to be the same thing as like in Texas when 10,000 people go to watch a high school game. is like in texas when 10 000 people go to watch a high school game it's like if you don't have kids in the game or you're like your best friends kids aren't in the game or your nephews or something like what is your life like if you're leaving the house on a friday night to watch

children play football yeah like kids jersey yeah yeah you're like look at that kid oh man he's real good he had eight tackles last night and he's got a c in biology he's my favorite like what the fuck are you talking about 2.3 gpa great kid oh he's the best man it's so weird so this is how they this team for decades they won numerous state championships so they're a powerhouse for decades it's not like you know one coach was there and he was good and then he left and then the program went to shit. This program is really good. And Chris is expected to fulfill his destiny in this program

because he is an athletic legacy in this area. Tell me more. His grandfather was a big star at his high school it's dirt durfee high school is where he goes and uh his grandfather was a three-sport star there um his mother was a cheerleader there where he met his father who was also a star a star athlete so yeah it's a john cougar Mellencamp song, it seems like, except with a Boston accent. Here's a little story. John Kennedy Mellencamp.

Yeah, John Kennedy Mellencamp. Ted Kennedy Mellencamp. There he is. That's filthy. That's filthy. About Jack and Diane. God, that's so ugly. That song sucks.

Jack was drinking down by the river. Can you make John Cougar worse? Oh, I can. With a Boston accent. Jack and Diane. So he quit playing sports as fast as he can. Oh, yeah, life fucking sucks. Sucks wicked hard.

That would be the fucking song. Life sucks wicked hard. Oh, Christ. Sucking on a cannoli instead of a chili dog. That's it. Sucking on a tall boy. Yeah, probably. That's more likely.

Oh, man. Oh, boy. So his brother, yeah, his father, his uncle, his three uncles played for Durfee as well. One of them was on a state championship team. He's a legacy. His brother, Michael, who's five years older, was when he was done playing basketball at Durfee, was the school's all-time leading scorer. So that tells you. And he's got to come into that shit. He's got to come into that.

His grandfather, his dad, and then his brother only five years ago all right leading score his brother last week and now you've got to do it that's that's a lot to overcome i feel like as far as uh you don't want that you know i guess you do because you're gonna it's easy because you're gonna be i mean it's not easy you're gonna coast through school but you still got the pressure of being good at the fucking athletics part. That's the thing is you have a lot of pressure, but at the same time, you're going to be treated differently than everybody else,

even before you do anything on the court, just because they expect you to. So your freshman year is going to be awesome. Yeah, you're going to feel great about yourself. He played, Chris ends up playing varsity in the freshman year too, as we talk about, which is, that's tough. Now, his grandfather was a three-sport star at derby right he seems like he might have been the best athlete of the whole lot here uh one day they said he says that the gym

teachers took a bunch of the kids outside who were good at baseball and took them to this is his grandfather took them all to a tryout for the st louis cardinals in a nearby town sweet christ back then school yeah back then they had teams would do all these like little tryouts for guys to fill their farm systems up teams like the cardinals the dodgers the yankees the you know the good teams that were winning and had very established they all had like 25 farm teams fascinating so a lot of they would just fill them up with these kids so you have so many people back then who played quote professional baseball in the minors but they just they never got to the majors because

you know they have a 25 man roster and you have 800 people in your farm system it's right the math doesn't work you know it's it's you you pick a particular position and that you're good at that somebody fucking amazing plays that's never getting in they're not always turning the team over so yeah right you're on the cardinals and bob gibson is on there and you're a starting pitcher well one of the slots is locked up for 15 years you're not sticking around down there for a while you're shit out of luck mister i mean I mean... Jeter? Yeah. You're behind. You play shortstop, you're fucked. Ask Alfonso Soriano. He became a terrible second baseman

and left fielder because he was a shortstop that could never get up because of Jeter, so he switched. They switched him to second base. Wish you had a fastball, fucker? Try something else out? He can hit the cover off the ball, so they're like, well, fuck it. We'll let him make errors at second base. That's fine. Whatever. Good enough. off the ball so they're like well fuck it we'll let him make errors at second base that's fine whatever good enough so uh he jeter will turn two on the next at bat yeah it's all right we got if he doesn't mess it up at second right he doesn't screw up the relay right know what he's

doing over there yet so there was about 400 kids at this tryout which is uh that's a it's like a big league of their own style tryout like a big i don't know 400 people that's what i mean a big mass tryout and uh apparently that he made the team or made you know the organization they offered him a minor league spring training job i guess you could call it to play a spot on a roster in Columbus, Georgia. So he was down there for a little while and then he ended up coming home for a bit and quitting baseball, but then going back and going to Missouri and playing class D baseball, which was like rookie ball back then. It was the lowest level. But back then it was a job and there was it wasn't hard. It was hard to come by jobs.

He went home and couldn't get any work in Massachusetts. So he went to Missouri to play baseball for a couple bucks just to make something get a paycheck. Yeah. Because back then, I mean, it was it was tough. And then he ended up coming home after a couple of years. He said he realized he was never going to make the majors. So he just went home and became an electrician, joined the union. And the family said never talk about being a professional baseball player ever why would you need to pull it out of them like these old old men are old men old women they're

fascinating you you dig a little below the surface you're like wait you went to the moon and they're like yeah yeah three times you're times. You're like, are you fucking kidding? Why did you not say that? You're like, I don't know. It was a long time ago, they say. It doesn't matter. Everybody's heard the one step for mankind shit. Nobody's going to pay attention to me anyway.

We've all heard about the moon. You don't need to hear anything more about the moon. You've seen it on TV, right? That's what it is. I just found out my grandfather grew up in Pontiac, Michigan, and I was almost born there because I happened to ask him a question. I had no fucking idea. I thought he was in New York the whole time.

That's what I mean. You don't know anything about these people. They don't talk about themselves. And he survived a bowling alley job that he used to have where the little Timmy that worked on the lane next to him fucking died, took a pin to the head, and he's dead. I love how back in the day, even working at the bowling alley was a dangerous thing to do. Dangerous as fuck. Even the bowling alley was like, like hey i don't know if you want to do that they

didn't have machines that reset the pins so they had kids and and expendable society back there throwing pins around i read an article about that once actually about the like that used to be a very dangerous job and people would be injured all the time and it was considered like a it was like a manly job to do that league play you got these guys that just came off the fucking oil field, and they're in there throwing balls instead of punching their wife. Yeah. And then a kid takes a pin to the side of the head, and it's over. They're three pitchers deep into this thing already,

and now they're three pitchers of Miller Lite deep into it, and now they're chucking the ball down there. Three pitchers and a couple of pretzels, and they're pissed. They're good and angry. Dude, that's what is it with old p you never know what's in there they just don't tell you they don't want to talk about it until until you until they want to talk about it and when they want to talk about it they don't shut up dude you can't people now can't put a half decent outfit on their kid without posting it on instagram like they're freaking parent of the year these these people would go to the moon and they were like that i don't know the long time ago watched her mom die of polio james oh my god that's wild polio polio how often does that happen anymore you don't hear well give it time people be like polio's not that bad it's

fine you never hear anybody dying of it. You're fine. No, it's fine. Survival rate's got to be high. I know no one who's died of polio. So personally, I think it's bullshit and it's fine. So what are we talking about? Why would I give my kid a vaccine for that?

I don't even know anyone who died for it. Why would I get it? That's crazy. That's stupid. So stupid. I don't know what's who died for it why would i get it that's crazy stupid so stupid i don't know what's in it no who knows probably polio so no oh man so his brother michael okay uh his brother michael is is an interesting character in this whole deal uh his brother like we said all-time leading scorer at the school now right out of chris's book he says that he was about seven years old when he first

got to see michael play basketball like you know organized basketball on the team he said michael was 12 he was already being called the best kid in the city colleges were already looking at him wow at 12 when they look at michael jordan not 12 not 12 imagine this put think about it this way when you were 12 what potential did you have that would make adults with money interests be like gotta keep an eye on that kid nothing not a goddamn thing i had nothing going for me nothing 12 i was i you know i was pretty good at super mario 3 i was decent at that i mean i don't know i had naps on lock i mean yeah i don't know what else i was really good i could eat like a horse i got that oh yeah that was a profession i would have had that but other than that other

than a food network job i really wouldn't have had nothing to do there this stealing i was really good at that yeah lots of stuff like that so he talks about this first game seeing michael before the game in a layup line which if you don't know a basketball shit they all line up to just shoot easy shots a little layup by the rim uh before to get your rhythm in yeah get warmed up and he said that this was against lafayette park which was a lot of tough kids there he said he said kids in the crowd were acting like bullies and i'm trying to like bully michael's team trying to you know make it make them intimidated so he said they were yelling at him they called him names and he said

the game started and his brother uh made a layup on the first play of the game and he said without stopping he just made the layup kept on going ran over to one of the people that was talking and beat the shit out of him said beat the beat the shit out of him just ran right over popped him right in the face and beat his ass and at 12 at 12 and chris said quote i thought it was awesome so this is a sport for me this is great this is now now i you know what maybe i understand why these adults are going to watch kids play basketball those are the games that'd be great kids jersey i'll put it on tomorrow oh dude i would i will get shit faced and go watch 12 year olds hit layups then punch each other i'll do that all fucking day long that's not even the team punch their fans yeah punch the i don't care

punch somebody punched a ref i'll pay to watch that that's hilarious i'm into that i'm into 12 year old on 12 year old violence that's funny so well the kid deserves it you know sure in that situation on him yeah so he said he did lie he loved going to his brother's games there's always a lot of people at the games uh the team was really good too while michael was leading the team as he was obviously the really good, too, while Michael was leading the team. He was obviously the all-time leading scorer. He's leading the team. Now, Michael's a little taller than Chris.

Chris is going to be about 6'2 when he grows up. Michael is 6'4. So a little bit more size. He says that in Michael's last two years, the team won 46 straight games sweet jesus and two state championships so big shoes to fill when that's your brother like 46 games straight straight just put the team on your back and carry them away down the fucking way it's insane and uh he was a three-time all uh all scholastic in the b Globe also, which I guess means you're good at school as well. The only other kid who ever had that done was Patrick Ewing, he said.

Really? Yeah, that's pretty good shoes to fill if you don't know about basketball. He played his cards right. He could be a big NBA superstar and then go back to the Garden and not be recognized. And not have anyone know who you are even though you're 7'1". And you have a face like Patrickrick like patrick ewing but even if you didn't recognize someone if you see a 50 year old seven foot two man in an eight thousand dollar suit saying he played probably played there probably played there if not you know what let him in if he does anything

you'll probably be able to pick him out of a crowd, I would say. You know what I'm saying? Like, he's not going to blend in and disappear. You're going to fuck. Oh, there he is. He's all the way out of the fucking corridor. But there he's down by entrance. A guy that big with that big of a blockhead and those bad in these. He played basketball, sir.

Basketball. You idiot. Ewing should have taken that guy to the team shop and go, that's my jersey still. That's how good I was. I haven't played here in 20 fucking years and you still sell it. Stupid. Take him to the team shop and stand next to the probable picture that's for sale there with your face in it.

Oh, shit, man. Jesus Christ. I don't care how much he ages. Patrick Ewing will always look like Patrick fucking Ewing. There's only one man that looks like that on earth and it's patrick ewing yeah who looks like uh that like patrick ewing patrick it's hard to describe he's just a big patrick ewing you know if someone you could just say that guy looks like patrick ewing and whether he did or not would be obvious instantly you know

everyone oh yeah or, he doesn't. I mean, Jesus Christ. How somebody didn't. How do you work for that team and not fucking know? That's ridiculous. That can't be true. Between that and the Charles Oakley shit that happened a couple years ago, what's going on down there?

They really didn't appreciate that fucking eight years of bliss there. I mean, apart from a championship. Eight years of a great fucking team. Did you just become a fan? The Dolans are the worst owners in sports. of bliss there i mean apart from a championship eight years of a great fucking team how they have some of the worst become a fan the dullins are the worst owners in sports that's probably a good reason why it starts right from the top and trickles down so that's why the knicks haven't won a championship since 1970 fucking two probably somebody that worked for the knicks in a carmelo anthony jersey yeah exactly we're going on 50 years next year congratulations everyone that's great

nick fans we're doing it so they're gonna be the cubs of the nba but it's already are well if they don't the sons will either way i'm miserable they're the only two teams i like so i can't win with this shit can't win so uh michael is brother after one of the playoff games uh this is a playoff game in the Boston Garden. That must have been cool to be a kid and do that. Fuck yeah. The Boston, they say here in the newspaper, quote, the eyes couldn't stay off Heron. He was involved in everything.

He was involved in the good, the bad. He was involved in the ugly. One minute he was scoring, clenching a fist to the derfy crowd, yapping. The next minute he was committing a charge, clenching a fist, yapping at the referee. One minute he was up. The next minute he was on the sidelines at the end of the third period. Blood rolling down his face from an eight-stitch cut across the top of his left eye from an elbow. Like, they just talk about he's just such a tough kid, and they're just gushing on him.

Is this basketball still? This is basketball still, yeah. This isn't hockey. He didn't gash in his face. Well, he'd catch an elbow on a rebound or something. I guess. Yeah, this is not hockey. This is Northeast basketball.

In the Northeast, you play a little differently. They're playing streetball on the fucking actual street? What is happening? Elbows are part of the body, babe. That's what it's about. That's how it happens. They said that right from Chris's book, he says, quote, and no one was tougher than Michael. You know how two guys square off and one of them says, fuck you, to the other, and the other says, fuck you back, and it goes on like that?

With Michael, you never got in that second, fuck you. That's basically what, obviously, he went and punched a kid after a layup. So, yeah. Now, as far as Chris goes, he started, he said said from the time he started youth basketball as a young kid, it was not just a game at all. In his family, you had to win. He'll talk about later on his team was a runner-up in a tournament, and they all got big trophies, and he threw it in the garbage on the way out of the locker room. Yeah, I would, too. He said, you don't bring home a second-place trophy in my house.

You're not allowed. Not just because it's a second place trophy. It's just because it's not first place trophy. Well, yeah, that's what I mean. Anything else is what do I have a trophy for this for? Right. To remind me that I lost? Thanks.

So, you know, he said it sucked. He had to win. He said that I guess in that youth league that his brother played there, too, and they never lost a game while his brother was on the team in the youth league. Yeah, they won 80-something games in a row, he said. And he said that when he was there, they started losing sometimes, and it made him feel terrible, obviously. He said that he wasn't programmed to deal with losing in his house.

He said that wasn't a thing. Everybody was a winner. And now he's like, oh, I'm not I'm not a winner. What the fuck? You know, I'm screwing up the lineage here. He said his dad was weird because sometimes his dad would say, oh, you'll get him next time. And sometimes he would yell at him. You didn't do this.

You didn't do that. You got to play tougher, which might have been sometimes he played well and they lost. And he said, well, you got him next time. You can't do everything. And then maybe he played like and they lost, and he said, well, you got him next time. You can't do everything. And then maybe he played like shit another time and wasn't paying attention, and he was telling him, you didn't do this, you didn't do that. That's why you lost. So that could be just decent coaching from the dad.

I don't know. He said that the father never blamed coaches. It was never, oh, the coach should have done that. It was your fault. Well, you're the best player on the team. Why didn't you do better? You would have won. Coach wasn't't playing we can't blame him that's the thing he said um he was never he said his dad didn't like you know take him out in the driveway make him shoot 53 throws if he screwed something up or something like that he said it was just uh

it was about his attitude and his mental toughness. And basically, like, the way they looked at it was like, you're a great basketball player. It's in your blood. Everybody's a great basketball player. You just have to be tougher and more, you know, mentally you have to be better than the next guy. And then you can always win because physically you got this. You're fine type of thing. He said that he had to score points. And that's the way it was.

He said he never liked it. He said, quote, I never liked it. I was a fragile kid, a nervous kid. I wasn't very good in school, but the expectations were always there. I was living in the shadow of a very accomplished brother. Michael was five years older, so when he was 12 and already on his basketball journey, mine was starting, too, whether I liked it or not. Michael loved it.

