Crime in Sports - #253 - Beaten, Battered & Broke - The Depletedness of Keith McCants

Episode Date: April 20, 2021

This week, we dig deep on a man who seemed to be on the cusp of greatness. A hight first round draft pick in the NFL, with a record signing bonus... but it all went wrong. Injuries led to painkillers, which led to, of course, crack cocaine. His struggles, through the years are legendary, including highway panhandling, and almost as many arrests as surgeries!Perform "fruit raids" at a young age, have everyone thing that you're going to be a Hall of Famer, and smoke crack in sleazy hotels with Keith McCants!!Check us out, every Tuesday!We will continue to bring you the biggest idiots in sports history!!Hosted by James Pietragallo & Jimmie WhismanDonate at... patreon.com/crimeinsports or with paypal.com using our email: [e-mail] all the CIS & STM merch at crimeinsports.threadless.comGo 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.

Hey Prime members, you can listen to Crime and Sports early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Discover all the best in audiobooks, podcasts, and originals featuring authentic Canadian voices and celebrity talent, like Brendan Fraser and Luke Kirby's latest sci-fi adventure, The Downloaded. A first listen is waiting for you when you start your free trial at audible.ca. on the Mr. Ballin Podcast, now available wherever you get your podcasts, you'll hear strange, dark, and mysterious stories about inexplicable encounters, shocking disappearances, true crime cases, and everything in between. So go listen to Mr. Ballin Podcast, Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Stories on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Crime and Sports! Oh, yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed.

My name is James Petrigallo. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wissman. Thank you, folks, so much for joining us this week again on another crazy edition of Crime and Sports. Yeah. Obviously, we hope you listened last week. R-I-P-U-R-U.

Very, very. And the Coyotes just traded for a guy named the russian bear it's unbelievable if you didn't listen last week because you never heard of the guy you don't care about hockey holy shit did you miss an episode you really blew it it's it's it's a classic so go back and check that out but for everybody else thank you for everything you've done for us this week especially your reviews those apple podcast reviews that purple icon we don't know they help, but they help drive you up the charts. So please, if you haven't done it yet, get on that five stars. Say something.

Doesn't matter what you say. Head over to shut up and give me murder dot com right now. That does matter because right now you can get your tickets to the virtual live show. It is on May the 6th and it will be available for 72 hours after that. So you can watch it over the weekend, whatever you want to do. Check that out. I'm telling you, it's going to be awesome. I can't wait.

Right now, I just know we have our own. We made a special dedicated studio. It's all for you. For this. It's going to be, it's really, we're really putting a lot into it. So we really hope you enjoy it and we think you're going to do that. Shut up and give me murder.com right now. You can also get tickets to all the live shows that are coming up. We have live crime and sports at the Tem also get tickets to the all the live shows that are

coming up we have live crime and sports at the tempe improv when is the date on that november 19 november 19th live crime and sports we were doing we're doing crime and sports and small town murder on the same night back to back on a friday night at the tempe improv oh it's we're so lucky we're jacked for that thank you matt yes come out see both shows and uh you know do that and sell out crime and sport don't let the small town murder people make you look bad yeah don't do it please because then they go oh yeah the crime they don't care yeah and then don't do it don't let them make you don't let them punk you yeah do it get your tickets for that right now and then patreon my goodness patreon.com slash crime and sports the bonus episodes are

amazing if you missed last week's uh you need to subscribe so you can go back and listen to those we did kind of our favorite and least favorite sports movies was one of our episodes which was a we've been wanting to do that for a long time so many sports movies it's fun to talk about them all we really talked about the ones we hated much more than the ones we loved so check those out while we make fun of bad old movies and on top of that the the other bonus episode we did was jail and prison reviews fantastic which was absolutely hilarious people in jail working in jail visiting jail living near the jail living near it you name it they were talking about it and no one really likes it that much a lot of surprise jail sucks and it's not even it's so funny how different a lot of the reviews are it's hilarious there's a lot of different ways to hate jail it's true go back listen to

those and you can hear the whole back catalog if you subscribe at patreon.com slash crime and sports and that'll make you a producer yeah well which will make you have your name read off by jimmy at the end of the show probably incorrectly correct but he'll try as bad as hard as he can he will try so uh do that patreon.com slash crime and sports and if you just want to be a good person with good karma and get your name mispronounced and be a producer of the show who we love and admire so much you can do that over at paypal as well using our email address crime and sports at gmail.com that said let's do this all right we got lots of show here this is a guy who is a

absolute mess since since the second he set foot in the league so it's going to be awesome stuff let us talk about keith mccance yeah do you remember keith mccance i remember the name yes if you were like a kid in 1990 during that draft, there was a big draft, that 90 draft. Really? And tons, for some reason, like that was the, that's when like every person who had access to card stock on the earth made football cards in 1990.

Pro set and score, this one and that one. And I just remember a million Keith McCants cards. They were betting hard on him. Yeah, and those creamsicle bucks uniforms the thing about uh your your your card being plentiful uh it's worth shit that's the thing yeah there's just so many of them if he was a decent player maybe he'd be worth something but yeah didn't quite work out like that let's talk about alvin keith mccance alvin alvin his family calls him alvin but in football it's always keith okay that's interesting date of birth and this i swear to christ was not planned yeah when i was putting this together yesterday i was like oh shit yeah uh date of

birth april 19th 1968 so birthday happy birthday i'm sorry i'm not sorry it didn't work out for you let's put it that way i'm sorry for there you go april 19th 1968 and uh the if you're if you're listening to this down the road we're recording this on april 19th on his birth 2021 so uh a couple of things i need to point out that gave a lot of good information one's a really good article in the tampa tribune by a guy named joey johnston and people for years use this article for information, referenced him. So this was like kind of a, he really got in there. Joey got the Bucks beat, huh?

Joey got it in there, yeah. And then also a book called The Dark Side of the NFL by Keith McCants. He wrote his own book. I'm a piece of garbage. Here's my story. Here it is. And it's, okay okay here's the thing about keith mccants and i don't know what it is but doing the research maybe i'll change my mind

over the course of the show as we go on but doing the research something about him i just kind of like the guy yeah i kind of feel i just some guys i feel for yeah i don't like the way they got done kind of i don't like the way they were treated by a league or you know what i mean sure so it's like i just get that when i get guys who only hurt themselves and you're like i don't really yeah yeah whatever but good god let's let's let keith open it up terrific with his own words here uh we won't do it in their own words till later but this is from this is right in the beginning of his book okay this is like the preface here quote if i had to describe myself in two words it would have to be it would have to have been atomic bomb oh boy i had all the motivation i needed to wreak havoc on the

football field by the time i was the ripe old age of eight luckily for me i found a way to channel my anger and frustration without killing someone well Well, you know what? Good. I mean, we could be doing a different episode. Snap a football and I might snap your neck. If you were standing on the other side of the line, I didn't run to you. I ran through you. Football is therapy. So we haven't heard that a lot.