Me, I hated it. That's a lot of pressure, man. It is a lot of pressure. on his basketball journey mine was starting too whether i liked it or not michael loved it me i hated it so yeah it's a lot of pressure man it is a lot of pressure it's a lot of pressure for it's a different kind of problem normally we don't have this kind of problem with a lot of our athletes are as we always have with the with the father is it better to uh stick around and beat the shit out of everybody within arm's reach or is it better to just go away and never be heard from again sure and we have mixed results it seems to be bad both ways and then you have like arch leekter's father or todd marinovich's father who are yeah giving him kidney gummies in the crib and yelling at him about gripping the football wrong when they're two and most of these guys though that we cover that we talk about week, don't have a lineage of just successful athlete after successful athlete.

There's a couple. Well, yeah. Look at Michael Irvin's family last week. It was a hardscrabble situation where he had to make – if he wanted to play and do things, he had to really be self-motivated to do it and get out there and not be a roofer like his dad and all that shit. Whereas this is kind of he's being pushed into this through family lineage so it's a little easier and harder at the same time i might say that that's a bad thing to do to somebody if you're a successful athlete encourage them to fucking draw or something because otherwise they may end up like kellen winslow this is not a

positive thing also you might end up like ken griffey jr there is that god damn it you could end up like him or barry bonds or you know any number of these even better sons and the fathers which happens lebron's kid is really fucking good so i mean you never know i mean look at michael jordan's kid he had a hard time and you know quit teams and all that and we'll talk about chris's kid later on too because he's gonna have one and oh no he's got issues as well we'll talk about it so uh well not like bad issues but just you know whatever like if you don't know when crystal pepsi was discontinued what was in al capone's vault or which famous meteorologist is lenny kravitz's second cousin then you haven't spent enough time

on wikipedia but that's okay i am here for you i'mcy Carden, and I'm inviting you to listen to my new podcast, WikiHole, from SmartList Media. Discover the craziest rabbit holes on Wikipedia with me and my funny friends as we bring the cyber frontier directly to your tympanic membrane. And if you listen to my podcast, you'd learn that that's the science-y term for eardrum. We embark on a hyperlink rollercoaster as we start out on a Wikipedia page and go from link to link to link to link, careening through trivia, oddities, and unexpected connections until we collectively shout, how the hell did we get here? Follow WikiHole on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to WikiHole ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the face. I see he's not intimidated

by anything. I can fix that. New cases. She wanted to fight me. Leave her alone. Okay, so, um... This is not a so. This is a period. Classic Judy. Did you sleep with her? Yes, Your Honor.

You married his cousin. His brother. That's not him. Yes, ma Honor. You married his cousin. His brother. That's not him. Yes, ma'am. I would make a beeline for the door. The Emmy Award winning series returns. How did I know that? I have a crystal ball in my head.

It's an all new season. It's streaming. You can say anything. Judy Justice. Only on Freebie. Judy Justice only on Freebie playing with your friends in someone's backyard. Once you played in real games and started keeping score and counting points, it wasn't fun. If you,

uh, it was something you did something you were supposed to do. Well, you had to win. That's right out of his book. So that's an, an interesting thing. He said he was never good in school.

He didn't like it. He didn't get good grades. Um, he said he even had a couple tutors for a while, but it didn't help at all. He said that his basketball was always more scrutinized than his academics, even when he was very young. Like, you know, never mind that shit.

If you play ball well enough, you'll get to college that way type of deal. One of the teachers, he was told, or his teachers told his parents, quote, Chris is hyper. He has a lot of energy. Don't give him any sugar. So they tell him, you know, make him go outside and play, make him run around. Don't give him sugar. He said that's how they dealt with his ADD at the time.

You'll make him burn it out. Yeah, burn it off. That's what they used to do. I know several. I know a couple different kids that were hyperactive and their parents would make him go run around the block five times. Go be tired instead of fucking nuts. Go run around the block five times get that energy out of you which is i mean it's good for your cardio i guess but i don't know how well it's really

handling the situation no so yeah he said that's how it was dealt with not very effectively and it kind of stuck around always and he was shit in school so when he gets to high school at durfee uh he said that uh right away oh, you're Michael's brother. You're Michael's brother. You're Michael's brother. He didn't have a name for a while. He was Michael's brother. They even gave him 24 as a number, which is the same number his father wore.

Jesus. He's like, fuck. He can't. There is no breaking away from this, just the way it was. there is no breaking away from this just the way it was he said that he was supposed to be the next great player at the school following uh his and his brother's footsteps he said a lot of people didn't like him a lot of like the seniors on the team didn't care for him the upperclassmen didn't like him because they were treating him like royalty and he just because of who he was and they were like fuck this freshman you know but he's good that's the thing uh he said that his first game

for the team was in a boston suburb uh weymouth weymouth i think it is way mouth it's spelled so it's probably way it's gotta be way with um he said uh a couple days before the game a guy on channel five in boston had done a little piece on him uh about how he was Mike's little brother. He was the new face of Massachusetts basketball and all this shit. And that he began dunking the year before. Like, he's in ninth grade. He's already dunking. So they showed him in the video dunking a bunch of times. And they played New Kids on the Block over it.

This is like 1989. So what do you think? I bet it was the right stuff hanging tough i bet it was you think i bet it was the right stuff it might have been just because i think it's hanging tough i think it's hanging tough it might be either way it's fucking terrible and you don't want that on your record as you go into ninth grade was it please don't go girl that would be amazing that would be the best if it was the joey mcintyre singing fucking that would be the best if it was that one i would like that that's the way boston does things though so i could see it being done well they are boston

they were boston kids so that's where that came from, probably. They were like, yeah, we're going to play New Kids on the Block while he dunks. We're going to play New Kids on the Block. He's just going to dunk all over. It's going to be beautiful. He said that as soon as he got to the game, there's a whole section of kids screaming at him and singing New Kids on the Block at him, mocking those motherfuckers. Like, fuck. God damn you, Wahlbergs.

No. Fuck me. Oh, man. Bill Reynolds, who wrote the book on that year in the life of this basketball team. He says the idea was to follow the team through a season and examine what the team meant to the city and to the kids who played on it. And it was a look at, you know, the whole experience of the town, how they're connected, why they love high school basketball so much, the whole deal. He said, you know, why it was so embedded his plan was to focus on the coach who was a legend locally coach carom uh thomas skippy carom he played for here so coach carom

who was a legend that had once played at durfee he coached there for over 30 years and um you know he was a legend they'd won a shitload of state championships. And, you know, he's a big deal. So he wanted to, you know, really concentrate on him. But he said once he got there, quote, it was quickly apparent that the story was more complicated. At the center of it was a psychic battle being played out every day between Karam and Durfee's junior star, Chris Herron, a battle that was both generational and cultural. With his teen idol looks and his swept-back hair walking through the corridors of Durfee as if he was the leading man in a Hollywood movie.

So, yeah. He said that... This is how Chris was. He said at one point when the book was almost finished, he made Chris read a couple of parts of it to show him what he was doing because he said these were sensitive areas almost finished he made chris read a couple of parts of it to show him what he was doing because he said these were sensitive areas and he said it was uh the kid was 17 years old he didn't want him

to be blindsided by some sensitive shit about him coming out in a book so he said chris said quote what's so sensitive the fuck i don't care and the guy said quote how about the fact that you drink too much and do no work in school and every other word out of your mouth is fuck how about that and he says quote oh i don't give a fuck about any of that this is boston man yeah i'm drinking and swearing that's that's what we do here right fuck is what you say you know well actually there's a thing about fucking this that i'm going to talk about that's pretty funny i can't wait it's good shit so he doesn't give a fuck he said the only thing that uh he objected to one thing in the book and that was one thing he said it was so insignificant that it was like that's what you're okay i don't like that you say i wear british knights i don't i wear adidas you know you know you could look down

right you could just look at them you're fucking bum he's on la gear sir you're a bum so he uh he said that he the thing he objected to was a profanity-laced speech he'd made to his teammates in the locker room minutes before a big game and he said quote let's just go out and fucking play like fucks and fuck them up. That was his quote. He said to his team, he said, quote, you see that last sentence? He said, sounding like a young kid asking for a favor. Quote, can you change fucking play like fucks and fuck them up to fucking play like animals and fuck them up? That was the only change.

I knew I had a feeling that the word fucks was the one that he was like it doesn't make any sense let's change that i feel like it's that's oh too much that's a superfluous you know it's a gratuitous fuck in there that's too much i feel like uh the first the first and the last fuck you got a book ended i understand that but the middle one let's let's put some you know like some turkey or some roast beef what are we gonna put another piece of bread in the middle come on You know, like some turkey or some roast beef. What are we going to put another piece of bread in the middle? Come on.

We're making a fuck sandwich. We don't. When you're making a fuck sandwich, you can't put fuck in the middle, too. I mean, what are we talking about here? Jesus Christ, man. I wish we could call this episode a fuck sandwich because it would 1000% be called that. Eating a fuck sandwich. it would 1000% be called that eating a fuck sandwich play like fucks play like it doesn't make any sense it doesn't he's who the hell knows what the hell he's talking about he's just so out of his mind yeah and uh he said also the weird thing

was that uh he said this is a quote from the quote, he seemed to live exclusively in the present tense, to the point that he didn't even have a driver's license, even though he was more than a year over the eligible age, and didn't every high school kid want a driver's license? He said, quote, I don't want it, I don't need it. They said, the author asked him, quote, what do you mean you don't need it? And he said, everywhere I want to go, somebody will take me. That's his attitude.

It's actually a pretty kick ass attitude. It's interesting, but it's not. If everyone had that attitude, no one would go anywhere. That's the problem. You know what I'm saying? Nobody would go anywhere. Someone will take me. Well, they're all waiting to be taken, too.

So who the fuck? Someone's going to drive. Get your license, asshole. What are you doing? So he they said he said he was very different. he didn't seem like he was trying on roles he was just a different kind of kid he didn't have like the school sports jacket he didn't wear like his you know a letterman jacket uh he forgot to sign up to take the sats just forgot me too. But I never thought I was going to college. They've been talking about this since he was born.

I never knew to take them. I didn't know. I figured I was like, oh, that's for different kids that are doing things. Like, I'm not. You know, I never even looked in when the schedule was for them. I didn't give a fuck about them that much. I heard people were taking them, and I was like, oh, that's what people who go to college do.

And then I went on with my life i heard people say i got this on my sats and i was just like nobody told me to take them because i think even the adults were like he doesn't need those yes no the teachers would tell the kids that needed to take them to take them that's the thing sign up like i really feel like they told the kids that needed them right realized that we weren't go we weren't those kids they were like no no no you're you'll do something different than that don't worry college is for everyone for your hammer fitting uh yeah exactly you're gonna get a work boot fitting at three o'clock see how big of a sledge you can hold uh tomorrow afternoon that's that's the the sledge aptitude test that's the sats for us sledge aptitude you just see how big big rock little rock guy that guy that's him he was he was always late for school and he lived three blocks

from the school chris so that was always late you know what i'm saying he when the coach said, why the fuck are you always late for school? You're getting in trouble. He said his parents left early for work and he doesn't have an alarm clock. So I don't know what to tell you, coach. I don't have a driver's license, coach. Yeah, I forgot to take the SATs. They said for away games, he would show up to the bus without his gym bag that had his uniform in it. And he figured only because he knew that one of the other kids

would grab it for him at some point though someone will grab it for me what the fuck i mean they're not gonna not let me play so they'll be fine he's in high school at this point that's yes he's in high school he's acting like he's an nba player who is like lowering himself to play on like some sort of charity league team or something like i don't know or a 10 year old who just is incapable of taking care of his own shit one of the they're an nba player or a 10 year old and they have a lot of similarities so that's it's true so uh chris says this is a teammate on chris this is jeff karen one of his teammates he said quote there's no one like chris he only cares about what's right in front of him the school could be burning down but if there were two ants going across the floor,

he would be looking at them, asking which one you thought was going to get to the other side first, wanting to bet on one of them. Everyone else would be running to get out of the building. He would be watching those two ants. The whole family's different. I used to love going over there when I was younger. The house was always open, people coming and going. My house is like a fortress.

Alarms, bars on the windows. The herons are just the opposite. Michael's always giving his car to friends and then forgets about it. You ask him where his car is and he says he has no idea. They're all like that. You can't not like the herons. It's like they don't care about what most people care about. It's like they're a fucking family of flakes is what it sounds like.

It sounds like a bunch of flakes. Old Karen is a grim karen he just told us all those things that are that he likes about them those are all bad things and he's like they're great he's the opposite he's like cheerleader karen he's awesome he shits in his pants and then just walks around it's crazy sometimes he'll dip his hand back there and then write his name on the wall in it. And it's all right. His mom doesn't even care. She's like, nice artwork, Chris. And they put a frame around it. It's really fucking cool. What a supportive family.

At some point here, he gets a shamrock tattoo on his left forearm. Yeah. Which is very Boston. If you've ever seen on Family Guy at one point, Chris, the son walks up to Peter and he goes, Dad, I need to get a shamrock tattoo. It's time. seen on family guy at one point chris the son walks in up to peter and he goes dad i i need to get a shamrock tattoo it's time it's just like if you're from the boston area and you're an irish kid at some point you'll end up with a shamrock tattoo on your goddamn body yeah it's either that or the notre dame logo you're getting one of the two one of the two yeah if his name was like uh

you know nate dawson who is he would definitely get that probably but he he ends up with his family crest and the shamrock tattoo that's what he does two different tattoos now let's talk about his entree into drugs and alcohol here he says quote this is from his book chris's book quote my first drink was cold duck champagne i was 12 years old and kevin miko was act and i found an old bottle of it in my basement we got away with it and that was the start we didn't drink a lot then but whenever we could steal a bottle out of someone's liquor cabinet we would go and drink in the woods which is every northeastern kids uh start to everything is by drinking the woods if

there was no woods i feel like most of whatever happens bad with kids would never happen. It all happens in the woods when you're a kid. So without the woods, burn the trees to the fucking ground. If you want to say, save your kids, chop down the trees. I'm telling you that right now. Otherwise they're going to drink liquor back there and finger each other and shit. It's going to be gross. Gross. It's going to be disgusting. So he said a few years later, then they would go to graduate to standing outside liquor stores trying to get people to get it for him, which we've all done that.

We've all done the fucking you're like 16. You're like, I just don't have my ID on me. Right. I don't care. Give me five bucks and I'll buy you whatever you want. Hey, mister, would you buy us alcohol? The amount of times I had to say that. Oh, my God. Hey, mister.

Hoping that I just got the coolest guy ever. Hey, man. Yeah, you'd like scope people out. No, no, not that guy. Right. He looks now. He looks like a guy. You always find the guy that's shame riddled walking into the liquor store.

You always find the guy that's shame riddled walking into the liquor store. The guy that's like, he's driving a piece of shit car and he's wearing clothes that are 10 years out of date. That guy will buy you booze. You look at a guy who looks like he needs five bucks. That's who buys you booze. That's it. He looks like he could use five bucks or he looks like he's going to buy booze. So we could just buy his booze and he'll buy us booze.

It's not like if you saw anybody with a car seat in your car you were like nope they're not buying shit a guy that looks like he's two days unshaved that guy will buy you anything that's the guy uh he said that uh you know they always got somebody to buy him booze and uh of course in boston too like hi you little pissy i'll buy you some booze. There you go. Hey, what, did your dad run out? What's going on? What's wrong? Here, go throw this up.

Yeah, go throw this up in the woods, kid. There you go. So make a nice vomit pile right in the middle of the woods. Tell you what. This is going to smell gross. Get away from me. Disgusting. So by the time he was a freshman, he's on the varsity team. And he said he had a whole new circle of friends which were all the older kids you know all the upperclassmen on the team

he says so all the other kids you know the freshmen were doing more kid stuff that he was going to keg parties already he said at 14 said he'd quote we'd be out in the woods somewhere or maybe half a half hour away at the beach in Westport or behind some old warehouse. Eighty to one hundred kids. That sounds about right. Then we started to go to Sonnison, one of his friends, Sonnison's basement. His parents were divorced and his mother worked nights. We call it the speakeasy.

You betcha. The divorced parent, whoever they live with, works at night situation was the greatest thing that's ever happened to children. Besides the woods. Divorced parent and mom breaking her ass to keep this roof up. Sweet. We can fucking get messed up and screw the house up while she works really hard at 2 o'clock in the morning. Awesome. And then we do that because we're animals.

Let's do that. And then when she gets home uh can't wait to hear her go why do i do this why do i smell mad dog 2020 vomit what is happening in this house this is disgusting my reward no shit he said quote i certainly wasn't the biggest drinker in my group my friends used to get on me for never really finishing a beer just taking three or four sips and putting it down then picking up on picking up another one later i was no angel i did my share of puking and all but there were guys in our little group who were much worse off drinking didn't really do it for me i drank to be accepted socially to be one of the guys

i just wanted to be uh like them back then so yeah he said i certainly didn't see drinking as the problem quote now the acid that was a problem that's oh boy yeah 14 that's a quote well no when he's a junior he said it started so a couple years in he said it started when he was a junior he said we didn't do it all the time because it wasn't around all the time acid's always spotty it's around somebody will get a couple of sheets or whatever and then you know they'll have it'll be around for a minute and then and it's poof it's gone for a little while fast it goes fast he says uh weed wasn't around all the time either he said later weed was around everywhere but he wasn't really into weed he said he couldn't he made him paranoid he didn't like it which is funny when you hear about his drug selection later on you're like

weed made you paranoid but but that shit's OK. Great. He said, I probably did acid 50 times and it was fucking torture. Is his line here? He said, to this day, I don't know why I did it because it was never fun. I guess it was the power of numbers, the power of the group. There'd be five of us, say, and three of us wanted to do it. So the other two would go along with it.

We'd end up laughing at other at other other people's torture sick shit like that it usually lasted about three hours and at the end you'd be begging it for it to end the only good that's a shit ass at three hours 50 times and it was awful every time who's wrong with you who keeps doing it i i did it it was probably great about 90 of the time it was good 50 times bad though i don't know what he's thinking he said uh the only good thing about it was that it didn't smell and get all over your clothes so that when you went when you went home you didn't get into trouble if your parents never looked at your pupils which are the size of nickels you'd be fine he said it was five dollars for a tab which yes back then it was and if it, we'd all do it, but we'd had some horrible experiences with it.

One night, we were in this tiny apartment on Bay Street, and there were two tasers in the room. This is just like a Northeast thing. It's weird. By the end of the night, the walls were dripping, and we were shooting each other with taser guns. You would have never know. You never know when a shot was coming. It was vicious we taught we were tortured souls i saw kids crumble on acid they would break down right before your

eyes all curled up wailing begging for help crying their eyes out you'd hear about bad trips horror stories yeah right we'd say then we started seeing them one night we gave each other homemade tattoos with razor blades oh jesus never did that when I was on acid. Were the taser guns, were they like the actual guns with like the harpoons? Or were they like the handheld taser guns? No, no, I think back then it's the ones where the element, where the things shoot out. My God. Yeah, that's what they're shooting.

On fishing line. Yeah, that's what they're shooting each other with. So he said, I still have a scar on my chest from that night, the homemade tattoo night. Another night I ended up hiding in the sand dunes at Horse Neck Beach with no idea what I was hiding from. Jesus Christ. This is I don't know if this is it a northeast northeast thing to really torture your friends. Is that because like. But if you ever did acid and then wound up in the sand dunes hiding

and from something you don't even know you're hiding from would you ever do acid again that's i mean stupid no probably not that's the thing i mean i had a couple that were you know on the edge but it was like it was okay i never was like i'm hiding in the dunes and i'm i don't know what's happening here like when you were a kid did you did you guys like shoot each other with pellet guns and shit i mean there were pellet guns around but i don't remember i remember people shooting them at us but i don't remember a lot of people getting hit oh okay we were sure did you do a lot of bad shots did you do birthday beatings was that a thing oh yeah birthday beatdowns those were yeah where you have like 12 of your friends beat the shit out of you that was a good fuck out of each other i I like that one. That was always fun.

So that's what kids do. If you wonder the teenage boys, what's wrong with them? Look at what we're doing. We're right. We beat the shit out of our paintballs and shoot each other. Oh, yeah. Whatever hurts, whatever's bad and can hurt another friend of yours. Nothing you could do is more fun than hurting one of your friends for some reason.

I don't know why that is. Trying your best to make your friend cry and then he doesn't is the greatest it's perfect so uh now we need to talk about heather um who was heather gray at the time heather is a down down down chick uh we'll just say because heather goes through hell hell she's like karen hill from goodfellas for fuck's sake and she just hangs in there and sticks around you're like wow this lady i mean she is she's honestly up for a golden gilretha right off the bat for 2022 she's right there um she said that uh uh they he said they met in sixth grade on a playground so that's how long they knew each other uh the uh he said she was by far the cutest girl i'd ever seen and from the start i was in love with her even though i put gum

in her hair that day so that's how he said torture was not what is it reserved for men yeah friends yeah he said that should have been the first red flag for her and it really should have because her whole life will be picking gum out of her hair basically with chris that's her it's just a whole life of gum picking man uh he said that he said they'd go out in high school for a while then they'd break up they get back together that sort of thing. You know, that was what they did. He said that she came from a much more stable family and she knew that he was kind of spinning out. He said she never cared about his basketball and that he liked a lot with her. She he wasn't a basketball player. He was just a guy. So he dug that. She said he said they went to the prom together. She was homecoming queen, a cheerleader, all that shit. So just like he's following right in his dad's footsteps, exactly the same thing. Except for that gum bit. Except for the gum bit. Well, maybe.

We never know. Now, the coach, Coach Karam, he says, quote, I always knew Coach Karam. I knew him before I met him. I had gone to his camp as a young kid, so I knew all about his screaming and yelling and his swearing. Although that never bothered us because this was Fall River, everyone swore. And one of the guys in the Fall River Dreams books, this was an ex-player, he says, quote, There is an entire Fall River rap, a language they've been speaking for 30 years. Fuck is a verb, a noun, an adjective an adjective an adverb and the all-purpose

word right it's just how it is so that's father down at the church he says it open your fucking bible they do that's the thing this fucking bum over here that everybody just talks like that it's the same in new york it's just how people talk it's just and then fucking mary had a baby yeah you'll go get a sandwich and the guy i'll be like that's talking this fucking guy earlier and it's like in arizona that would be a big like, what the shit? In New York, it's fine. You're like, oh, yeah, you're talking to this fucking guy. Oh, yeah, that fucking guy.

I know that fucking guy. How does he fucking live? How does he fucking live? That fucking bastard. Where's he fucking from with that fucking baby? I'm telling you, these fucking fucks. I'm making a fuck sandwich. Mary had a fucking baby.

Nobody fucked her. Nobody fucked her. I'm making a fuck sandwich. Marry a fucking baby. Nobody fucked her. Nobody fucked her. I don't know what happened. So another time they're on a bus and they couldn't find one of the kids, Danny Callahan. Jesus Christ. You'd be more Irish than any of these kids. He said, the coach said, quote, where's Callahan? And one of the kids said he went back to get his uniform.

And a few minutes later he showed up and the guy said, quote, way to go, the coach way to go danny you don't get any rebounds then you lose your uniform and keep everybody waiting a great night you're a pisser danny a real pisser so uniform your uniform so that's how they say it so uh chris said that he yelled from the back of the bus mr carom you know there's no such word as pisser. It's not in the dictionary. So he said, quote, sure is, Chrissy. You look it up in your pictures there. That's what the coach told him.

Chrissy. He called him Chrissy, which is hilarious. Of course he called him Chrissy. Chrissy. Hey, Chrissy. Dunk the ball, Chrissy. So, oh, boy. So college recruiting comes around, and he said it started basically the summer before his freshman year of high school.

He was already being recruited by colleges. He said he was at the Villanova camp. On the last day, someone left a new pair of sneakers outside of his room. Like, that was his first, like, oh, wow. The next summer, he said letters from various schools started coming. He said, quote, by my junior year, it was flat out crazy. As a sophomore, I was named all scholastic by the Boston Globe. The only sophomores to do that before me were my brother and Patrick Ewing.

So he's yeah, he's a pretty good company. He said, I spent the summer before my junior year playing for the Boston Amateur Basketball Club, an AAU team run by a guy named Leo Papil, who works for the Celtics as a personnel guy later on. So he's a guy who's in there. He said that everyone from Ewing to Dana Barrows, this guy had picked out and knew about early on he said that uh yeah he coached the team and uh he later papil later became assistant director of basketball operations for the celtics there and the leo guy said quote there was no one better in the nation in high school as a combo guard he could run a team tough as nails shoot the long ball he had great instincts and a feel for the game he could run a pick and he could run pick and rolls he has an nba resume so right away this guy who knows his shit uh then the boston

globe ran a three or i'm sorry not that it was a local newspaper ran a three-part series called quote the courtship of chris heron and this was all about what college he's going to go to where is he visiting who wants him i guess kentucky and duke wanted him florida wanted him all these different teams here the letters came to the coach's mailbox like crazy he said he'd uh places he never heard of said there was notes from coaches and pamphlets and all this type of shit um the coach said, quote, there must be 20 pieces every day, and maybe two of them are for me. The secretaries in the office said they're going to switch the name on the box from Karam to Heron.

Kentucky, North Carolina, and Duke haven't contacted him yet, but just about everyone else has, and they end up contacting him eventually. Yeah, he said that the coach was constantly after him to get the letters out of his office and take them home, but he just didn't. That was all it was. He was just like, I don't know. Who cares? That's all.

Whatever. Must be nice. Yeah. One scout said of him, quote, called him the toughest kid on any block. He said right now he lacks the ability to score from the outside, and part of that is a macho thing, the need to always take the ball to the basket. But he has a tremendous will to win. If Chris Herron had been a Jesuit priest in the 16th century in upstate New York, the Iroquois would have cut his heart out and eaten it for courage. Jesus, that's pretty fucking specific.

My God. That's a guy that just learned about the Jesuit and can't wait to tell you about it. He read a book like he's been reading it the last three days. And he's like, yeah, it's just like, you know, the Jesuit priest in the 16th century. And people are like, what the fuck are you talking about? You know, everybody knows about them, right? They ate hearts for courage. You guys never heard of this?

What the fuck? You fucking bums. You know what I'm talking about. a uniform let's go so uh he said that they got beat in a christmas tournament there uh he went in the locker room threw his all tournament team trophy into a trash can and uh he said you know you don't bring second place into his house. And he he said, years later, I ran into someone from Newport and they still remembered it. They remembered me as the punk kid who threw the trophy in the trash can. So he said there was a scuffle with some kids from Silver Lake after a high school hockey game in Fall River. And it got me suspended for school from for five days.

And it was all over the Fall River Herald News. Got me suspended for school for five days, and it was all over the Fall River Herald News. Really? So if you're in high school and you getting suspended from school is in the newspaper, that's weird. You're a big deal, too. You're a big deal, yeah. This happens to a lot of our subjects here. No one gave a shit if we got suspended. Our parents barely cared.

Never mind fucking. It didn't make the paper because it was expected. Yeah. He's an idiot. Of course he did that. Right. It's't make the paper because it was expected. Yeah. Yeah. He's an idiot. Of course he did that. Right. It's a jerk off.

Jesus Christ. Has he been finished for a sledgehammer yet? Jesus Christ. Has he taken the SAT? We're not telling him when the SATs are. Of course he got suspended. Yeah. No shit.

He said that he went to an AAU tournament in Vegas before his senior year, and all the biggest coaches in the country were there, and that's when they really saw him, and that's when it really stepped up the drive to get him to go to different colleges. He ends up finishing his career with a total, his high school career, of 2,073 points points which is the new record he broke his brother's record in his last game with derfy so last game oh it's a big deal right so him and his brother were pretty much exactly the same in scoring he's also named the boston globe and gatorade player of the year

wow all of high school in america and he was also named to the mcdonald's all america team so here is this this is 94 so he is blue chip as blue chip gets at this point and on top of that for uh basketball and especially a kid in boston he's also got the advantage of being a great white basketball player which in boston that's kind of a big deal because I don't know why they want to watch white guys play or care who the fuck they're watching play. As far as I'd like to watch people who can score well and win games. I don't give a shit. Fuck what color they are. I don't care if their heads come out of their asses.

I just want to see the fucking Knicks win a championship. That's it. I don't care. I don't give a fuck who's playing for them. I don't care. If they want to get 12 Chinese guys, bring them over here, run the table. I'm a huge fan of everybody. Jing Sao, you're my man.

I don't give a fuck, dude. I don't care. I'll root for anybody. Anybody. I don't care if they buy all the best players get get all of the warriors to go to new york i'll watch as long as they win good just the good ones so there you go so he is as blue chip as it gets green and is not kicking fuck yeah yeah never mind them jesus christ but uh let's just say right here grace this is grace right here i mean it

doesn't get a pretty great grace it's better than i ever had so i mean i gotta give him credit so uh but it'll it'll get worse here for him now he chooses to go to boston college of course he does the local school and he said he wanted to go there because it's close to home. And also his brother Michael went to Boston College, which is like you'd seem like you wouldn't want to go there for that reason. But he does. His brother Michael says, quote, at one point, my father voiced concern that Boston College might be too close to Fall River. His fear was that my friends would always be coming around. That was certainly a legitimate fear. But when I heard it, I flipped out.

This is Chris talking. My father and I verbally got into it a little bit, and I got all upset and stormed out of the house. He said that Michael ended up leaving Boston College, never finishing there. He didn't pan out the way he was supposed to pan out. It wasn't that he got out and declared for the draft he just quit no he just quit yeah he said that he never felt comfortable there he said quote i left because my basketball career was in jeopardy because of injuries i had and because the media pressure was becoming too stifling everything i did was in the paper it

seemed i was 18 19 years old going through that. I wasn't a senator, someone 35. I was still a baby. I want to set the record straight about those troubles. I do not have a police record for now. We'll talk about Michael a little more later. I lived life on the edge for a 17 year old. I definitely did, but I wasn't the only one doing it. Maybe I shouldn't have been drinking as much as I was for an 18 year old or fighting as much.

I shouldn't have put myself in those tough situations. I'm not going to tell Chris not to go out and have a good time. I'm not going to tell him not to enjoy his high school experience. What I can tell him is to not test fate. If you test fate, you're going to get burned. I tested fate a little too much. So that's his that's his advice there. Taylor Swift is soaring high. her every move captured in the news cycle and devoured by her devoted fans. She's broken billboard records and made Grammys history, not to mention becoming a billionaire in the process. But along the way, Taylor has had to wage war, first by taking on a very powerful, very famous manager, Scooter Braun, and then by going

up against the biggest live events company, Ticketmaster. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Thank you. and the NFL. Follow Business Wars wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. First brother. Don't test fate. I don't know. I mean. Are you going to get burned? No, that's not the way.

No. No, he made that one up. Yeah, he did. That's a heron right there. I give him credit because the word fuck was nowhere in there so i give him credit for that right off the bat he's he's did well at bc taught him something so uh he he says he goes to boston college chris chris does and he said he was not prepared at all for college like he didn't do shit in high school grades wise yeah but how can you really be prepared for college there's really no preparing you for that going from a place where the government pays for the school

to a place where now it's on you or a scholarship but either way your behavior here decides whether or not you stick around in high school no kid left behind then i gotta just fucking throw you out forever unless you're a real piece of shit 16 yeah unless you're 16 and they're like go away no but this though it's i don't know man this is a this is a weird one here they're they're gonna keep him around and they're gonna yeah i see what you're saying though so but he's not it's there some kids are more prepared than others though like this kid never even thought about like class or college or he didn't even know when the sats were right kids that know like when the sats are probably a little better prepared for college than probably right kids who don't know toward the campus already yeah that's what i mean it's not like one kid is like knows exactly what's going on the other kid knows

nothing but it's it's degrees of it i think he says quote i didn't have any structure i didn't have any study habits i didn't have any discipline to even get up in the morning never mind be a college student i've been sliding through school since the beginning and now i was in a real school and woefully unprepared to be there yeah um he said at first he was like sleeping on other people's couches and the coach asked him what he was doing and he said the coach said what's the problem chris why aren't you in your room and he said what's the problem i'm living in a 10 by 10 room with a six foot 10 canadian who has vampire posters on the wall who has bruce lee posters that's the problem you expect me to live with a room full of vampire pictures on the wall that's hard i guess

so he doesn't want to be there so he's boston call i mean this think about this he's been prepped his whole life for this boston college right here i mean this is everything first game okay he's in the game he's got 14 points in the first 21 minutes of this so he's doing well looks like this is going to be work out really well. And then I'll let him tell it. Quote, then I got hurt in my first game, falling on my left wrist in the second half and breaking it. So, fuck. It was a home game against Cal Poly. And when I went down, I knew it was serious.