No. We've heard football is an escape from a shit life or my bad family. Therapy. This is therapy. And we find out why it's like oh jesus christ uh now he grows up in downtown northwest of downtown mobile alabama uh he's from down there he's from the orange grove housing project hell yeah so not a lot of money growing up with keith pretty pretty poor and um it's uh it was once the largest housing project in the state of Alabama

at one point. Really? In Mobile? In Mobile and it's known for being a rough place at this point. He's the youngest of five children like Richard Ramirez but better probably than Richard. At this point. Well yeah and his mom was pretty good actually from what he says.

He loved his mom and his mom was there and everything like that. His dad not so great. Okay. what he says he loved his mom and his mom was there and everything like that his dad not so great okay um so he says he talks about like uh you know around 1976 he talks about in his book and being you know hot basically says he remembers fighting with his brothers and sisters for the spot closest to the air conditioner they had a window unit in their place and he said it was mounted to the wall in the living room, and he said it felt great, but you had to get close enough to it when five kids are all blocking each other out for a spot.

Two bodies blocks all that air in the first place, and you get a third, and then a fourth, forget it. Now it's hotter in there than it was before. And they said, too, it was, you know, they were lucky to, he said, I was lucky to have an air conditioner. He said, you know, it was really a big deal there. Like, people are like, oh, shit, you got an air conditioner? Look at you.

And in Mobile, air conditioning is really necessary. It's hot and it's humid down there. He said that, you know, it was hard to sleep at night because it was so hot, especially during the summer. He said his mom would soak washcloths in water and then put them in the freezer freeze them up and then lay them across the backs of their necks so they could go to sleep basically because that cools your whole body off yeah that's some i've had that done before that's you got your nappy cloth in the freezer that's some poor kids air conditioning and then later on what sucks is like a little while later like your pillow's all wet and you're laying in a wet spot in the pillow.

You got to lay on your stomach. But it's cool. And hopefully that thing doesn't fall off. That's better. Yeah. Pin it to the pillow with your head. He said it was his mom's idea and she did this. That's the best she could do to take care of him.

And she always did the best she could. She could. He said that a lot of times the the mom would say get out basically everybody go outside the kids go play go do your thing outside which used to be able in the 70s that was just get out and come back later right and whatever and they didn't expect you to be murdered don't be here right now that's what i need pulled into a van or some shit um so yeah he got chased out he said to go to his friend's house and you know that sort of shit um he said that you know there's a big open field that all the kids would go hang out on

yeah and play in and i said though it was very it was hot yeah he just he describes in his book every other sentence in his book talks about how hot it was when he was a kid he just it's just hot it seemed like you know the sun never went down and it was just always hot yeah it's like that uh there's a there's a i think it's in uh ray kwan's album for wu-tang there's this thing and they're talking like it's hot like he's like it's hot at night and shit like the sun he goes the sun ain't even out and it's hot like i feel like that's what kind of hot we're talking about phoenix shit that's some phoenix shit We're standing on a patio at midnight and you're just sweating your balls off trying to get a cigarette in you.

Well, because the heat's coming from the ground, not the fucking. It's coming from all angles. All angles. Because you got these tall fucking buildings that are radiating heat at you. The concrete's hot as shit. The concrete walls around your backyard are hot. Everything's hot. Everything's reflecting heat.

Yeah, it's bad stuff. everything's reflecting heat yeah it's bad stuff now his mom was uh his mom's name is cinderella which he says yeah his mom is his mom's name is cinderella mccance oh my god literally she said uh she was he calls her a saint basically uh the way he talks about it um she said that uh he just loves his mom calls himself a mama's boy and says people made fun of him for it yeah he didn't give a shit he liked to hang out with his mom she's cinderella she's cinderella right he'd hang out with her while uh he was while she was cooking breakfast and shit like that yeah um and she also worked three jobs jesus so that's a lot yeah so he's got a lot of respect for his mom for hustling to keep the family together.

For really doing it. Five kids and three jobs. That's a lot of work. That's eight things you got to worry about. Most people, one or two of those is a lot. She's got eight things to worry about. Now, his dad, he said his dad would kind of take off, basically. He said that his dad managed to, the way he puts it he goes my

dad wasn't harry houdini but he managed to disappear out of my life before i knew him he said he packed up his clothes and left me left all the kids behind and didn't give a shit mccance is funny he is he's pretty funny this guy sometimes he said that uh his dad's name is herbert kaiser and yeah i don't know he took his mom's name all Herbert Kaiser. And yeah, I don't know. He took his mom's name. All the kids do. He said he spent very little time in the same room with his father in his whole life. He talks about one time in high school, he met with him at one of the houses he owned.

As it turns out, his dad ends up being kind of a successful businessman. Well, what the fuck? He owns a bunch of property. Yeah. He'll come back later, but doesn't do anything to support his children what the hell man yeah that's why he's kind of pissed off at his dad as you can imagine yeah um he said that you know that was he hadn't seen him in over 10 years and he saw him the one time there and uh he said that his father his mother was great and he said he also had a stepfather who cared for all five kids like they were his own

that's awesome and was a good dude too so he says, as hard as it was, he goes, man, his mom and his stepdad did their best, and he was thankful for them. He talks about some funny shit when he was a kid here. He talks about something he calls a fruit raid, which can only happen if you're in a place where there's a lot of fruit growing on trees that's easily accessible.

Yeah. He said that, this is funny, quote, the key to a successful fruit tree raid was to wear a belt so you can tuck all of it in your pants he said that way you could cinch it up tight enough yeah so you would hold the apples and pears that you plucked from the trees once they were pulled from the uh from the branch they had to be dropped down the front of your shirt yeah so yeah he would use this his shirt as a thing you tuck it all into your pants yep he said i'm not trying to say what we did was right but there was more fruit lying on the grass rotting than we could ever slide down the fronts of our shirts

we figured if the people who live there really cared they wouldn't have let all that fruit hit the ground in the first place he's got a point fair right he said you know it's kids logic but still and uh he said by late august the fruit trees had ripe apples pears plums awesome yeah he said he loved it all and he loved to eat fruit but fresh fruit as everybody knows is really fucking expensive yeah it is and if you lived in the projects he said you know mom didn't get a chance to buy fruit very often right fresh fruit especially for five kids yeah so this was like a chance to eat this is awesome fruit yeah he loved it and it's true too that's tough they that's a big deal like it's you it's expensive to be healthy it is it really is even crazy how cheap it is to be a fucking disgusting piece of shit when you

look at like the difference in price between like how much food you get for fast food, where you can get three burgers for five bucks or something, and that weight of food, as opposed to fruit of that weight, you can't get it. It's not even close. For vegetables, God forbid, they're more expensive. Oh, my God. Fruit can be really cheap if it's in season, but vegetables seem to be always expensive. Have you seen how much fucking tomatoes cost?