I had scored 14 points by then and was having a good game. But after that, I knew I was fucked. Basketball was my only chance of getting me through boston college the only thing that gave me any focus at all without it it was just a matter of time quote then i found cocaine what that's the quote said without it was just a matter of time then i found cocaine so i set up that time he's hurt and he's bored and he doesn't have any basketball to be a central point of structure in his life. So he's like, I did find cocaine, though. So that was there.

So, yeah, he that's by the way, that is the he'll play 14 or 21 minutes at Boston College. He plays exactly. Yeah. One half of a game at Boston College. His wrist is broken. he's out for the rest of the year with the broken wrist totally fucked and then we'll find out what happens here he said i'd always been afraid of cocaine had never seen it in fall river i was afraid of it because of len bias and that scared the shit out of a lot of kids of like our generation sure was

seeing that because len bias was like i mean he was fucking beast he was he was i mean he was more of a surefire bet than michael jordan was a couple years before it i mean he was the there was no doubt he was going to be a monster and then he gets drafted if you don't know the lend but we're going to do a bonus on this one of these days by the way but um if you don't know the story he was drafted number one overall and then the night of the draft he overdosed on he had a cocaine overdose and died and he was like the horrifying part is that it obviously it's a waste of talent and yeah what could have been all that shit but they frame it as if yes that's the one and only time he ever did coke and it ruined everything

they frame it as he went to party he did one line of coke his heart exploded onto the walls all over the faces of the people around him right hole in his chest inside out it led bias yeah fell to the ground crumbled and then disintegrated like the wicked witch of the west that's what they made it sound like the prop when bias probably had a problem he was probably doing it once in a while and he had a heart problem anyway so yeah whatever he was a different kind of case but like you know it horrified everybody though i believed that he wow he did the coke for the one time and his heart exploded jesus christ like that's what i thought come when i was

you know nine they told us all so he thought the same thing he said uh because of that i wanted no part of cocaine then he says quote but there it was one night in a dorm room on offer by a guy and a girl do you want some the guy asked no come on he said try it i hesitated just put it on your gums the girl said then he says i was off and running. I never wanted to put cocaine down. Jesus, some people. Oh, that's what this is. This is great.

Some people love coke. They just love it. They get it and that's what I've been looking for. You know your vice when you get it. That's the thing. And when you find that thing, don't do it anymore. When you find the thing where you go, this is what I've been looking for never do that again and you'll be fine i really feel like this is what's going to control my life forever oh man this is going to completely destroy

me i love it so uh he said he never wanted to put it down everyone else would be coming home at one two in the morning shutting it down and i'd be making that one more call, knocking on someone's door, looking to keep it going. I couldn't stop. Did I know what I was doing? I didn't care. I would go to bed with my heart racing. Eventually it would slow down and I'd fall asleep over St. Patrick's day that year. I went to South Boston to see the parade and I saw the clock go around twice. I got back to my dorm, lay on the floor, my heart beating so fast, my shirt was going up and down i thought i was going to die but it was all about keeping the party going he went for 24 hours just fucking 24 hours hanging out on coke he said cocaine extended the night i never did it

without drinking first but eight or nine beers didn't do it for me i'd be swaying back and forth i wasn't a good drunk i I wasn't content with that. I needed more of a bite, more bark. Cocaine is a very revealing drug. There was no filter, at least not for me. I'd end up telling some stupid girl that I used to wet the bed as a kid. Crazy shit. You end up talking about the most intimate things in a room full of strangers.

You never know what was going to happen with cocaine, but for me it all started with alcohol. Yeah, coke makes you, people just say, talk mad shit on coke about, anytime you're talking to someone who's on coke, you're like, well, none of this matters. Nothing this person is saying is important. If that's a thing where you just start revealing intimate shit, that's a drug for people the most intimate thing they have to reveal is that they pissed the bed when they were four you know what i mean i don't want to reveal the shit i've

got to reveal no shit bad jesus christ no not at all i don't want to let that out yeah so he said the coach o'brien was always bringing me into his office they used to drug test us sporadically at boston college now while he was injured he failed two tests for marijuana already so he's failed two tests if you failed three you were ineligible for an entire year so of course he was very concerned with that he was also very concerned with my schoolwork or lack of it so one day he brought me into the office of chad chad glad chuck glad chuck chad glad chuck that sounds made up that sounds like a dan akroyd character in a movie that they made up how you doing now that's uh what's his

name check chuck fuck is his name now i lost his oh chet chet glad chuck nice to meet you from chet's chuck house it's a you know chuck wagon you know him chuck wagon chuck chuck chuck's a, you know. Chet's Chuck Wagon. You know him, Chuck Wagon. Chuck Chet House, you know him. Chuck Chet Chuck, you know him. You know the guy. So he was the Boston College athletic director.

So he's the guy in charge. The coach is in charge, but the AD is actually in charge. So he said that he was one of of those not no nonsense guys who look like he should have been in the military his kid was a freshman walking around the campus in polar shirt polo shirts with the collar up all prepped out and i already had two run-ins with him had already threatened him twice he already threatened the guy twice uh so me and glad chuck didn't have a whole lot of good karma between us glad chuck said we're going to try to help you and uh he said tell me the names of your classes and teachers i couldn't do it the only thing i knew was that one of my teachers was a nun holy shit what classes are you in i don't fucking know

who are your teachers and i think one of them's a nun i don't know you know that one she dresses like a like a nun you know you have eight classes sir you can only tell know that one? She dresses like a nun. You have eight classes, sir. You can only tell me that one might have been a nun? Yeah, that's what I got. He said, quote, the guy said, what's her name? He said, I don't know. I finally said, sister something. Sister Christian.

You know her? You know Sister Christian? You know her. She knows the time is right, you know. she knows the time is right you know she knows the price for flight sir she knows it so he said by this time the guy was tired of him uh he'd done everything he could nothing worked and he said i went out all night in boston clubs i'd been there for seven months but i knew more about mary ann, the bar near campus and Copperfield's near Fenway Park than I did about Boston College. I had crossed worlds. I wasn't hanging with students anymore. I was with people in Kenmore Square, people all over the city and cocaine was everywhere. I never had to pay for it. And if it was around, I was going to use it. That's just the way it was the way it had become i knew it was i knew it was all fucked up but this was my life going out and sleeping all day if i was powerless to stop it i had as if i was powerless

to stop it i had stopped going to class a long time ago i couldn't play basketball i was a total delinquent and i knew the gig was up so then uh he got called by the coach again and they said quote chris you're doing cocaine now because because he failed a drug test there. Oh, Jesus. So, yeah. So he's done at Boston College. Yeah, he's done. One game, 21 minutes, 14 points.

Total Boston College life. So he transfers to Fresno State. Really? Yes. Is that in California? Yeah, it actually is. If you can consider Fresno in California, yeah. Fresno State in Nebraska.

Yeah, it's Fresno State of North Dakota. You know where it is. Yeah, it's up by the border with Canada. So this was after Jerry Tarkanian had had his problems at UNLV and went to Fresno State to try to start over again. Really? So Tark recruited him. He's Tark's first guy that he brings in, is this guy. So, yeah, he said that he—

You've got a problem down there that looks really bad, and you're going to rebuild and pick one of the biggest fucking busts in college history? Well, yeah, but Fresno State isn't like a— Well, yeah, that's how Tark is, though. Tark wants the guys who have a bad reputation. He's like Al Davis is what he was doing, like looking for that. That's why UNLV was so good, though. UNLV, there's a lot of guys people didn't want to have anything to do with.

If you win, though, that's what it is. You've got nothing to lose there. If you win, you look like a fucking genius. If you lose, people just go, we knew this was going to happen. Exactly. That's why Fresno State's good for him, too. Tark played at Fresno State. He's from there.

This is like his hometown. So he was going home to rebuild, basically. Okay. It was the only place that would give him a chance. Chris said that it was a short trip from San Francisco in a little airplane, and the airport was in the middle of nowhere, by farmland i felt like i was on the moon so it's fresno fresno looks a lot different than boston to fresno if you might understand yeah he talks about the school when he got there he goes it just looked like industrial buildings like these plain buildings and he's like it didn't look like a the colleges in new york like when we went to New York and Sarah drove by Vassar College, she was like, that's not a school.

Are you fucking kidding me? It's these giant stone ornate, you know, 250 years old. So it's this crazy thing. And, like, it doesn't look like that. University of Chicago is fucking insane. I went there for my ex-wife's brother's wedding. I was blown away. I was like, this exists for education?

In Phoenix, this would be a fucking museum. A museum or like the oldest church in town or something like this. This is like East Coast. All the schools are these giant old institutions that are these brick buildings. Ivy growing all over them. Yeah. Out West, they're just trailers that you you know it's like a strip mall that they took all the home depot badging off of and now it's a college

that's what it looks like throw a copper dome on something and call it the auditorium yeah that's it yeah there you go get in there so uh he said that he uh he had will mcdon, who's the sports reporter for the Boston Globe, he's a very famous guy, he said that he told basically, they did a story on him of why he left Boston College. He failed three drug tests, the cocaine, missing classes, all that type of shit. And yeah, he said that Boston College was pissed off at them and all that sort. It was pissed off at him and they wanted to get even with him and shit. So, yeah, he ended up going there. He had to sit out a year because he transferred. If you transfer, you have to sit out a year.

That's how it works. So I guess that's college's way of trying to control you so you can't go somewhere else, God forbid. You'll have to sit out a year. The other point is that he's still got a limp wrist at the moment. That too. the other point is that he's still got a limp wrist at the moment that too well that yeah by the i think by the beginning of his sophomore year he was healthy again but he just wasn't allowed to play he said the team he was on uh was basically all the old the holdovers from the old coaching regime he said that most of the players on the team were gang members so he said literally

there was like four crips and four bloods and then like a couple other people uh but he was definitely the only white guy on the team he said but he said coke nose over here and old fuck the whitest nose in town over here he said that it was weird because they would get along on the team but like they'd score a basket and flash gang signs at each other on the same team where he was like i didn't get that like what that was a weird thing like why are you why is the center flashing a gang sign right to our small forward like what the hell is that about why'd the center just scream pyro at our point guard yeah he was very like confused by that shit because also that's very west coast

stuff like in the east coast it's different so he like, I never was around any of that before. I didn't know. You know, that's not like, you know, city kids in Boston. It's a different thing. He said that Lamar Odom went to visit on a recruiting visit at Fresno State. Really? Yeah. He said, quote, I picked him up at LAX in a rental car, and we got into an accident

before we even got out of the parking lot. Which is... That's hilarious. Now, October 1995, October 11th, 1995, there's an incident at Black Angus, of all places. Okay. The old Black Angus. He said we were at a restaurant a few miles from campus

called the Black Angus. Listen, he doesn't need that big of a description. We were at a shit quote-unquote steakhouse. That's what steakhouse it's gonna say and you're using the word restaurant pretty loosely like it's a yes it's a restaurant but it's like I love when people talk about like they'll be talking about like a something happened in a Burger King and they'll be like the gentleman came out of the restaurant it's like calm down it's not a restaurant I mean technically they sell food and you can eat it there, but that's not call it a restaurant. So, uh,

black Angus is, it's your server said, would you like fries with that from behind a counter? That's not a restaurant, not a restaurant. So he said he got in an argument with a wrestler, a bouncer got involved and quote, before I knew what was happening,

it spilled out into the parking lot and a SWAT team had shown up. So black Angus has a bouncer, Jesus bouncer at the Black Angus I don't know if this was not one of the chain Black Anguses or something maybe maybe it wasn't maybe not maybe because it's called the Black Angus maybe the Black Angus back then there was only one yeah this was the one this is where it all started everybody he said it was all over the media going out on the national wire because it was jerry tarkanian's team and all that sort of shit and that his assistant coach who was his son danny tarkanian was also there it was him and three players terence robber roberson james gray and chris heron and they were all detained at gunpoint by police there. Apparently, Chris is 20, and he'd been drinking in the establishment, even though he's underage.

Police respond here at 1 o'clock in the morning to the Black Angus. Who the hell is hanging out until 1 in the morning at a Black Angus? They are responding to, quote, a man with a handgun out front causing a disturbance. That's something something as police normally will respond to that yeah um so he said that uh this is danny tarkanian said that he got into an argument with two uh two african-american males heron said that uh he wasn't asked to show any identification to get into the bar and he only had a couple of beers yeah tarkanian says i'll just quote him this is from the newspaper tarkanian who was also at the bar at the time told police that the two

individuals who are african-american said to harren hey white boy you need to respect us tarkanian said he tried to calm harren down and told him to leave tarkanian said that he loaned harren his cellular phone to get a ride har Heron called Roberson, Gray, and two of their friends. Not getting a ride. He called backup. He called his teammates to come back him up. Corey Wilson and Corey Chandler are the two of their friends. The four arrived about 45 minutes later, and Tarkanian said he thought Heron had left when a bouncer told him a guy in a hat outside wants to see you, who was Heron.

He said, quote, two other guys started yelling at Chris. I grabbed him and told him to get out of here. But then the two guys kept antagonizing. I told the bouncers that I got Chris and the other guys in the car and then the police came up. That's the story. That's the official silver haired version of the story. But somebody brought a gun. Well, that's the thing. They said the official silver haired version of the story. But somebody brought a gun. Well, that's the thing.

They said they thought that somebody had a gun. Roberson, who was one of the players, he said that Wilson had his hands in the front of his pants. That's Corey Wilson, one of his friends. He said he had his hands in the front of his pants. He said that people there then subsequently the police thought that he had a handgun because of that. Then subsequently, the police thought that he had a handgun because of that. So Chris says, quote, we were in our car just ready to leave when all of a sudden, boom, boom, boom, cops everywhere. They had guns.

I mean, sawed off shotguns, all that kind of stuff. They made us get on our knees. They didn't have sawed off shotguns. They just had shotguns. Yeah, I was going to say the cops don't saw shotguns off probably. You can get stopped by the. Cops showed up with fucking pistols with etched with the numbers etched off yeah it was not cereal scratched off that shit was crazy so the crazy part here is that tarkanian was found by police to be not fit to drive so they just gave him a

ride home the coach so there's a lot of yeah there's a lot of like uh there's a lot of privilege well coach fucking tarkani sports privileges i'm fucking if he was a black coach on this team too they would have done the same thing yeah it's it's you know it's just you you're in fresno which has nothing except this so you know that's what it is it's just a matter of is the most popular person from here ever yeah oh that's what i mean he came back he walks on water right now like they're not going to arrest his son they just give him a ride home the police said they didn't give him any special treatment they just gave him a ride home because you know why not we're nice guys um so the black angus manager said that it's the restaurant's policy not to allow

people into the bar that are under 21 after 9 PM. And he doesn't know what happened, but he's conducting his own investigation into this disturbance. This is the black Angus manager. He's going to get to the bottom of this. The players and the coach were all released with no chart. No one, no charges are filed here at all,

but he is, he is on athletic is uh uh on athletic probation after this incident they place him on probation and he's referred to the assistance program for students to like you know some counseling program he's got to take now so 96 97 he actually plays for fresno state plays in 32 games averages 17 and a half a game 2.3 rebounds 4.6 assists still got it it's pretty fucking good yeah that's not bad 97 98 there's rumors that he's giving tips to gamblers oh not only rumors there are articles in the newspaper about oh shit and uh we'll talk about that because he he uh he has a legal response to that.

He said, quote, this is his version, quote, all that stuff got blown up into something it never was. There were so many rumors. People were saying my phone was tapped. I had reporters outside my apartment. There had always been cameras and sports writers at practice. Now there was a whole other level of reporters every day. Then one day I was called to the president's office and four FBI agents were there in their dark suits and narrow ties. We want we know, you know, things one of them said, we want to help you. Another one said, I paused and said, quote, I want a lawyer. Why did I say that? I knew it from TV and movies. I knew I shouldn't be in a room with four FBI

agents without someone looking out for my best interests. I never heard from those four agents again. So that's how that worked. Um, something bigger for him pops up and then that'll come back later. The alleged point shaving thing. So November, 1997, he, uh,

comes out and has a press conference. There's an announcement saying that he is leaving the Fresno state basketball team to go to rehab. He says that he has quote slipped up in his fight against substance abuse. And, uh, by the way, he's,

I don't think he's passed a drug test since he's been at Fresno state. They just ignore it. Like he, they said he, he said the truth was I had failed innumerable drug tests at Fresno. They were constantly testing me. That's what he said. He's always failing them.

He said, I was always in some kind of program. Everybody in the athletic department was aware of it. I went to an outpatient treatment center at Fresno called Cedar Vista. I went to counselors. I went to therapists. The people at Fresno State tried to help me maybe too much. No, they tried to help you while keeping you on the court because it was for them. That's a silver thing to do is what that is.

Well, the kid's got a problem. Well, get him in an outpatient thing because he's got practice at two. That's what that is. That's bullshit. Just get his points per game. Get him help. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. I mean, it's nice to want to keep it low key so the whole national media doesn't crawl up his ass on top of it.

But I don't think that's what it was about. He says that they hired people. One day a pastor knocked on the door and said he wanted to talk. Former players talked to me. One counselor was great. I saw him on and off for two and a half years. So the press conference was right before Thanksgiving. And he said that his mom and his grandfather had flown out for the game because it was a game against UMass.

So, you know, fly on out. And he said, quote, I've battled a personal problem for the past four years. It's a winnable problem, but I've had a setback. So I'm stepping away from basketball from the basketball program at Fresno State for a few weeks. I hope to rejoin them soon. Blah, blah, blah. So the school is thrilled with it they said quote it takes quite a bit of courage for this young man to let people know he's stepping down for this period uh for this reason he should be commended for that he's not afraid to admit that something has happened and he wants to work through it okay fine very very supportive here he said he was in utah at the rehab for 23 days he said i was one of the youngest people there and uh you know he said he was in Utah at the rehab for 23 days. He said, I was one of the youngest people there. And,

uh, you know, he said it was basically boring. Uh, they would shake their heads and say, what's wrong with you? Cause these were people, he said that they'd like lost their homes and families and jobs.

And they're like people with lifetime problems. And you've got a problem for four years and you can't shake it. You little fuck. We're looking at him going, you got the world by the balls and what are you doing? Right. Just stop stupid. I got a day job, four kids and you can't shake it you little fuck we're looking at him going you got the world by the balls and what are you doing right just stop stupid i got a day job four kids and a wife i fucking hate that's why i do it i drank because i'm miserable that's why i drank what's your you're doing it because you're having fun yeah too much fun so uh yeah he says that um uh he said they keep this is about the point shaving.

At the same time, he said they keep saying the investigation is picking up steam. He says, I want to know when is the steamboat going to pull out? And then he says, don't sing it, bring it. That's what he tells the reporters. So if there's evidence, bring it out. Charge me with something. But otherwise, fuck you. That year, he averages 15.6 points a game and 4.8 assists a game

not bad uh may 16th 1998 he's got some legal troubles he's uh he faces an arrest warrant for failing to appear in traffic court last month he pleads guilty to two violations and agrees to pay a hundred dollar fine big deal um It was a traffic violation from December 1995. He's cited for running a stop sign and driving an unregistered vehicle. Three years old fucking fines and he didn't, what? Right, what are you doing? Takes three years to take care of that? Yeah, apparently so.

So things are, you know, kind of a little bit precarious for him at this point not solid ground so what's the best thing he should do right now what do you think is back home well no no go to another rule what's up drop out go back home no you got to get married now jimmy that's the time you get married this is he's gonna who the fuck's he gonna marry heather he's marrying heather she moved to fresno with him he's been talking to her back and forth and he decides that he needs heather uh oh also she's pregnant as well so it's a good time to it's a good time to do that the he'll have the child will be born the following march and uh it's a son yeah it's a son j Jimmy. Chris Jr. Chris Jr. Motherfucker.

You knew it was coming. He just in this mess. He could not name his kid Jr. He just there's no way it wasn't going to happen. As bad as things are going right now. I don't understand how he loves himself so much. Chris Jr. Yep.

They got married at a church in Somerset, Massachusetts, across from Fall River. Heather grew up there. He said they invited 150 people to the reception, and 300 showed up. Wow. So, big party. He said the bar eventually ran out of beer. Then we went to the Coliseum, and they ran out of beer, too. So, they really...

We invited 150, and 300 people found out we have Coke. Yeah, found out we have Coke. And 300 Bostonians can literally drink any place out of beer. That's just going to happen. He said we were supposed to go to Cape Cod the next day for our honeymoon to a ritzy resort called the Chatham Bars Inn. But not only did we not know what Chatham Bars Inn was, we didn't know the way to the Cape. We were two kids with no clue i had to call my father and ask him how to get to the cape even though it was only an hour away what the fuck jump on the highway dipshit yeah so he said though at this point things are

completely different she moves back to fresno with him he says he dabbles with painkillers as we'll talk about but things calm down totally. He doesn't go out all night and do coke and do all that shit. He said, basically, once he went out, he couldn't stop. He said, once I drank, there was a 90% chance I'd do cocaine. And once I started on coke, it was going to get ugly.

Oh, my God. He's one of those guys. He said, it was also the summer we discovered pain pills. This is the team, he said. Vicodin, Percocet. We're always going to hospital emergency rooms on the ride to L.A. trying to get some pills. We told them anything, toothache, any kind of ache. Sometimes we'd hit three or four on the ride to get pills.

Anything to get fucked up out of our heads. Kevin, one of the guys, was a master of getting drugs this way. He looked about 16, his sweet choir boy face. No one could say no to him. He said Percocet was good, he liked that. He said he was off cocaine, which was a depressive effect for him, being off the cocaine, because you're used to that. Yeah, you're used to that levels in your brain. He said, we lived in a condo, and by my standards, it was very normal. We even adopted a dog, a black lab named Miles. Heather knew that I went out once in a while and did some things I shouldn't be doing. She knew that after I drank, I wanted to do cocaine. She knew that I got out of control sometimes.

She had witnessed that, but she had no idea the extent of my addiction. I never allowed her to see that back then, never wanted to live that life around her. So that year year it was only an occasional i was only an occasional user i hadn't developed an everyday habit i didn't have the money for it and i rarely went out so yeah senior year it all calms down there's articles in the paper about here's one that says quote yesterday heron who has a lamaze class monday appeared reborn he described himself as a quote nice guy and praise the UH fans as being the best in the Western athletic conference,

some other school. So he said that now they're saying that he's, uh, he's a calm now. He's not the same player on the floor. He doesn't talk shit. He doesn't have the same baby on the way. Got a baby.

Yeah. He's like, I'm a dad. I got to keep it down. He says, I run my mouth too much sometimes. I point at the crowd to get them going. That's what the fun of the game is for.

That's why they're there, and that's why I'm here. But he needs to chill out a little bit, he said. During his senior season, there's a game against Duke during the Great Alaska Shootout Tournament, and Duke's ranked number one at the time. And Fresno loses the game 93-82, but it's nationally televised and he scores 29 points. That's a big deal. That's a big deal.

He said they told him, this is what he told a reporter, he said that he imagines the NBA as a haven. He said, quote, I'd lie on my back in a hotel all day switching channels with the remote and play at night. Simple. Simple. Simple. That's all. He'll be fine. That's all there is to it.

That's where I'm going. That's where I'm going. His last season here, 11.4 points a game, 1.6 rebounds, 7.2 assists. He had a little ankle injury, like nagging throughout the season, too. So at that point, the NBA draft comes around. And he doesn't know if he's going to be drafted or not because based on his stats he's not a real it's not great he's not well i'm going to say something that might be you know whatever but i think it's true at the end of this year number one overall in the draft jimmy 1999 nba draft kobe bryant elton brand bryant

was 97 i think 96 kobe. Kobe Bryant was that early? Yeah, a little Stevie franchise, number two. Oh, shit. We'll talk about that. Steve Francis, Baron Davis, Lamar Odom, Wally Zerbiak, Rip Hamilton, Sean Marion, number nine overall. Yeah. Ron Artest, who will be a future episode. He's on there, too, that year.

Carol Link goes on there. A lot of guys. Finally, number 33 overall overall fourth pick of the second round chris is chosen by the denver nuggets they pick him up each denver nuggets pick him so they do pick him i don't know why honestly like i can't denver had a lot of holes to fill back then yeah i can see that yeah i just and also back then there were a lot of teams that need that really had because there was a lot of older guys that were going to be retiring in the next couple years there was a lot of a lot of teams needed dudes i feel like

whoever was looking at him whenever teams are deciding when they're looking at him they're going i mean he runs the floor okay yeah he's good he's got one good shot yeah i don't like this i don't like that and then at the end they go he's white like literally and that's not a nba executives who are retired now will tell you that that's not a secret at all nba teams tried to get some white guys on the teams that was a fact of the fucking matter if you could if you had two guys one was a little bit better but he was black you're taking the white guy because people are going to like that better. People want to buy the white guy's jersey. That's what it is.

It's been going on since the beginning of fucking time in basketball. Now I don't know if it's the same as much anymore, but I'm not sure. I think they just want the best fucking player now. Yeah, but back then they were looking at a different thing. Because we'll see here in a minute, like when he goes somewhere, there's a reason why he goes there. You know, that might still be a thing because they are recruiting heavy in Europe for dudes from Greece, shit like that. A lot of those guys, too, are 6'10 and can shoot threes. So that's why they play a different style that the NBA has evolved into.

And that's what they've been playing their whole lives so a lot of the european shit's because of that anyway uh they said that on draft night he said that they drove down the street in his light blue jeep cherokee complete with a police escort there was a big poster on the wall that had my face against the backdrop of some bridge it was like a scene out of some hollywood movie local boy makes good and the whole town is they have a fucking parade for him essentially for getting drafted denver and no no and in austin yeah fall river there at home his hometown this this this has real like shades of tommy morrison to me right now yeah you know what i mean uh he's gonna get aids yeah he's

watch out chris he's lucky he didn honestly, when you talk about what he did. The next morning, he said they were on a plane to Denver where they were being introduced as the new nugget there. He says that he thought of himself as a like he said, quote, I just wanted to be like a regular guy. So I hung out and partied and drank with my homies. I didn't want to be anybody famous. That's what he said. I didn't want to be this important. That's what he said. I didn't want to be this important person. So that's what he said.

Going here, though, now he knows that he's got to do better and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He said, people think that's because I went to rehab. That's some kind of bad thing. What's bad about that? I think it's a good thing. If it works, yeah, it's great. So in Denver, he said that when he got there, he knew right away there's not going to be any more drinking for him there. Like, you can't party with this crew and get by.

He said Denver was full of quality guys, veterans like George McCloud, Popeye Jones, Antonio McDyess, and Roy Rogers. Those are men, you know? You can't get drunk with Antonio McDyess. That guy is a stoner drinker. Yeah, but if you go out and score 20 you can but if you're the new kid who's kind of a fuck up anyway yeah they're gonna tell you hey you better be able to score 20 before you worry about drinking motherfuckers that's how they are he said that they couldn't have been better to him he said chauncey billups took him to his house and

gave him some of his suits to have because he didn't have anything. He said Popeye Jones took me shopping. He said that he was wearing like jeans and sneakers and backwards hats and shit and that that wasn't going to fly in the NBA. Right. Those guys were dressing. Yeah, those guys were dressing. So he said that, you know, they're all wearing Prada shoes and shit and he's got Chuck Taylors on.

He said McDyess had a platinum bracelet filled with diamonds that he knew I liked. And the next year, when I was in Boston, he'll be in Boston next year, he came into the locker room before the Nuggets were ready to play the Celtics. I have something for you, he said, giving me an envelope. And it was the bracelet. What? That's the type of guy McDyess is right there. Wow. That's a good dude.

He said, which I would later hock, of course. Oh, Jesus Christ, no. Yep. Yep, yep. right there that's a good dude uh he said which i would later hawk of course oh jesus christ no yep yep yep he that's fucked that's how fucked he was he's think about that he's pawning a jewelry that antonio mcdice gave yeah that's probably was very expensive i'm sure to be purchased yeah he said one of his first games they were playing the houston rockets and vernon maxwell was guarding him now if you haven't listened to the vernon maxwell episode go back after this is done and listen to the vernon maxwell episode because it's bonkers it's wild he's a problem you'll understand about this he said vernon maxwell was guarding me when i checked into the game my nerves almost jumping through my skin we had a ball out of bounds and the play was for me to come off a screen.

Listen to me, Maxwell said. There's two seconds on the shot clock. I'm not going to chase you, so just go off that screen and knock that jumper down. Like he's on the other team. He's like, listen, you do that, you're going to be okay. So I come off the screen, catch the ball, and hurriedly throw up a shot.

Air ball. And there's Maxwell laughing at me and pointing at the clock, which said there was 23 seconds left. He didn't look at the clock. He just believed Vernon Maxwell because he knew he was nervous. Listen to me. There's two seconds left. Listen, just throw it up.

I won't even fuck with you. I'll let you have it. He chucks it up. They're like, what are you doing idiot there's 23 seconds left so uh vernon told me there's two left vernon's a jerk so the team finishes 35 and 47 that year chris plays in 45 games 13.3 minutes per game 3.1 points a game one point two rebounds two point five assists oh no not playing much here he makes three hundred one thousand eight hundred seventy five dollars for that oh that's a great payday for that shit fine it's a fine year um also at

the end of the season there's a lawsuit here chris and another player filed a $36 million libel lawsuit here against a newspaper for reporting the points shaving allegations. Oh, so they do that. He said it damaged their reputations and hurt their chances of playing pro basketball. The article reported on a federal investigation into the point shaving allegations that chronicled Heron and Young's purported involvement with local gamblers. By the way, he puts this whole thing as like he goes, this is what they would say was was helping gamblers. He goes, I go in to a store. I'm talking to a guy that works there, the guy that owns a store. And he goes, hey, you guys going to do tonight against, you know, Arizona State? And I go, yeah, not too good probably.

This guy's hurt and whatever. So we'll try our best though. And he goes, if that guy uses that information to gamble with, he goes, I can't have a conversation with people. He goes, they didn't come to me looking for gambling information. If I talk to people about the team, that's not helping gamblers. That wasn't what I was doing, which is probably true. I don't know if they were giving him money. But the problem is when you have the stink of cocaine on you,

when you got that Coke stink, basically they think that you will do anything for Coke, including, you know, go into a little debt and then get out of it with some information, which is what they've, the mafia did that for so fucking long. Players that were on drugs that they knew were players that were gamblers they get into gambling debt that they can't pay and you go well i know how you could pay it you can win the game 93 87 like i bet and uh yeah guess what you're wiped clean that's what they would do though that's that you gotta hook a guy so uh the judge ends up though uh dismissing the lawsuit after ruling that young and harren submitted no evidence whatsoever and were unlikely to win at trial they just came and said they said we did

things and we didn't do them and the judge was like where's your evidence he's like we're telling you it now like yeah that's not how it works so i got a game tomorrow i can't present what the fuck man i can't do it so the witnesses, I guess they had witnesses that were being asked about what Heron did, who he talked to, and all this sort of thing. Now, also, the Los Angeles Times, now, that all happened a couple years ago when it was going on. Now it's 2000, and the Los Angeles Times is seeking to garnish $16,000 in wages from Chris Herron from the Denver Nuggets. And also another player. Also, the Fresno County supervisor court judge dismissed the libel lawsuit and issued an order requiring requiring them to reimburse the newspaper for $14,000 in legal fees plus interest. Oh, you can't do that chris so he said they said quote

harron has known that he owes us this money and he owes it to us because we won the lawsuit that he shouldn't have ever brought that's what the newspaper's vice president said oh boy so uh after his first season in denver uh they said they had a hard time adjusting they had a good life there him and heather and the baby now um they had a place eight minutes away from the arena it was all good but she was homesick she missed her family and if you have a newborn baby you know a young baby in a strange place away from your family that's kind of tough so um they said that they ended up getting back going back home for to live in the offseason. He said, quote, in retrospect, it was a big mistake.

Yeah. Yeah. I told you that already. Yep. He said he should have seen Denver as a new home. The mature thing to do would have been to stay there that summer, work out every day at the practice facility, treat the NBA like a year-round job like it should be.