Depending on which ones? Yeah. The cheapest, obviously obviously are romas and you can get those for like i don't know 99 cents a pound yeah if they're in everything else is like three dollars for tomatoes it's crazy i get like some san marzano's you're gonna be paying the big ones yeah 6.99 a pound and shit those uh the ones that are different colors what are they called uh finger no that's potatoes yeah Yeah, you're talking about potatoes. You know what I mean.

I got you. They're specific tomatoes. I forget what they're called. It doesn't matter, but they're like yellow and orange and green ones. Yeah, yeah. It's crazy how much those things cost. They're very expensive. So to get his fruit, he said, quote, I slid my hand in the front of my shirt and smoothed

it inside the waistband of my pants. Once it was tucked in, I pulled on my belt and smoothed it inside the waistband of my pants yeah once it was tucked in i pulled on my belt and slid the buckle to the tightest notch it could reach so my legs fell asleep that's it till i started losing circulation to my toes so my toes tingled that's when it was tied and i fell down and he said i pulled that sucker snug until i couldn't get it any tighter and then you drop all sorts of fruit down. He talks about one story where some old man chased him away. And they basically said, fuck you, old man, and ran away to somebody else's house.

Got your plums. Yeah. And he's like, I feel bad about that now. That probably was just some guy trying to keep people. But at the time, he wanted the fruit. But honestly, have you seen a tree full of fruit? It's enough. there's no way that guy that guy's taking that shit to work and saying get rid of this shit somebody make a pie

yeah even if you're like a grower there's a lot of wasted fruit it's a lot a few kids from the neighborhood taking some fruit isn't going to hurt your bottom line man it's helping them more than it's hurting you i was gonna say if it just gathered it up yeah how about gather it up and and tell the kids hey guess what you can have all the fruit you want to pick up, how about gather it up and tell the kids, hey, guess what? You can have all the fruit you want to pick up. How about that? Hire the kids, maybe. Or you can have all the fruit you can pick off that tree, because if you don't pick it off that tree, it's going to fall on the ground, then it's going to rot, and it's going to

smell disgusting around here. You're going to get bugs and rats. And how much fruit could a fucking nine-year-old really fit in a shirt? I mean, honestly, how many apples is that? Really? Is it a dozen? Who's that to you? Who do you care?

Unless he gets it around the back, too. Oh, probably. you might be able to get two dozen in that picture i'm running with all that fruit bouncing around now that's that's that's his good memories of childhood right there you know stealing fruit with his friends and laughing about it and shit like that you know that's fun shit when you're a kid doing fucking off how many times did you get chased and have to jump over walls and shit it's fun when you're a kid it's funny it's fun it's funny uh what wasn't so fun or so funny is the fact that he had a couple people in his life that were not exactly too nice to him uh he calls these two people in his book quote the babysitter and the abuser oh no this is who he calls what he says um at like eight years old yeah

and um well i'll just read this right from the book and let him say it he says quote the first time i was molested i had no concept of what sex was my mind and my body weren't prepared to be violated yeah yes um he was busy said he was worrying about you know comic books and shit and kid shit stealing apples yeah he literally he was worried about comic books and shit and kid shit. Stealing apples. Yeah, literally. He was worried about apples, and he said, I was literally worried about monsters. That was a concern.

Monsters, superheroes. He found out what a real monster is. Yeah, shit like that. He said, though, yeah, he said it bothered him for years and years. Oh, I'm sure. He talked about while he was on the football field at one point when he's in the NFL, he made a play. It's like, I came off the field. People said, I think they were complimenting me.

I don't know because I was caught up in that again. You know what I mean? So that's rough. And he didn't get a lot of therapy as a kid or anything like that. So he's got a lot of bad things in here. I wondered that a lot fairly recently recently like because in in the in sports it's commonplace smack a dude on the ass you know what i mean high five hug whatever it just sheer statistics alone there has to be plenty of dudes in those sports that have been that have been

sexually abused women too as you know from all the olympic shit too i mean probably more yeah but i but more because of the men. Yeah, because there's just more of them. And looked at as, like, tough, and you can't hurt that guy. Women, they're generally, ugh, whatever. Yeah, I get what you're saying. They're easier. They're more prey.

It's not easier. It's just that they're more targeted as prey than men. You consider your son as less of a target if you're a parent. Even though they're absolutely just as much of a target if you're a parent even though they're absolutely just as much of a target but you consider them less because you're like oh it's a boy he'll be fine sure yeah and it's got to be uncomfortable i can't imagine being molested like that as a child and then having somebody you know fucking smack your ass or even worse in hazing incidents yeah yeah i'm trying to put shit in your ass get away from my ass well he was he was abused by two women

oh my neither of these were men really yeah well he was he was abused by two women oh my neither of these were men really yeah neither were men he was abused by two women and you don't see that as a thing no and that's the thing and for him for yeah two and i mean he must i don't know what it was they have a sixth sense these fucking abusers yeah they have a sixth sense they really do they know who's vulnerable and they know who's who's vulnerable enough to keep it to themselves they have a weird fucking thing they're predators i mean just like every other predator they have a sense of prey yeah and uh he says quote there are only two people in the world to blame for my molestation the babysitter and the abuser uh he said he never blamed his mom he said she went to

her grave never knowing about it he never told his mom about it because he said it would break her heart because she was away working the whole time and he didn't want to make her feel guilty that he was there because she was working. So, I mean, that's brutal to feel that and never, you know, we didn't get help as a kid because he didn't even tell his mom. So there's no way she basically they had he had him and a younger sister and they basically they'd find a neighbor to watch the kid's sister and him. And that would be the thing they'd have to find a babysitter. So he said the babysitter lived near his apartment and his mother knew her well. She wasn't a stranger, knew her real well. And, uh, she's, he said nothing on the outside would make you concerned about this lady. Not that everything was fine.

the outside would make you concerned about this lady nothing everything was fine and uh yeah he said that she would uh basically she would leave him by himself to watch tv on the sofa and let the sister play with her baby dolls and she would like have guys over all the time she's an older woman too not like she wasn't 16 and he said on most days she disappeared in the bed into the bedroom in the back of her apartment. And that's how it works. She'd bring in guy friends and, you know, they'd come and go all the time, a bunch of different guys and all that sort of shit. And, you know, he said that he could hear what was going on in there, but he didn't know what was going on because he was eight.

Yeah. And, yeah, he said basically eventually the guy stopped coming as much, basically. Like, she didn't have as many boyfriends. Okay. And so he said that's when she started paying attention to him. Oh, God. He said she started out tickling me. I would end up sprawled out on the floor in tears of laughter and shit like that, begging her to stop.

One day, the babysitter offered to braid his hair, he thought. And he thought braided hair was cool he was excited to change his look up and his friends had hair and braids and shit and so he wanted to do it and he seemed it was great and then he realized that this is all grooming nowadays obviously she said he said that was the day the playfulness crossed a boundary and uh she said he she finally found me a way to get me alone in her bedroom and once she did she secluded him behind a locked door and he said that was it he said that he was too young to realize what she was doing yeah he said he just felt like shit and um yeah he's

basically said that you know anything that she was nice to me about was just grooming me for this so it was like it's even that was you couldn't trust people being nice to you then. Maybe they're doing that. And he also talks. It's weird because he really talks about his mom like this woman betrayed my mother's trust. Right. Which is like he's more concerned about his mom and his mom doesn't even know about it. Right.

Which is. And she'll never know because he never told her. And now it's too late. Yeah, exactly. He said that she molested him for weeks. This went on for weeks. And yeah, he said it was fucking horrible. And then afterwards, she'd give him ice cream.

That was the thing. And he said, make me hate Rocky Road. He said, as if that was a fair trade for what was happening to me, happening to me on a daily basis. Your innocence. Ice cream. Ice. He called it a corrupt bribe it's a great way to putting it uh he she threatened to have him removed from his family uh if if he told if he said anything about that and he said he was terrified and he didn't want anybody to know about it and get taken away from his mother and he was just scared of fucking everybody basically at that point um so that ended up kind of ending after a while he stopped going there and then he said the oldest daughter of a family friend was the next person

to do this to him and he said that he doesn't know if she knew about the what happened with the babysitter or not he said quote i often wonder if the two perverts were in cahoots with one another. Otherwise, it's hard to explain the boldness of their actions. Why does that truthful statement sound so funny? It's so true. But the thing is, they probably didn't. Molesters generally don't discuss shit with each other. Molesting is a solo endeavor.

Whenever they talk about all these giant molestation rings that are going on how'd you even get on that conversation like i'll take a kid that i'll give it to you that's very rare molestation is a gross private thing that you don't want any fucking body to know about because it's the worst thing you could fucking do to something there's shame involved exactly so but it's that sixth fucking sense they just knew she could she's a predator that could smell it on him um she he said that this abuser spent very little time grooming him um he said that she was more aggressive than the babysitter he said quote she took the perversion to new levels that the babysitter never reached oh no jesus the abuse back door who knows the

abuser controlled what we did and forced me to engage in several different sexual acts and he said it was horrible and uh basically he said after that he would find himself just zoning out and shit and um kind of uh trying to keep in his own little private world in his head yeah it's too fast too too much he doesn't know what happened and oh god yeah um he said quote the abuser was also more sophisticated than the babysitter she forced me to wash my private area when she was finished assaulting me she too used the threat of having me removed from my family if i were to ever speak uh of what had taken place to anyone so she's done this before they both have you don't just decide to molest a

fucking kid out of the blue i mean and they were and the fucked up part is that was like a teenage girl the abuser she was probably fucking abused that's why she's doing this most abusers were abused that's how they got the idea you know what i mean and he's eight so it's not like she's like getting it you know what i mean she's not getting anything from i don't know yeah it's it's it's depravity it's just a matter of you're fucking sick i suppose there's a way to to get something out of yes from from even no touching it it's more about the power for them it has to it's not it can't be for sexual no it's there's no way there's sexual gratification there's an eight year old i would fucking hope not but it's in an internal it's not about making her feel good

sometimes it's about making you feel bad and i think that's what it is that it is and uh he said quote eventually i would find a way to purge myself of my anger it happened once i began playing football there you go if you're pissed off yeah it's a good and a big guy yeah it's a good way to fucking take your anger out absolutely he said football would be the outlet that i desperately desperately needed to unleash my fury looking back now I would have never put on a jersey if I had known what I was

doing might want to make someone kill themselves someday however at that time I was likely to incur internally combust I had to find a way to release the pressure that was boiling inside of me yeah he said football would end up being both my salvation from childhood torture and the door that would lead to my ruin.

My God. Jesus Christ, man. That's that's crazy. That's ominous. Fall of 1977 when he was nine. He said that's when he was looking for any way he could to not be put in someone else's care when his mom was at work. He was just looking for a way of something to do to not be abused. Yeah. And so he said that his mom was at work. He was just looking for a way, something to do to not be abused.

And so he said that her rule was after school, I was to head straight to the babysitter's house, which she didn't want to do. And he said she had no idea what was going on, but he said, I told her I would, and every time I did, it ended badly. And this is gross, too. He said, quote, the babysitter was there just waiting to violate me

god damn she had this snickering sickening sneer pasted on her face a kind of gotcha look that was smug and devious jesus christ that is fucking awful uh he said after that though he that's when he started playing football so instead of going to the babysitter he'd go to football practice and that was a way out and i mean mean, football is not exactly healthy, but it's way healthier than getting molested. I would say so. He said, I'd be lying if the sport came easy to him. He said he was athletic, but he didn't know anything about football. And, you know, he said he dropped the ball all the time.

He'd miss tackles. He's a bigger kid, too, so he was kind of goofy. He said people called him sissy and butterfingers and shit like that and uh you know he said it hurt but he kept going um he ends up being in the neighborhood for a high school called uh blunt high school yeah but he wound up at murphy high school and this is the story behind it i don't know how true it is but it's the legend that's persisted uh he smashed a backboard during a summer league basketball game in the eighth grade like as a dunk he ripped it down yeah

he's like six foot three and he's really athletic i mean the guy when he goes into when he at the draft time combine time he's six three 260 pounds and he runs a four five forty so it's a fucking scary that's a scary athleticism you know um So he said that a basketball coach told his mother, Cindy, that they would overlook the cost of replacing the backboard if he would transfer to that high school. We could use him. So I'll tell you what. Come here. We'll eat it. It's all forgotten, which I mean, if you have a bunch of kids, we're going to make the kid pay for the backboard like he knew he could break it.

Right. Jesus Christ. Dominique Wilkins couldn't fucking break it, hanging on for the backboard? Like he knew he could break it. Right. Jesus Christ. Dominique Wilkins couldn't fucking break it, hanging on it and shit. I mean, I've seen, yeah, fuck.

Uh, he attended Murphy high school in Alabama. Uh, had a great high school career too. Uh, as a senior, he had 130 tackles and three interceptions. Holy shit.