If I had figured that out and worked hard and watched a lot of film, gotten in great shape, done all those things, I might have had a 10-year career. Instead, I felt like a kid who couldn't wait for summer vacation. So they went back there. He said, when I was in the NBA, I was able to make nearly a half a million dollars in my second year. I was married to the love of my life,

and if you looked at me that summer with my own basketball camp, driving around in my new black Ford Explorer, money in my pocket. You would have thought I had the perfect life. You would have thought wrong. Okay. October 16th, 2000, he's traded by Denver with Brian Stith for Calbert Chaney and Robert Pack to the Boston Celtics. Really? Yeah.

So it's a bottom-level garbage trade, basically. Contract years. Garbage trade used to be good when he was at the Bullets. He was great when he was in college. Shit, in Indiana, he was the man. So in October 2000, they had introduced him at a press conference, and it was a big deal because apparently Boston doesn't really look for New England guys on their team. But there's a thing they're talking about where the executives were literally

talking and they go, well, that kid's not bad. And one of them went, he's got a shamrock tattoo on his forearm. We should really pick him up. I swear to God. That's what they were saying to each other. You know, we got those on our jerseys. He fits. If he's going to be the 12th man, they were like, I

think our fans are probably going to like that. He can play three minutes a game and he'll still sell more jerseys than most of our team. Probably true. That's the way it is. And that's how they look at it. Especially if he comes in there and is even a little bit scrappy. Dive for a loose ball once and they'll be like, oh, that Heron kid. Oh, boy.

Oh, for Christ. He's got the shamrock. He's diving all over the place. He's a fucking animal. I love that guy. He's a fucking animal. I love that guy. He's a fucking animal. If Heron dies for two loose balls, $3 Sam Adams. God, Jesus, Heron, he's a fucking king.

He's a king, I tell you. He'd be the most popular guy in Boston. So at one point, this is the Kenny Anderson, Antoine Walker, Paul Pierce, Rick Pitino coached Boston Celtics. Speaking of Piru. There you go. Exactly. Boston goes 36 and 46 this year. At one point, he gets the opportunity to start at point guard.

But the problem is he's missing something he needs to start at point guard. Oxycodone. Oh, okay. That was a good time. I thought maybe he sold his shoes for drugs. Nope. He needed it so much he called his dealer and told him to drive right up to the player's entrance at the garden. Oh, my God.

He said after Paul Pierce and Antoine Walker left the locker room to warm up, he ran outside in celtics gear and waited in the rain for five minutes for his dealer to come drop his shit off to him wow jesus christ he said he took his shit real quick and then got on this floor and played so um then at the midway through the season he has a season-ending injury because shack fell on top of him. Oh, that'll do it. Literally, he was crushed by a falling Shaq. Right. And, yeah. So he ends up 25 games, 16.3 minutes, 3.3 points a game, 2.2 assists. And lucky to be alive.

And lucky to not have broken, snapped-off legs. Right. He does make $316,969. So there's that. Does make $316,969. So there's that. He apparently goes to a summer league here with Boston, and we'll talk about that in a minute.

But he also goes to Italy to play. So there's a couple interesting things. He'll never play in the NBA again. It's over. A regular season game. Shaq ruling this career. 70 games, 3.2 points a game. That's it.

Done. Shaq literally crushed him yep less than 700 grand so that's i mean that's a lot of money i would love to get 700 grand but if you're 22 and you're now retired and that's all the money you made that's a problem it's not gonna last it's not gonna last for 60 years i don't think you got a life to live now yeah that's that's not going to work so 2001 he plays in italy for uh fortitudo palacanestro bologna hell yeah 103 commonly known a bologna team if he plays for bologna he plays for bologna uh commonly known as fortitudo bologna and uh yes he plays there Here's what he says. Quote, it was January 2002. Five months earlier, Heather and I had gone to Italy where the plan was for me to play for a team in Bologna for $50,000 a month.

The Celtics had made no offer to bring me back, and this was real money, a great opportunity. At least that's what my agents were telling me. Ex-NBA players are in demand in Europe, and basketball keeps getting bigger and bigger overseas. He says there was only one problem. I arrived in Bologna without any drugs. That's not a problem, Chris. The bag in which I had my pills hadn't arrived yet. Then we landed.

I was met by a guy from the team. Come on, he said, we're going to practice. So with Heather and Chris going off to a hotel hotel he hands me keys to an alfa romeo i jump in the car and start driving around bologna for the next two hours in search of drugs he said but where i didn't speak any italian i had no idea where i was going but i discovered that something would be true in all places i went to in all places i went to play around the world you You want drugs? Go to the train station. Go to the bus station. You'll find drugs

or they'll find you. Wow. In an Alfa Romeo, you'll find drugs. Someone will imagine you need drugs if you show up at the train station

driving a nice car. Right. Like, you're not going on the train. He said, quote, I found this gypsy-looking dude at the train station. He didn't speak English.

We were stuck in some bad scene from a bad movie, yet drugs have become the universal language. He sold me a bag of heroin powder for $200, something to last a day or two, and then gave me advice. Quote, dark skin men, he said in broken English, dark skin men. A couple of days later, the powder gone. I go back to the train station and find these two nigerian looking guys how do you know they're nigerian looking how do you pick that out as a white guy from boston you know as a white guy from boston i know the difference between a nigerian and a kenyan i'm just telling you i could tell you're from fucking ghana i'm like no you're

not nigerian pal you're fucking got ghana. I don't even know what they would be. I think it's Ghanese. Ghanese. There you go. You're a Ghanaite. That's all I know. You got gonorrhea, and I'm not going near you. I'm looking for a Nigerian.

I know you're a gone American. I know what you are. I know what's happening. So he says, Nigerian-looking guys in their mid-20s who look a little shady. They look at me. I look at them. We go back and forth again. They don't speak English.

Eventually we work it out. This is fucking crazy. I'm going to do an in their own words on this because this is this is just fucking phenomenal. I just love it so much in their own words. Quote one of the guys had a string around his tooth. He unravels the string and starts to pull on it and six little balloons of heroin come out of his stomach i thought it was a great sight that's it that's the what a trick holy shit do it again what is there one in your ass i can pull too

that is my card holy shit you're incredible how'd you know that is the one i signed oh man beautiful oh look it's the sucking ace of clubs look at you holy shit he pulled a string that was wrapped around his tooth and six balloons of heroin out of his stomach and he had like a like a like a skimmer line going and down his throat where he had just caught a bunch of trout. He pulled them out. So he said that snorting heroin was no different than taking Oxycontin. It's the same junk, the same stuff. The misconception is that it's different, that somehow heroin is worse because the stigma is worse.

It's not. It's the same. The only difference, when you start start snorting heroin you're one step closer to putting it in your arm of course of course you are so imagine this guy wandering around bologna sitting around fucking rap fucking whacked out on heroin not speaking the language this is a disaster this is a fucking disaster. Snorting heroin. Snorting it up, man. Yeah.

So there's one particular time that he's saying he's buys. He bought some heroin down at the bus station this time. He said he went to a park and he was just like zonked out. If you like bubbles on the wire when you're just sitting there, drool string hanging down from him. One of those deals, you know, doing the lean. You're still green. Yeah, still green, man. I'm going to get you brown. So he's doing all that, and he's sitting there,

and he's like, has no idea what's going on. People are speaking Italian around him. He doesn't know what it is. And all of a sudden, there is a noise he understands, and it's dogs barking in the distance. And coming up to him is Bobby Colorado, animal trainer from Frederredericksburg texas and he says how is it you come to arrive here what the fuck what the fuck is wrong with you oh i come over here with my dogs get a a nice vacation. I come back to the homeland, you know what I mean? I come back, this is where my ancestors are from.

I didn't expect to see some fucking, some fucking stunad bum from Fall River sitting here with a fucking heroin all over you. Look at you, you're a goddamn mess. What the hell is that on your forearm? One nostril's got white powder, the other one's got brown powder. You're a fucking disaster. Hold on, what's that tied around your tooth? What do you got there christ's what'd you think it was a neat trick get that out of your stomach what's wrong with you jesus christ i would tell you to get a fucking dog well you'd forget about it and leave it somewhere you know what i'm here

to tell you don't get any dogs that's what i'm here to tell you yeah if you have any i'll take them from you how's that i'll take care of them because you are a fucking bum i gotta go this is ridiculous poof and in a poof of marinara and dog shit yeah he's gone and chris's he thought he was really high we'll put it that way he's like wow i'm not gonna snort the stuff they pull out of their ass that's what i'm saying so he said uh he was trying to get back with the celtics and the celtics basically offered him he comes back but they offer him a deal where it's not guaranteed so he can be cut or waived at any time they had guards that they had just picked in the first round so he ends up getting waived he said that you know his quote is quote i had more important things to worry about than the celtics namely to get another job overseas and just as important to keep Heather from finding out about the state of our finances.

She doesn't know we're broke. Nope. He said that he had a Payne Weber account, which is like a money management savings account deal. He said, which I've been writing rating for a while sometimes to the tune of fifteen thousand dollars a month for drugs uh and if she ever saw that she'd freak and she'd know something was really wrong well no shit he said every morning i go to a 7-eleven convenience store that had an atm and i take out two or three hundred dollars jesus that adds up fast there had been eighty five thousand dollars in the account when I started tapping it.

There was something called hit receipt that told you what your balance was. Most days I wouldn't hit it. I was afraid to hit it. I didn't want to know because I was always going down to $65,000 and then to $45,000. I was making frequent withdrawals and never putting anything in. In the beginning, I conned myself. $45,000 is all right. I'll be putting money back in soon. Oops, fuck, now 000 oh my god now it's 20 and what's heather gonna do

when she finds out and now it's fall and i don't have a job rosters are filling up overseas heather's about to give birth because she's pregnant again by the way and what am i going to do this is fucking this is like the second half of goodfellas you know what i mean this is like he's got helicopters and tomato sauce he's got all sorts of problem it's a lot he said so every day my game was to find the mailman before he came to my house this is like a kid trying to hide his report card right he's gonna throw out the fucking statements yep he said every i would drive around the neighborhood looking for him anything Anything to keep that Payne Weber statement from coming to the house. That was the most important part of my day.

Find that mailman. Try to keep the lie going. This went on for three months. Holy shit. He said one morning in a drug house in Fall River as I was about to snort heroin. He said that somebody said to him, quote, why don't you shoot it he said i'm afraid of the needle so she took my arm and stuck the needle in oh my god that's what i mean yeah i got you that's why i said he's lucky he doesn't have something uh he said i went back to my house

i went back to that house every morning for a month jesus christ shooting heroin was a totally different feeling a totally different high for one thing it entered your bloodstream in three seconds not 30 seconds it took if you snorted it all right but how who can wait 30 seconds to be 27 second savings i mean yeah you look at it that way over the course of a lifetime you're gonna save years you know what i mean it's gonna add years to your life if you think about it. Wow. He said the needle had so much power.

It instantly took away all of the sickness as if the needle had more power than the sickness. And I chased it, chased the rush, chased the high. There weren't very many hours I was straight. But once you do the needle, you cross the line. It's a scary day. You know you're crossing the line, but it's not like there's a rational thought going on you hate yourself every time you use you're taking a chance of killing yourself but you do it anyway oh my god that is a bad carousel to be on right there because there's only so many times you can put that needle in there and you need a fix constantly there's only so many square inches of body.

It's only so much crazy. Only so your body doesn't heal as fast. Eventually, no, it's just a downward spiral. And eventually you're fucked. It's fucking terrible. And you can't get the drugs inside you. You can't get them inside you. And then they don't work as well. So you need more.

And you got a big problem. 2002, he goes and plays in Turkey. OK, for Galatasaray SK. Jesus Christ. That sounds good. He said, there at the hotel, there was a bellboy in his mid-20s who spoke a little English. I started working this kid, even though the language barrier. One day, he brought me some marijuana. I looked at it and shook my head.

His eyes got a little wide. The next day, he came back with hashish no i said his eyes got wider then he came back little pigs yeah it's i mean it's this one's just right well no it's gonna be four then he came back with cocaine no cocaine i said shaking almost you're getting warmer pal getting warmer now his eyes were open so wide they were bugging out of his head. He pointed to his arm. Yes, I said, nodding. That's my porridge. There you go.

That one. Perfect temperature. Look at that. Just right. He said, soon I was back to snorting heroin and my habit was back. He ends up playing for the Beijing Ducks at one point. Really? The mighty Beijing Ducks. Yeah. of my habit was back uh he ends up playing for the beijing ducks at one point really the mighty beijing ducks yeah he scored 63 points in a game for them one year that year though that's not bad

63 63 puts up for the chinese league here so 2003 he actually is on a dallas maverick summer league team yeah and uh but they do not offer him a contract at the end of the summer. Right. So he goes to play for the Jing Su Dragons in the Chinese League. Okay. And that's there. Then he plays for Energy Braunschweig in Germany. Braunschweig.

Yeah. Their home arena is Volkswagen Holley. Really? Yeah. H-O-L-L-E-Y? H-A-L-L-E-Y. H-O-L-L-E-Y? H-A-L-L-E-Y. H-A-L-L-E. Holl?

Holl. Interesting. It's probably Holley. Volkswagen Holley it probably is. Probably. That's what it translates to. Yeah, I mean, I think it translates to probably Volkswagen place.

Probably, yeah. Late 2004, he signs with, God, so many of our fuck-ups have done this, the Dakota Wizards. It seems like even if you can't play basketball if you just get arrested a bunch the dakota wizards will take you in or you have a drug problem they want you uh december 2004 though he's released by the wizards because he's his ankles fucked up the whole time he never really gets to play for them so that's the way it works december 9th 2004 he is found at a drive-thru of the Dunkin' Donuts in Portsmouth, Rhode Island.

Yeah. He is passed out unconscious in his vehicle here. Police say they found 18 packets containing heroin residue and paraphernalia in the car. Residue, but no heroin. No, well, no, just the residue. They said, no hurt no heroin no well no just a residue they said quote this is uh one of the officers quote i had to break his car window just to get him out once he regained consciousness the first thing he asked was how his window got broken he was completely out of it then i saw the blue packets on the floor in front of him on his lap and realized

there was uh there were drugs uh he said that he apparently had a seizure while he was waiting on the Dunkin' Donuts drive-thru line. Heron told the Herald Fall News that he didn't have a seizure. He says, this wasn't my fault. Quote, some lady was in reverse and she hit my car. My head smashed into the windshield and I went unconscious. I was in a car accident. I wasn't just in a parking lot passed out in my car. You were in the drive-thru i was in a car accident i wasn't just in a parking lot passed out in my car you're in the drive-thru passed out in your car that's worse

he said uh how hard would somebody have to reverse to bash your face into the windshield in a drive-thru where'd she come from across the street jesus christ i'm gonna back into that drive-thru also he because he's arrested for all sorts of shit including refusing to take a drug test or a breathalyzer yeah and he says i don't know what they're talking about i never did that that's what he said he didn't he did not deny that the packets containing heroin heroin residue were his but he claims there were seven not 18 great tomato tomato chief what are we talking about here he said point seven's too many that's a lot yeah he said i don't deny that there has been an issue for me i've struggled with this a

long time i know i have a problem but i haven't touched the stuff in months months now uh months the uh he uh he's charged with uh let's see driving while intoxicated driving while in possession of a controlled substance possession of a controlled substance, possession of a controlled substance, driving after his license has been revoked and refusal to submit to a drug test. So he's not even supposed to be driving. No, no. He has no license. He's got shitloads of traffic stuff that we didn't even have time to get into. He was released on four thousand dollars bond.

I think it's because he didn't start driving till later. You have to drive right away. It makes you a better driver. You need practice, sir. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody I know that's got their license when they were like 25, terrible drivers. They're the worst.

I'm a bad driver, but I've been driving for fucking 30 years. Yeah. I've been driving. I'll be driving. So the Wizards here, they have a very silver response. They say, this is the dakota wizards not washington they say we took drug tests two weeks ago and nothing has come back from the league usually it comes back quick if somebody has a failed test and we haven't heard

anything in other words we're good we did everything now tarkanian jerry tarkanian has something he has to say here he said he always seemed fine and in control i just hope this isn't true because god damn it this makes me sick he has so much talent so much ability not only athletically but socially just an extremely likable guy with a great personality but he's throwing it all away yeah yeah july it's been thrown it's been it's it's long thrown jesus he averaged three points a league and fucking snorted his way out of the league jesus christ that's Jesus, he averaged three points a league and fucking snorted his way out of the league. Jesus Christ.

In July 2005, he pleads no contest to the reduced charges of driving with a suspended license and driving under the influence. So they got rid of all of his drug charges. And this is just embarrassing at this point. This is just a fucking disaster. His family's got to be like, Jesus Christ, Chris. We're kind of people know us around here, man. What are you doing here? What the fuck, buddy?

I mean, it's bad. You feel, you know, you feel sorry for them. I feel bad for Heather a lot. Like Heather has now two kids at home and she's got a third kid running the streets, sticking heroin in his fucking arm and no goddamn money. And then no, no, I feel bad. I feel bad for all these people jimmy but not nearly as bad as i feel for chris heron eac board of advisors member slash chief voting section civil rights division u.s department of justice oh my god it sounds important sounds like

a job that you you know fucking need to do, right? Let's see here. We have Chris Herron, aviation professional. Oh, boy. I'd like to trust this guy to fly a fucking plane. Those guys love Coke, though. Oh, they do. Yeah, they love it a lot. Chris Herron, mechanical.

Well, it doesn't make you fall asleep at the fucking wheel. That's why. And crash into a mountain and go, what happened? The mountain backed into me. It went in a reverse, and I was just flying by. Instead, it's like, we got to land now? I think we're doing great. Let's just keep going.

Yeah, what are we doing here? So Chris Herron, mechanical millwright at Southwire Company. And finally, Chris Herron, international award-winning magician and pantomime expert. His balloon animals are great. Yeah, the magic and mystery school in Las Vegas he went to. So there's that guy. It's amazing.

He pulls a giraffe full of cocaine out of his stomach. And then snorts it all. It's an amazing magic trick. 2005, he goes and plays in Tehran, Iran. Tehran, Iran, Jimmyhran, Iran, Jimmy. Yeah, well, at least there you figured Iran isn't the place where you go look and find drugs, probably. You know, it seems like a pretty close-off country. Yeah, the punishment, if you find it, I imagine is pretty stiff. Well, let's see what he has to say.

Quote, my driver was Iranian, but he spoke English. That's a bad start. Uh-oh. He would show up every morning outside my hotel with cocaine tied into a sock and throw it up to my second floor balcony. So, yes, he found he'll always find it. Once I had been there for a while, I knew I could get heroin if I wanted it. It was there, but I was trying to quit. Opiates had caused so much misery in my life.

2005, he goes and plays in Poland for a while. For some reason there, there gets a couple of bucks 2007 he's arrested for possession of a controlled substance again don't know the details but he pleads no contest to that then comes his main issue in 2008 here this is a big deal um this is uh pretty fucked up he has a pretty bad overdose here, and it's not good. He talks about what led up to it. He said, there have been days living in the dark because the electricity had been turned off,

and we didn't have the money to turn it back on. This isn't as a child. This is now. He said, there have been times when we'd run out of heating oil, and I would take a red gasoline can to the nearby mobile station, fill it with diesel fuel for $10, and trick the oil burner into starting again. That's not safe to put diesel fuel in your oil burner, I don't think.

There have been many times when Heather had thrown me out, telling me it was really over this time, that she couldn't live this way anymore. I would end up in a fleabag motel in a near and nearby newport for a few days then the money would run out and i would sleep in my car until finally she would feel sorry for me and take me back and then it would start all over again the lies the betrayals false promises and all the squandered chances this is how we lived we were always trying to hide the ugly reality from the kids even when they were sitting in the dark and the tv didn't work and it was cold what a this is ugly my dad used to play in the nba this is ugly i would this is where we are i would steal money from heather and then tell her she was crazy when she called me on it jesus christ i tell her she should go to a doctor and get some help that she was losing it i'd be screaming at her she would find needles and show them to me you're fucking crazy i'd yell those are old ones

so yeah um he said she'd say what's this chris coming back from the mailbox with an overdue bill you said you paid this and then it would start all over again we bounced check after check going through thousands of dollars in late fees and penalties she'd sit in front of her computer and shake as we went through our accounts looking at the money that was no longer there or that was far less than it was supposed to be. Jesus, this was a fucking mess. So the days of his problem, he said, how bad was I? A month earlier, I'd been at a drug dealer's house in Fall River. Chris, this is real strong stuff, he said.

Go easy. I didn't go easy. When I woke up, I had one black eye and the other one was swollen shut. Seems the dealer had been so afraid I was going to die that he kept hitting me in the face to wake me up. Wow. Is he from Pulp Fiction, bro? Yeah, right? He said, yet when he drove me home, I bought 10 more bags of the stuff that had almost killed me.

That was great. Let's do it again. That's fucking wild. He says, I was only a few blocks blocks from where i'd grown up only a few blocks from bmc durfee high school where there was a banner on the wall saying i was the highest scorer in durfee history i had gone off the street near the cemetery where lizzie borden was buried oak grove maybe the worst thing that i had just driven through had just driven through fall river for a couple miles in a blackout a ride i don't remember to this day when emts found me there was a needle in my arm and a packet

of heroin in the front seat it was only about two in the afternoon but i'd been going at it heavy since early in the morning oh god i'd put my seven-year-old daughter samantha samantha in the car like i did every morning after my wife Heather went to work. We drove through the nice suburban neighborhood in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, where we lived and went to East Main Road where the liquor store was. I bought a pint of pop off vodka, poured it into an empty water bottle and started to drink. Then we went back home to wait for the bus that took Sammy to school.

Oh, my God. Couldn't wait till the kid went to school to start drinking vodka. By the time she was on the bus, I'd finished the pint, and I went back to the package store to get another one. Now I needed some money, so I drove to nearby Middletown, virtually on the Newport line, where Heather was working in a hotel.

She told me in the morning that she would leave some money in the car for me. It was $40 under the mat in the front seat, and I started off to Fall River, about 20 minutes from my house, to meet one of my drug dealers. I gave him the $40 and he gave me five bags of heroin. I didn't take heroin at night. I'd shoot up at

4.30 in the afternoon just before Heather got home so sometimes in the morning I'd be starting to get sick and needed more. This was my daily routine. Had been for about eight months. Jesus Christ, what a nightmare. Put Sammy on the bus go to fall river do some dope and get back in time for when sammy and my nine-year-old son chris

came home off the bus that was my life that was the only way i could function sometimes i couldn't wait to put sammy on the bus to get my dope because i was getting too sick so i'd put her on the back put her in the back seat and speed to go meet a dealer in Fall River. I would make the buy and shoot up in the car while I was driving. Samantha's still in the back seat. Fuck. Dude, think about that. Think about that.

What a life. How could I have done this? People ask me all the time. How could you shoot up with your daughter in the back seat? They can't believe it. Not surprising. I can't believe it either. But that's what I did. People think when you're doing drugs, you're high all the time out partying. They think you're having fun. That's not it at all. You're not having fun. You're in hell

without the dope. You'd be dope sick. So sick that I couldn't do anything or even get up. I'd be in a fetal position. You have to sweats one minute. You're freezing cold. The next, it's like having the flu with restless legs because you can't control them he says the dope dealer with with the dope i could function if you want to call it that i could drive a car i could mow the lawn i could be something of a husband something of a father when i pictured a heroin addict before i became one i saw someone emaciated someone nodding off that wasn't me not in the beginning anyway i didn't do it to get high i did it to function he said by the time i got to heroin i was so far gone on oxycontin that the dope became medicine something that made

me feel good enough to get through the day holy shit man yeah it's not a party anymore he said then more shit started happening that made him more of a stereotype junkie he said once i left fall river about 11 30 in the morning and I was driving on South Main Street into neighboring Tiverton on my way home, which was maybe 10 minutes away. So I and I couldn't keep my eyes open. I nodded off, woke up by the side of the road about two and a half hours later with one of my feet out of the door. Jesus. Another time I passed out in a house in Fall River with four other people there. They were so scared that I was going to die that they called 911.

Holy fuck. He said when I came out of it, he said he walked outside and the police were coming up the sidewalk. Jesus Christ, man. So, yeah, he would get busted and do all this shit. It's a goddamn mess. So he is found this particular day about 6 p.m., slumped over the steering wheel of his Mitsubishi Lancer, which had which was partially up on the sidewalk with the engine running and in gear. It wasn't going anywhere because he smashed into a utility pole.

Oh, no. So that's why that was. He was unconscious and, quote, ash gray color, according to the reports, having difficulty breathing and sweating. So they turned off the ignition, called an ambulance after being brought back to consciousness because he was unconscious for a while. He's taken to Charleston Memorial Hospital for treatment. By the way, like we said, hypodermic needle sticking out of his arm, by the way, bag of heroin on his lap. So, you know, not too difficult to see the course of events that happen here. It says in the report, Officer Vail observed a vehicle in the vehicle,

a hypodermic needle in a small blue bag that he recognized as packaging for heroin. So, in fact, he did overdose on heroin. He denies this at first. He's going to be charged with driving under the influence of drugs, possession of a Class A drug, reckless operation of a motor vehicle. But he had bigger problems because his medical situation was bad. They told him he was dead for 30 seconds. That's not good. That's what the cop in Fall River told me.

He said that two emts had brought him back to life he said that uh jesus christ he said just shut the fuck up he said when i started to say something you were almost dead that's what they were told him he said that he said to him yeah shut the fuck up you're almost dead that's what the emts told him i was like mad professional i love that a medical professional in boston's like hey shut the fuck up that's my favorite thing in the world he said that at this point he has two kids seven and nine and heather's eight months pregnant so good time for this imagine the stress in her life right now holy shit working 40 hours a week having two kids being eight months pregnant and then

worrying about this fucking guy. Holy shit. He said when he got to the hospital, he was more drunk than high. He said the nurses were staring at him. They all knew who he was. He didn't have any insurance, so they weren't going to admit him. He was in the emergency room thinking of ways to kill himself. He said that was just that was how it was.

He said he couldn't stop sweating because all the opiates were sucked out of his body after a shot of Narcan, which immediately brought on withdrawal. So apparently after Narcan, those people feel terrible immediately. He ends up in a into Star, a detox facility in Fall River, just down the street from Durfee. It was June 2008. He said that seven years earlier he was playing for the Celtics and now he is in a rehab facility in his own neighborhood. So,

not the best way to go. He said, no one had to tell me how far I'd fallen, what I had lost. It was right there on the TV in front of me as he was watching the Celtics in the the finals that year he was like shit um he said um he was 30 this is amazing there was another kid from fall river there and he had a plan star was on the second floor and there was an outdoor patio where you could smoke he had a girlfriend and she was going

to put some dope inside a tennis ball and throw the ball up onto the patio while we were out there i was 32 years old i had two kids and a wife who was nearly eight months pregnant and i thought that was a good plan so that's where he's at he's a fucking disaster he ends up legally getting lucky he gets a deal instead of facing all these felony charges that he deserves here he agrees to plead no contest to three counts of driving with a suspended license and one count of driving under the influence. That's it. Unsupervised probate. You, sir, may fuck off. Unsupervised probation for six months, and he loses his Rhode Island driver's license for three months.

That's it. What a gift. Right? He was ordered also 60 hours of community service the uh assistant attorney general called it quote the deal of a lifetime for him i would say jesus christ um he also has the guy that gave uh epstein his deal was like you did what yeah what the fuck uh he's also ordered to provide samples to the probation department, urine samples. And it's also, he's allowed to reside in Rhode Island and may travel out of state for employment purposes. That's what they said. In 2011, a 30 for 30 came out about him called Unguarded about Chris.

about him called unguarded about Chris. Um, now Chris jr. Later on, we're talking, uh, 2019. He was a 2017, 18,

new England preparatory school, athletic council, all class a selection averaging 23 points a game, six rebounds and four assists. Pretty damn fucking good. Their kids really good. And he commits to Boston college. Chris jr. Is going to go to boston college jesus christ wow he lasts one year is shooting heroin through his cockhole

yeah he that's the only way to up the ante um chris chris jr only plays there for one year and then transfers though he transferred in 2020 uh to San Diego, University of San Diego, I think. The Toreros? What the fuck is that? Toreros? The Toreros, I guess. I don't know. So that's his kid there.

Now his brother Mike. Let's talk about him. Also in 2020, he is charged with rape. Yeah, that's an unexpected curveball. Yes, it's allegedly occurred on May 28th, May 28th, two counts of rape and one count of indecent assault and battery on a person over the age of 14. So an adult bail was set at ten thousand dollars cash. He was taken into custody at six six three Bedford Street. The address is of Billy's Cafe and the location where he opened a podcasting studio last year. So that's where he was. He was at his podcast studio.

Jesus Christ. You're late to the game, bro. Police were dispatched to the building after the alleged victim had arrived at the Pleasant Street police station described as frantic and appearing under the influence of drugs and alcohol, wearing only an oversized black T-shirt, no shoes and claiming she was raped by Heron. The alleged victim had reportedly flagged down a driver pleading for help, pleaded for help, and the driver transported her to the police station. pleading for help, pleaded for help, and the driver transported her to the police station. They said that she had visible signs of injury and was taken to St. Anne's Hospital, where she told a female police officer

that Heron had messaged her on Facebook, inviting her to his broadcast studio that night. She told police, yeah. How many times have we done that, Jimmy? Jesus, you bring a girl in, that's awful. Don't do that. Don't go to people's studios unless you know them, please. Fuck.

Bend over. I'm going to shove this Sennheiser up your ass. Yeah. And we don't mean that you should be responsible, but people are gross, so you never know. That's awful. It's more like advice. Yeah. People told me, the woman told police that she, Heron, and another man she could not identify by name spent the evening drinking and doing lines of cocaine.

She told police that the second man was recording portions of their conversations. At some point, the second man left. And that's when the sexual assault allegedly occurred, according to her, which she said included an object being inserted into her. Possibly. Oh, my God. Possibly a Sennheiser. We're not positive here. according to her which she said included an object being inserted into her possibly oh my god possibly a sennheiser we're not positive here so the woman told police she was able to leave the building and had taken some items including an atm card to prove that she had been at the scene she also uh and that so there was that now michael had had problems before he was charged with assault and battery in 2009

for punching and trying to run over his 22 year old neighbor with his car so he's got some anger issues also in 2010 for an alleged assault on his girlfriend and then about a year later he was arrested on the charge of assault and battery with a deadly weapon, which was his foot, because he kicked the shit out of some guy and broke his ankle. He's the worst brother. He said in Chris's book, he says that his brother estimates he's been in 300 fights in his life, which is an astronomical amount of fights. That's insane. That's too many.

The charges end up being dropped. They are dismissed against him. They said that the DA's office said it could not mean its burden of proof because the victim did not show up for the next hearing. That's how it worked. So they dropped the charges. He acts like he's the most exonerated person in the world. Like the woman came in and said, I'm sorry. I made the whole thing up.

I was just angry at him. He's actually a fine gentleman. He offered me a water and then sent me know, sent me on my way with with, you know, money for an Uber like that. That's how he actually was so bad that she was horrified to testify. That's what I mean. But he's acting like it's what I just said. That's I mean, he's acting like he is completely exonerated and everything's fine. The victim previously refused a sexual assault examination at St. Ann's Hospital and failed to follow up for medical treatment or testing and failed to cooperate with investigators. So who the fuck knows what happened. Either way.

Now, since then, since August 1st, 2008, Chris Herron has been clean. So he's been clean since then. In June 2009, he launched, Chris Mullen helped him out, actually. He went and stayed at Chris Mullen's house, and Chris Mullen helped him somehow, like get him into rehab and all this shit, which is crazy, isn't it?

It's weird. We're going to get you a crew cut. You're going to be great. We're going to get you a nice flat top, and it's going to fix everything, pal. crew cut you're gonna be great we're gonna get you a nice flat top and it's gonna fix everything pal so uh heron in 2009 launched uh hoop dreams with chris heron a basketball player development company to mentor players on and off the court he wrote the book that we just talked about he wrote it with bill reynolds he was one of the authors of this called basketball junkie

a memoir and that's what we just quoted pretty for a lot from here. So also, like we said, the documentary comes out on him, the 30 for 30 in March of 2012. It's called Unguarded. It's nominated for two Emmys, Outstanding Sports Documentary and Outstanding Editing. What he does now, according to him and according to everything he's doing, it's very well documented. Heron now travels the United States sharing his story through Heron Talks with the goal of making a positive difference in the lives of others.