Which seems like a lot for like 10, 11 games that they play. Right. He's, he was 1986 first team all state. Also named to the 86 Alabama Sports Writers Association Super 12 team composed of the top 12 high school football players in the state of Alabama. In a state where Alabama is their football team.

That's a big deal. And Auburn is their football, is their religion. I mean, besides Baptist. It goes Baptist, then football. That's a big deal and auburn's their football is their religion i mean besides baptist it goes baptist then football that's how it works down there incredible uh he's also on the basketball team of course as well the fucking hoop exactly and help lead the team to the state tournament in his freshman and senior year so uh been on that was four years of varsity also he's a champion yeah i i found a old high newspaper article from when he was playing high school basketball and it's pretty fucking funny here they talk about him uh he joined the i guess he joined in the senior year he joined the basketball

team with 12 games left in the season and uh the coach said quote he's a full-grown man i'll tell you that the guy's an athlete take it easy sir no shit jesus christ he does play with a brace on his knee which we'll talk about his knee a lot this uh in this course of this episode here and uh yeah he did really well he uh threw they said he uh mccants took the ball about eight feet from the goal he stepped cupped the ball leaped and converted a one-handed throwdown slam that shook the backboard i mean he's fucking dominating they they interview him afterwards and he says quote football still my number one sport i just play basketball mainly for a hobby yeah it could make it can be a lot of fun yeah it trains you can you imagine they

talked about another dunk where he had a two-handed dunk that was just as intense yeah imagine if you could from eight feet away take a step cup and just fucking throw it down and be like ah it's just a hobby not a 10-foot hoop i mean who cares you know and over kids who are trying to stop you from doing that too this isn't want this to happen this isn't a dunk contest here and you're like yeah not a big deal um yeah he said uh uh since i got back on the team i think we were really able to put things together and make a lot of progress. But I don't really feel I played up to my potential tonight. So there you go.

Now, the Buccaneers end up having the same coach as Alabama. A coach from Alabama recruits him, a guy named Ray Perkins, who ends up coaching the Bucs. He was a huge failure as a Giants head coach. He was the New York Giants head coach before Bill Parcells. Oh. So he got shit canned. This guy drafted Lawrence Taylor, so I'll give him that.

Okay. And then he was awful otherwise. So he had a good idea there. He did one good thing by drafting, I don't know, a freak of nature. Yeah. I mean, anybody would have seen him. Yes, that. Yeah.

Him and Phil Simms he drafted, too. Okay. So that was the future. Phil Simms was a good quarterback. Very hot toast, but a great quarterback. They both got inducted into the Giants Hall of Fame. I remember that in a halftime thing. Phil Simms throwing him a pass and shit in the celebration.

He's such a dork. He is a fucking dork, yeah. He's just an egghead. He's almost invisible, also. He is a fucking dork, yeah. He's just... Just an egghead. He's almost invisible also. He just blends into every surrounding. So, just his hair. I've never seen a man so... Him and Boomer Esiason, I was convinced as a child, were the same person.

Boomer Esiason looks like if Phil Simms worked out. Yeah. Like he's pretending to throw left-handed to throw us off the scent. It's ambidextrous, this bastard. How does he do it? The wait is over. So far, you're not losing. The only thing you're losing is my patience.

Quickly, I see that. Bing! The queen of the courtroom is back. I didn't do anything. You wouldn't know the truth if it came up and slapped you 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'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. 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 Wondery's show, Business Wars.

We go deep into some of the biggest corporate rivalries of all time. And in our latest season, Taylor Swift will shake up not only the music business but hollywood and the nfl follow business wars wherever you get your podcasts you can listen ad free on the amazon music or wondery app boomer assign is synthesizing as phil phil sims with a blockhead that's the only difference same everything else yeah except phil's his big brother that gave him wedgies. Yeah. So Ray Perkins tries to recruit him to Alabama. Uh-huh.

But he said that he's a Tennessee fan. He said a guy named Charles Kimbrough, who also played for Murphy High School, he said was one of his idols and he went to Tennessee. Okay. So he wanted to like... Play where he's at. Yeah, he wanted to follow in his footsteps, and he said, you know, there was that, but he said he took a visit to the University of Alabama,

and he said, quote, it was like all that changed once I started stepping into the light. Yeah. I saw all the scattered Southern ass around here. Yeah. Yeah. It's a little different story there than in Tennessee.

And they're so into it there. Yeah. I mean, that Crimson Tide, they're a fucking... It's a party. That's a fan base. it's a little different story there than in tennessee and they're so into it yeah i mean that that crimson tide they're a fucking it's a part that's a fan base that's yeah everything in tennessee too they're real into it yeah they give a shit but not like down there they don't they'll kill you over that shit down there so it's big i'll bet i'll bet somebody's been stabbed uh between auburn and alabama positive gunshots have been fired i mean not like at the stadium but in a trailer somewhere and in a trailer somewhere, in a deep holler somewhere. Somewhere between lot 112 and lot 63. There were some gunshots fired, I feel like. Somebody went down in the gravel street.

I'm pretty positive of it. So in 86, he goes to Alabama, and his grade in his freshman level English course was invalidated by the NCAA Eligibility Center. So he lost. This was under Prop 48, which was overturned later on, but he had to abide by it. He lost a whole year of eligibility and couldn't even practice with them until 1987. Oh, no. So he had to basically pretend like he wasn't on the team for a whole year because he didn't do well in English.

Like he's there to be a fucking English major. What is he going to be, a professor here? It's the University of Alabama. Do you think fucking English really matters? Have you? This state is last and second to last in English. And on top of that, they care about football let's be realistic it's there to do football that's why they're there i mean shit i get it you want him

to learn but his capacity for learning is based upon your public school system and i'm sure they have a medical program and things that are great great architecture or whatever the fuck they have but for the most part yeah if you ask anybody hey what do you what is alabama the fucking crimson tide stand for the football yeah that's they don't know about that uh he said that uh uh or this is a coach of his or i'm sorry this is another player alabama starting center for a few years here he said i think the thing that stood out about keith was he was a freak athlete everybody uses the term but he's kind of one of those first guys that defined it he was always one of the strongest guys on the team and for how big he was he was just so fast he was he was one of these guys who when you saw him you go holy shit that guy is just i mean there's so many guys now like that where you're like oh my god it's a

giant guy who runs like a deer and can jump and fucking you know it's crazy the game is so fast today it's so fast so yeah he's an average player with his things now this is hey yeah this is what you have to be to be drafted now have this you don't have a shot yeah whereas back then that was like holy shit he's going to be the next lawrence taylor and that's what they were telling him or the next Derek Thomas because he played on the same team as Derek Thomas really yeah he played he was like Derek Thomas's backup kind of deal here not backup but he got less playing time because of Derek Thomas and uh they ask him here uh there's a in his sophomore year an interview about this later on they said your first year playing in Alabama you shared the field with Derek Thomas what did you learn from being

around him and do you have a favorite Derek Thomas memory if shared the field with Derek Thomas. What did you learn from being around him, and do you have a favorite Derek Thomas memory? If you don't know, Derek Thomas was one of the all-time great outside linebackers as far as. Would have been one of the best ever. He's LT without the killer instinct. And I'm not saying he doesn't have a killer instinct, but no one has a killer instinct.