So he has all of these Heron Talks, the Heron Project, Heron Wellness. He goes to everywhere in the world and talks about drugs and staying off drugs and talks to kids. And that's all he does now. I mean, he is like pretty heavy into it. Like he has like there's rehab facilities that he can. He's got a whole thing out of this whole deal. It's these nonprofits here. He's got 2018.

He founded Heron Wellness, a residential health and wellness program that helps guests lead healthy substance free lives he's spoken to over 1 million students athletes and community members sparking honest discussions on the topics of substance abuse and disorder and wellness now

all of the things that people say too when he goes there whenever there's like a shitload of speakers they're like by far the standout is this guy you know like people he really actually has been doing well like he uh her and wellness here they talk about that and uh they say they call it a holistic recovery approach offering structured daily services for guests that focus on eight key elements of health and wellness he's actually up possibly for a 2022 mandy malone award actually yeah i would say he has turned it around yeah how could his last name

be so close to his favorite uh thing that that is unbelievable and as you can imagine that was chanted at him quite often oh i'm sure yeah so that yeah the heroin yeah he's the yeah haron that'd be like a guy that a guy that drinks and drives last name of drunk last name of uh your jimmy dewey is your name there that's what it is oh boy look at that so uh can't get this gonna go great forever james or is there gonna be a problem someday? It's been 13 years. I think it's good. I think he's good now. I really, I mean, who knows? It's like we said, we've watched Ryan Leaf go up and down, but this isn't like a Josh Hamilton, Ryan Leaf situation where it's like three years off and then there's an incident and three years on. It's been 13 years with no

incidents. Like he's been fingers crossed and Heather is still with him. She is all into the business with him she does her own version of everything and they're like together in all of this somehow through all of that they stayed together that's incredible that's incredible it's wild so i can't get enough check out chris heron.com or the heron project.com or uh i don't know i'm sure if you go down and shoot something up into your arm and crash into a utility pole he'll probably show up like a fairy godmother and sprinkle some dust on you and you can talk about it with him i'm not sure how it works if he was drafted higher james he might be talked about more than ryan leaf yeah oh if he was a top

10 draft pick you'd hear about him a lot more a lot more it's just a matter that he was you know in the nba he was a total washout and he wasn't even drafted high he second rounders are expected to not make the team most of the time you know so it's nobody cares about second rounders but that said we hope you enjoyed that crazy shit wild ass episode of Chris Herron. If so, there's a way to tell us about it. Isn't there, Jimmy? Yeah, there is.

You got it. You can check it out. Go to Apple Podcasts, the purple icon on your phone there. Give us five stars. It helps a lot. We don't know why, but it really does. It helps drive you up the charts for some stupid reason. So thank you for everyone who has done that we really do appreciate it just say something say you know i don't want

to be i don't want to drive into a utility pole with a needle sticking out of my arm we'll understand what you're doing o'neill ruined my career shaquille o'neill fell on me and now i don't play ball anymore something like that we're happy with that we're good with it so uh yes do all of that get on there give the review head over to shut up and give me murder.com right now like right now check out everything there listen to small town murder if you have not yet jesus you are missing out i don't know what you're thinking it's been wild and crazy and how nuts has that show been lately like i've been having so much fun it's so great you're not listening to it, you're really, really, really missing out.

So check it out. Also listen to PSA Hate This Movie. We just watched Once Bitten, which I'm happy about. And then in two weeks, we have to watch Twilight, which I'm not happy about. So there's that. Check that out. Patreon. Oh, actually, first, the social media.

Follow us on social media. We're at Crime and Sports on Twitter and Facebook, at Small Town Murder on Instagram. And Patreon is cooking. It's boiling. It's boiling over right now. I'll tell you what. Patreon.com slash Crime and Sports. We've got so many crazy episodes.

Our last Crime and Sports bonus was Danny Almonte, the not-quite-Little League Little Leaguer. in sports bonus was Danny Almonte, the not quite Little League Little Leaguer. And then this week coming up, we're going to talk about the documentary about the Hotel Cecil in LA, particularly the case of that girl disappearing, that weird paranormal activity elevator footage. How fucking creepy is that?

You know what I mean? It's disgusting. It's awful. It's awful. It's awful. But it's also that footage created a monster in itself. Oh, absolutely. It created a whole other. And we'll talk about that.

We'll talk about all of that because it's so much. And then some history of the hotel, crime history with Richard Ramirez there and stuff. He'd come in covered in blood and just go to his room and nobody said anything. In his underwear. Nice hotel. That's a great hotel you got there check all that out and then if that's not good enough for you you also get access to all the small town murder bonuses as well and the whole back catalog of both of those and this week's small town murder bonus is the prisoner dating game so you can't go wrong if you've been waiting to get on Patreon, wait no longer. This is the week.

Don't don't don't get up. Treat yourself. Just do it. You're going to enjoy it. Dilly Dallying. Stop dilly dallying around over there. So do that. Thank you for everyone that has Patreon dot com slash crime and sports.

And in addition to that, all the bonus material will also get jimmy mispronouncing your name brutally at the end of the show while trying his best to read it so that's how that works and uh it's a good time if you just also want to have uh just want to have good karma and you want to get your name read off and mispronounced brutally you can also donate over at paypal using our email address crime and sports at gmail.com. And, uh, truly, truly, truly what you people do for us. Right. That sounded very aggressive.

What you people listen, you fucking people know what everyone out there does for us is remarkable. And, uh, we just can't thank you enough. And there's not a day that goes by that we don't reflect on how great everybody out there is for everything you do for us. Every nickel you do, every nickel you give, every friend you tell, thank you so much for doing that. Don't you think, Jimmy? Yeah. The years are just – it's – I can't say it enough.

You've changed our lives. You've given us opportunities that we can't even really explain to you how much you've changed our lives. And without you and without this, I would be working 80 hours a week, waking up next to a monster. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to not do that. Very miserable people we would be. So, yeah, thank you for all of that. And in a way that we thank you is by reading off the list of all of you wonderful producers. And that said jimmy i think i need that list right about now this week's executive producers are melissa spears

jordan bennett emma sykes uh felicia clifton ryan guest liz liz yeah liz nelson's birthday was this week happy birthday liz birthday liz nelson chrissy anni, again, thank you very much. Molly McDermott, Brittany Siegel, Stephen Poirier, I think, Lori Olson, and Kate Phillips. Thank you guys so much. We can't do it without you, truly. You're amazing. So much for everything you do for us.

Other producers this week are Kaylin Bancroft. Also, Candice Kennedy was accepting orders from people overseas to get Girl Scout cookies, and then she was sending them to them. Wow, that's so nice. Obviously, they would buy them, but they would send them to her, and then she would send them to them. And I think she covered shipping

too. Wow, thanks. Thank you very much. That's cool, Candice. Yeah, she's a good one. She's a good kid. Yeah, she is. Other producers this week are Thomas DeMello, Jesse Pitts, Ashley Veo, Todd Robertson, and Pasqualina Elardi. They donated both ways. Thank you very, very much. You got that name right.

Brendan Ables, Thomas Smith, Jackie Ringen, Cynthia Haston, Joanne Ahern, Billy Overbay, Carl Kirshner. Again, with the fucking umlauts. I don't know how to fix it. I don't know how to do it. Corporal umlaut. There he is. that's what you've got forever carl sorry liz vasquez peyton meadows britney feldhake feldhake uh james martyr shiana nope that's sheena shiana ramsay brooke kale uh eliana ugwadela uh iguadela. Dana Stewart's birthday was this week.

Happy birthday, Dana. Ethan Morrissey. Steve Schnell. Iron Tree Craftworks. Mariah Lazaritz. Adam Udaini. Jessica Finch. Travis Tim.

Allison Warnock. Alyssa Nurenberger. And her Uncle John. She got her Uncle John into the show? No. Her Uncle John couldn't listen. Doesn't matter. Listen, he's no longer with us is the thing.

And I'm ruining this. And I sound so cold. I was just going to go, thanks, Uncle John. That's great. He's fucking dead. Jesus Christ. Sorry about Uncle John. Alyssa, I'm so sorry that I just ruined it. Both of them.

He would have loved us is the thing that she said. I think that's the one. Oh, good. I hope that's true. Elizabeth Everson, Alex Ortiz, Melanie Aguilar, Janice Hill, Andrea Fellows, Kristen Bellinger, Susanna Platt, Trey Valkenar, Anne L. B. Oh, anal beads. Got it.

All right. Jesus. There you go. Samir Nahinajan, Mario Guerra. He is BikesGunsBJJ on Etsy. He makes fucking bullet keychains, and they're very cool. Rabbi Shmuel Alevich. I don't know why he loves me saying that.

I don't know what the joke is. We don't care what the joke is. Thank you for giving us money. But I'd love to know what the joke is. Yes, we would. Gabby or Gabby, I'm not sure. No last name. Katie Hall, Chandler Easter, Dylan Crider, I think.

Melanie Fagan, I poop on you. Kate McIntyre, Jamie Little, Dana Longin, Randy Tallarico. It's Italian, right? Yeah, you're going to mess that up. That's a long one. Jose with no last name. Natasha Williams. What?

Is it more than five letters? It's going to go. It's bad. It's not going to work out for your Italian. Natasha Williams. Sarah Arntz. Bert Kay. Frank Golden.

Todd Robertson. Sentry with no last name. Courtney Teasdale. Amy Moyer. Mojher? Moyer. It's got to be Moyer. Lisa Cox, Nick Garcia, Rohan Bajaj, Richard.

El Wanger, what? That can't be right. Elwanger? El Wanger? That's not Wanger, right? Susan Russell, Alexis Bergstrom. Jordan would know last name. Stacy Kramer, Swifty Flanagan, Tate Murdoch,

Tyler Christian, Michael Hansen, Goblin and Gremlin, I believe they're dogs or pets of some sort, Kristen with no last name, Bewigged Douchebag, Lila Lehner, Nathan Jackson, Anthony Rodriguez. What'd I do? No, not that I said nice. Oh, okay. Bewigged Douchebag. Patricia Major, Sophie with no last name, Sarah Maloof, Jordan Sisk Johnson, Patrick Bedford, Luke Pell, David B., Megan Matuszewski.

Matuszewski. That's the one. Todd Letts, Chris Thomas, Valley Stitemus. Close enough. Alyssa with no last name. Pablo Franco Jr. Matthew Scharnweber. Lindsey Montembolt. What?

Oh, boy. Adila MTZ. That can't be a name, right? I can't pronounce that. There's no vowels at all. Decoder Rice. Clint McDonald. Michelle Higgins.

Zoe Moon. Erin Emery. Mariah Edwards. Marissa Ann. Taryn King, Kyle Walters, Matthew Johnson, Matthew Tansey, David Rouse, Samantha White, Jenny Zeme, Ryan King, Kristen Mock, Sean Sneddon, Matt Rosenberg, David Evans, Stacey Fetterman, Eric Thorpe Jr., Anthony Opadesano. Holy shit. Hey, wow. Amory Gonzalez, John Shedolsky. Oh, boy.

Lisa Gomez, Christine Kintay. You're getting Italian names and Polish names. David Dinette, Rhonda Spencer, Sophia. Nope, that's Sonia. Kirby. Kenny Storr, Amy Leith, Cindy Lee, Eli King, Kristen Holmes, Brent Walker, Jessica Plancic, Brian Brown, Jarrett Byers, Matthew Webster, Gabriela Lopez, K.I., I think that's an I, it might be an L, Angie Prigg. Priggy. Priggy. Nathan Sharp. Jason Weiss, a.k.a. Soldier Guy. Vincent with no last name.

Sage Fritchley. Katie Conkrook. Wade Waller. I almost had it. Emma Allen. Cameron Commodore. Kate Simorosti. Thomas Robinson.

Gabrielle Boyd. Don DePriest. K.D. Moore, Ann Engstrom, Lori DeHuy, I think, Daryl Washington, Neely O'Mearen, Chris Trenner, Michelle, nope, that's Michael, Martinson, Riker Frohawk, Frohawk, Frohawk, Matthew, nope, that's Nathan. Matthew? There's never been a Matthew in the history of anybody. It's Nathan. I've never heard of the name Matthew. Oh, nope. That's Nathan. Matthew? There's never been a Matthew in the history of anybody. It's Nathan. I've never heard of the name Matthew.

Hello, Matthew. I created it. Perfect. You're going to name me. Nathan Warren. I'm going to try to name him Matthew. Young Matthew. Tina Melville.

Tina Jacobs. Bruce Wagner. Dina Morissette. James Winant. Cassidy Barnett. Loretta Kennedy, Emmett Maielli, Jacob Hansen, Maggie with no last name, Jaden Blomstedt, Anthony Rosenberger, Melody Kernatz, Janai Janay, Sardar, Amy Wiedemann, Joe Anderson, and Ira Anderson, James Nance, Michelle, oh boy, oh boy, boy bard to catch you

josh with no last name thomas with no last name moving on jenna everett al everett i don't know i just burped i'm sorry you looked at it like you burped i'm looking at you i didn't see the burp i just looked up and you were like staring at it like you were really trying to figure it out but no you just burped your fucking mic was covering your mouth so i didn't see it open fucking i had the monster in front of me sierra howerton amita goindy jesus jacklyn with no last name neo neoteric gentleman gentlemen. Dominique Whitney. Fuck.

Stephen Norris. Hunk Gooden. Patricia Hanley. Van Jones. Vanessa Evans. WB. Dixie with no last name. Rebecca Robbins.

Samuku. Nope, that's Susamu. Araki. What? Ryan Patel. Alton Horton. Here's a who. Ashley with no last name.

Brady Taylor. John Bennett. Elijah Ruddy. Here's a who. Ashley with no last name. Brady Taylor. John Bennett. Elijah Ruddy. Julie Fitzgerald. Stephen Kramer. Carla Reynolds. Emily Daniel. John Filkins.

Mike Euler. He's back. Thanks, Mike. It's been a minute. We know Mike Euler, right? We know that guy. I don't know why. Yeah, we do.

He wrote an email. Did he hate us at one point? Now he likes us? I don't remember, but I know the the name i know we've had interaction we got a history with mike i don't know why nick sturdivant uh susan waven uh kendall kendall sage parker devin decker cheryl g jacob carr heather burland uh amanda thomas robbie russo jim Jimmy Denver, Beatrice Brandel, Heidi with no last name, Aaron Burgin, Laura Ondal, shit, Emily Harris, Zach Cole, Wayne Bradley, Ian Mitchell, Sissy Rose, Travis Monger, Fiona Campbell, Melissa Nicole Martinez, Evelyn Gokin, Punky Trashcan, Clinton Grout, Blake Box, Abraham D. Nebgen. Boy, oh boy, that was a tough one. Justin Yeliet, Grant Vanik, Jimmy Peterson, Seth Tracy, Carla C., Marissa F., Allie Arce, Patricia Blankenship, Damon Brown, Caitlin Lewis, Brittany Cobb,

Nathan Potts, Sean Whalen, Amy with no last name, Natalie with no last name, Tyrell with no last name, Noreen with no last name, Shannon Morgan, PJ Benson, Gabrielle Turner, Lisa Bradley, Drew Freetag, Natalie Wall, Annette Jayberg, Zoe Bird, Star Annalise, Chris Vega, Luis with no last name, Tori with no last name, Jeff Pike, Eric Smith, Rebecca Caputo,

Katie Bailey, Miley Forbes, nope, that's Mila. God damn it! James Swinn, Jordan Beach, Mark Gonzalez, and Derek Edwards, and all of our patrons. You guys are fantastic. Thank you. Thank you, everybody, so much. Honestly, we can't thank you enough for everything you do.

And just thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Jimmy, what if they wanted to talk to you? How could they find you out there in the world? You know where to find me, and you found me, and I appreciate it. And go find James. Where can they find you? You can Google us both, and we'll pop up, and you found me and i appreciate it and go find james where can they find you you you can google us both and we'll cut we'll pop up and you can find us it's not that hard

you know how to find people jesus christ look up our names you if you want to find us you'll find us so it's really easy to find people today it is you just pop a name in and they'll pop up with all of their shit so yeah thank you so much everybody honestly we hope you enjoyed this crazy ass episode uh an early contender for a scummy award next year already two of them the mandy malone award and the golden gilretha both up for grabs in the first episode out of the gate we love it so much and we can't wait for next week and uh live from the crime and sports studios we will see you next week. Bye. Bye. I'm in sports early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus and Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.