And a tinted shade? Sometimes. No one has a killer instinct like LT. No, they literally wants to kill lt yeah if if you at that point if if you replace the other team and put animals out there he would run them down and eat them with his bare hands he's just that fucking until he breaks somebody's bone yeah then he feels awful yeah he feels bad he wants to break your bone but then when he does it it's not it's like oh i shouldn't have done that that wasn't that was what i wanted that wasn't nice he says quote my favorite dt memory was him waking me

up at 3 30 in the morning telling me to go to the next level and that this is what it's going to take oh my god this is what guys who are amazing in the nfl do they wake up at 3 a.m with a fucking chip on their shoulder get up and go to the next level. We're going to go to the next level. Can I go back to sleep and then to the next level? Can we go to the next level at about 7.30? Take it easy, L. Ron Hubbard. I'm sleeping. What are we doing here?

What level can we achieve in bed? Can I just be in between the two levels? How much sleep do I require to go clear? That's what I want to do. That's what I'm looking to do here. We would go out to the stadium steps and we would do things while everyone else was asleep at home. My God. That's why Derek Thomas was Derek Thomas.

And we would do extra stuff on the field after everyone else had gone off the field. We would do extra stuff so when the fourth quarter hit and everybody was tired, we were conditioned. We studied to become a student of the game. He was one of the best I've ever seen, especially in the NFL. Derek was unique. He was a great player. Did he die in a car accident? Yeah.

Yeah. It was sad. He's still playing, for fuck's sake. That was sad, man. I was going to ask you, maybe this killed him. If his heart exploded, maybe get some fucking rest, Derek. Jesus, get some rest. I had a feeling.

Yeah. That's brutal, man. It's wild. Yeah, it was terrible. I remember that. It was like brutal, man. It's wild. Yeah, it was terrible. I remember that. It was like, whoa, it was 99 maybe, something like that, 2000. It was so good. He was fucking great.

He played number 58. He was the shit on the Chiefs. So the 88 Alabama team that he plays on here, they go 9-3. They finish like 17th overall in the AP poll. They do go to the Sun Bowl. Oh, boy. They beat Army. Is that in Florida? I think it is. They do go to the Sun Bowl. Oh, boy. They beat Army. Is that in Florida?

I think it is. Probably. It's the Sun Bowl. Louisiana's the Sugar Bowl. Cotton Bowl? Both press sugar, cotton. I'll bet the Sun Bowl's in Texas. There's the sugar, the cotton, the peach.

They're all down there. Who knows? The Sun Bowl. It's probably in New Mexico or something. But they beat Army 29-28, which is playing Army in a bowl game. He finished second on the team that year with 78 tackles, second to Derek Thomas, obviously. And he recorded the most tackles on the team in four different games as well.

He had a 17-tackle game versus Auburn. That is awesome. Versus Auburn. So that's 14 versus Mississippi State. Leading tackles. That's incredible. That's whaturn. So that's... And 14 versus Mississippi State. Leading tackles. That's incredible. That's what they want to see right there. They don't give a shit what you do against other teams.

They give a fuck what you do against Auburn. Right. So they ended up, like I said, beating Army. And McCants had a game high with 13 tackles also. So a guy here, a coach of his, said, quote, On the field, he was unstoppable. Keith was like the predator. Speed, said, quote, on the field he was unstoppable. Keith was like the predator. Speed, power, and a bad attitude, just all the tools.

He was a man among boys. Sideline to sideline, cover, drop deep, intercepting passes, and rushing the passer. He was really fun to watch. He was, because he was a linebacker that just, if he was coming at you, you better watch out. And if he's dropping back in coverage, he's pretty nasty there, too. He had a big, wide wingspan, if he was coming at you, you better watch out. And if he's dropping back in coverage, he's pretty nasty there, too.

He had a big, wide wingspan, too, for picking balls off. The same guy said he just had an innate sense of how to play the game of football. That's a dangerous person out there on the field, man. He was just intimidating. He'd hit people, and people did not want to be hit by him anymore. And he was. He was nasty. Another coach said Keith was a great athlete to be hit by him anymore. And he was. He was nasty. Another coach said, Keith was a great athlete, a great player in college, but he was kind of a wild card.

I think defensive coordinator Don Lindsey let him line up and do whatever he wanted to do. He kind of free reign, and maybe that created some bad habits. But it worked for him in college. He was a great college player. Which, if you have a guy that's that skilled in college you do you'll have the other 10 guys have assignments and that guy cause havoc yeah just wreck shit plays out and that's great in college but you have to have an even greater level of crazy athletic ability to do that in the nfl right and but you've got to understand you've

got a very few guys you have a football acumen to understand when to do what exactly like that's what they did with LT. Lawrence Taylor. They said, he's just so fucking wreak havoc. It doesn't matter. And he would know right where to line up. So football smart. And yeah, I mean, he just was.

It was ridiculous. He was. He's a weird kind of savant. Yeah. So at this point, when he's in college, his dad got a hold of him and his dad got a hold of him and he heard that his dad was looking for him. He had stopped by the college and asked for him and shit like that. So he finally went to see his dad and he said that he went to a building that he had and he was going to decide whether to go in.

Finally, he said, screw this. He saw the sign in the stairwell and he just jogged up to the third floor. Where's that open? Dad, I guess it was his office or something. say open yeah sign say sign say open sign say close no open i changed mine you have schwannerman now he said as the doors open i hustled to room 320 yeah he said there were several unfamiliar faces gathered in the waiting area outside of the room the door to room 320 was closed i felt all the eyes of the people in these hard plastic chairs staring in my direction uh i said do you know if herbert kaiser is in this room uh and the guy said and somebody said where who are you a woman asked him and he

said i'm his son alvin i was told to get here as quickly as possible that he wanted to see me and she said i'm sorry but herbert passed away 20 minutes ago oh no so then he missed his dad there so he was upset about that he finally decided you know what i'm gonna try to have a relationship with the guy fine and then he went to his went to see him and he's dead it's over uh so his dad had a will okay his dad's got money he does he's got all sorts of shit and he said he was called in for the reading of the will oh no he was named in the will uh he said the balding lawyer who was reading from the will uh he said you know got ready to read and he said quote to my son alvin keith mccance i herbert kaiser being of sound mind and body leave absolutely nothing wow left him who gots but made sure to mention it

yeah so he couldn't like say that not just nothing absolutely nothing nothing isn't that fucking ridiculous that's a cunt move man yeah he said he said it was just i felt nauseous if i were to describe my state of mind at that moment i would simply say i was devastated yeah he said he felt like he like let him back in right and gave him a drop of trust and then he just fucking burned him again and even worse from that uh a dead man who uh for all intents and purposes is supposed to take care of you yeah uh his last moment of acknowledgement of you is to tell you i give you nothing nothing i mean he should have understood yeah he said it was just the final insult just another time that he gave me nothing

it's exactly what he said he goes i just considered it the final insult. Just another time that he gave me nothing. That's exactly what he said. He goes, I just considered it the final insult from my dad and whatever. My mom's the only one that fucking cared. Wow, man. So good for him there anyway for realizing that. But you can see where bitterness is going to creep in from his childhood through now. There's a lot of chip on his shoulder. So far, one person on Earth has cared for him. That's what I mean.

That's crazy. In 1989, Alabama, they go 10 and 2. This time they finished ninth. shoulder so far one person on earth has cared for him that's what i mean that's crazy uh in 1989 alabama they go 10 and 2 you know this time they finished ninth they go to the sugar bowl which we're not sure where that is i believe that's at it's in new orleans i think it's in louisiana right i think do they make sugar there sugar there's gotta be sugar cane in louisiana it's damp i guess but uh they lose that game don't tell me because i fucking don't care we don't give a shit at all they lose that game to miami of florida so they were that was the u at that point they lose 33 25 yeah and uh i remember seeing on the u they talk about that game a lot uh he led the team this year

with 119 tackles and four sacks wow so he was all over the place uh his 119 tackles ties him for sixth all-time for tackles in a season by an alabama player awesome not bad also in 89 he is the butt kiss award runner-up yeah um yes and that's the best linebacker in college yeah which by the way brian bosworth won that twice in a row did he really fucked up and how weird is that has anybody ever done that i i don row. Did he really? He fucked up. Isn't that weird? Is that? Has anybody ever done that? I don't know. They've got to have, right?

I don't know. I guess since then, probably. Although, if you win it once, you're probably coming out. Yeah. Now, you're not sticking around. But you get two, then you're for sure coming out. Yeah. He's a runner-up to Percy Snow of the Chiefs.

Really? Also, yeah. Percy Snow. I remember that guy. He was a unanimous first-team All-American he's also alabama was an s was the sec champion okay he's first team all sec uh cbs like the tv you know network national defensive player of the year wow and mvp of the iron bowl awesome which was the i think that's alabama i think that's no i think that's alabama auburn okay that's the game they play against each other i believe really if not that's that much iron in fucking alabama i think it's the award they've got a bowl i think it's a trophy that you get

it's some sort of okay i don't know what the fuck in the desert here yeah it's all what do they win a fucking hourglass of sand what do they, I think they win a thing of sunblock, I believe. It's just you win some Hawaiian Tropic. And a copper tone. That's all you get. Yeah, that's what you get. Here you go. Here you go, sun bum.

Get the fuck out of here. Here's one of those bad sun chairs that'll rot out in the sun in six months and you'll fall through on your ass. One of these. Here's a skin doctor appointment go get your holes checked everything here just rots yeah the sun it's fucked up like you think everything back east it rains and shit you think things would fall apart they last forever yeah out here you leave something in the sun for 15 minutes and it's disintegrated to shit cars floorboards will

have holes in it for sure but here everything rots it just rots it doesn't rust it just rots everything but cars it turns back to dust it goes back to the earth here car like bodies don't rust but the everything in the engine deteriorates to nothing all the rubber if you're if you don't use your windshield well either way even if you do use them you have to you need two new pairs of windshield wipers a year in phoenix because if it rains once you're like oh i haven't had these on in three months you turn them on and one of the rubber things comes completely off because back and forth on your windshield out of your windshield it's the worst thing windshield wipers and a windshield fuck god damn it so that was his etched rainbow that's what everybody out

here has an etched rainbow you've had your car more than three years. You have a fucking scratch etched rainbow because you've lost a fucking you've lost a windshield wiper at some point. Unreal. In the dry. So there's rumors of him coming out early. And nowadays, obviously, that is completely normal. If you finish your junior year and there's any interest in you at all, you're coming

out. You might hurt yourself. You're not throwing the money away. Back then, that was still considered crazy to come out early. Oh, yeah. That was not normal at all. So at that point, I think they just made it so you didn't have to apply for a hardship waiver, which you used to have to do. Prove you were poor.

I need money, period. I don't have to prove that to you. I need money, right. Yeah. Like, I need money, period. I don't fuck up to prove that to you. I can't keep making money for old men. I need it. Exactly. Yeah, I need to make it for richer old men so they can give me some of it anyway. So the February 12, 1990 issue of Sports Illustrated had an article that focused a lot on McCants. The name of it was The Young and the Restless.

And it was a profile of him and other college juniors who wanted to declare for the NFL draft, basically. Before this, Chicago Tribune's Ed Sherman described McCants as the biggest all-around star in the whole draft. He said he had pro scouts drooling over him and projected him to be, quote, a virtual lock to be the top pick in next spring's NFL draft. That's a lot. That says a lot.

Like I said, he's really strong, and he's running a 4-5-1 40-yard dash, which is obscene, honestly. Like, a receiver can run that. Right, that's what receivers generally run, but for a linebacker that's nuts nowadays that's a possession receiver right but it's a linebacker that's also a linebacker right that's a guy running down the field trying to gain yardage not a guy

racing after the quarterback to stop yardage not a 260 pounder anyway you might have guys that are i mean like lt was 230 he wasn't a big which made the way he hit even more remarkable but dangerous still like you know that's a big man to be running 451 this guy he became friends with emmett smith in college okay because they both played down there emmett played at florida i believe if i'm not mistaken the gators i'm pretty sure uh was it that or florida no it's florida um he they were became friends so keith and emitt Smith became friends because, like I said, they played in the same conference, and they were both named to the 89 All-American team. Okay.

And Smith called him, actually. Emmitt Smith, think about this. Now, Emmitt Smith at this point in his life has a lot of success, a lot of money, kind of a big, you know, a big, what's the way I want to look at this? He's got a lot of respect in football and all this sort of thing. Casts a big you know a big um what's the way i want to look at this got a lot of respect in football and all this sort of thing a big shadow yeah and keith mccance at this point is um i mean people are surprised he's not in prison so it's like one of those but at this moment in time emmett was calling keith for advice oh really yeah which i mean i don't know if he took it or not what he asked well he ended up taking it because he called him for advice leading up to the 1990 draft,

whether to come out early, because Emmitt came out early, too. And, yeah, basically, they wanted to come out. They couldn't at that point. So the NFL knew there was a shitload of lawsuits coming out of this, and they thought they were going to lose. So in late February, they allowed juniors to enter the draft. The NFL just gave up and said, said fine you don't have to you know if you played three years now the rule is three years remember the whole maurice claret episode all bullshit all ridiculous um so yeah they thought they were the team that was number one at that point they had the pick was the atlanta falcons

okay we're coming off a 3 and 13 shit show of a season. So that's who they thought was going there. And Keith said about coming out early, he said, I knew they were going to let it happen. We had some inside information. I was the first one to make the announcement. I talked to Emmett Smith and said, you announce first. He said, no, you announce first. You take the attention.

No, you do it. You take the heat. So I you do it. You take the heat. So I made that announcement. I made the announcement that I was gone. I had to withdraw from school and all that. A lot of Alabama fans were really upset. But one reason I felt I left was because I had a bad knee. I was already hurt.

So he was like, another year, I might have fucked my knee up worse. Might be the end of it. Not had all that money, man. He said, football is a child sport but you get paid extremely well to do it that became my profession and i worked all my life to get there and i'm right there i was rated number one in the country why wouldn't you turn pro it wasn't about it wasn't as much about the money as it was about making it and playing in the national football league about 0.1 of the people in college football make it in the NFL,

and I was ranked number one in the world. That says a whole lot. Anybody who gets upset at someone coming out, what the fuck would you do? No, I think I'll stay here and risk the security of my entire future and my family and four brothers and sisters and my mom who lives in the projects. That's okay.

They can go on because i just college is just fun and i want these fans to just have a good time next year the other side of the coin is your goal in college is to be yeah number one yeah he's number one he's he did it early yeah that's yeah he should be able to leave if you were going to college for like marketing or something and the top ad agency in the world taps you and says we want to give you our our star position right and pay you a shitload of money we think you're going to be the best you'd fucking leave college because that's why you're going to college right so uh he said quote i had a bad bad knee double bad and i was having problems with that knee it was like i don't know if I would have stayed an extra year. I don't know what would have happened.

I don't know if I would ever have gotten the chance to make it to the National Football League or play in the National Football League, which is every college and high school kid's dream. I knew I was going to go pretty high after talking to several NFL teams. I hated to leave Alabama. Alabama will always be in my heart. Those are the best years of my career. I miss college.

I miss it with a passion. I don't think I've ever heard anyone put it like that. But when I stepped into the NFL, it was business. And I didn't know how big of a business it was until I got there. And yeah, very much a business. Everything. Yeah. And like I said, he looked like he was going to be number one. But the Falcons, well, the Falcons didn't like his agent. but the Falcons well the Falcons didn't like his agent and that's a problem at that point his agent Lance Luchnik of course it's a Lance

yeah had never represented an NFL player before why would McCants take that guy and he was an NBA agent but he had been decertified by the NBA what so I don't know why I don't know if he did something wrong why did he get tied up with this guy that's the thing he got talked into it he gets talked into a lot he's a very naive guy

he really is that's the problem as we'll talk about it trusting very naive very kind of country like even though he's not really from the country he's got that country like you know i guess i'll go along with it and people just walk all over him um and uh one anonymous general general manager in the nfl told the sporting news that mccant's choice of agent called his question and his character into question which is bullshit that's his character that's stupid that's just stupid um he says that the mccant says that they wrote quote chop jobs about him talking show you could take these. The number one guy.

Let's see what's something wrong with him. There's a million articles about how great he is. Let's find one about how shitty he is. Len Pasquarelli, who's an NFL writer for years and years, who's with the Atlanta Journal Constitution then. guys put together a story on March 20th 1990 and it detailed alleged illegal payments to an unidentified member of the McCants family by the agent Luchnik or Lucknick or whatever his name is who also represented McCants cousin who is NBA forward Willie Anderson oh really who also had some problems if I'm not mistaken no no nevermind it was greg anderson it's cadillac different guy um so oh did william i don't remember but either way there you go you got it so that's how he knew luchnik or luchnik or whatever his name is pascarelli came to mobile mobile to interview

mccance and mccance said that he thought it was going to be a positive story yeah like all the other ones they were doing and he said after it was published he said the falcons were spooked and didn't want him anymore basically um luchnik ended up paying five thousand dollar fine for failing to register as an agent in the state of alabama which was required mccant said about the article quote they did a lot of digging they looked at everything any kind of surgery they looked at it i had a couple of surgeries while i was at alabama and then with the nfl they just kind of turn you inside out well yeah that's gross too uh he said that pasquarelli came in and just humiliated me and cut me down to size he said which is that's why they hire reporters uh they say quote go in here and do this to this guy which isn't really it it's more like um what's everybody else saying?

What can I get attention if I say? Kind of a different thing here. But either way, the same result. He said when it happened, it was so mind-boggling that I didn't understand it at all, and he didn't get it. He said, quote, I got to sleep one night, and I wake up, and I've got everything in the world negative, talking about my legs, my work ethic. I killed a man man he didn't kill a man but he's just saying like where the hell did

this come from that's when i realized that this right here is a business yeah well no shit um his agent refused to discuss the money uh accusations and uh they said this is an unidentified family member that the at Journal-Constitution is quoting, quote, somebody in the family got money from Luchnik, but it wasn't Keith or Mama McCants. They haven't taken anything from anybody, from no agent. There wasn't any handouts to this house. So that's what they said there.

And the agent said, quote, I've been hired to do his contract and it ends there. The other stuff doesn't matter, the things people are talking about, things in my past, they've got absolutely nothing to do with Keith McCants or his contract. So he shows up for individual workouts with NFL teams out of shape and overweight.

Oh no. Which is a bad sign. Yeah. It's never good. That calls into question your character. That's, yeah, this is all, yeah, just you can't even hold it together for another few months until you can get drafted. Yeah. It's never good. That calls into question your character. That's, yeah. This is all, yeah. You can't even hold it together for another few months until you can get drafted. Yeah.

So he worked out there. And also, the other thing is, he's been listed at Alabama at 6'5", always. So everybody thought he was 6'5". And then they measure him, and he's 6'3". Yeah, that's a problem. That's not okay. Yeah, that's the college that does that shit, though. They just want it to look better in the program, like fucking wrestling.

Yeah, and from the stands, you look at a guy that's 6'3 and a guy that's 6'5, you can't fucking tell. No, with helmets and who the hell knows. They all look huge. I don't know. So the height's a problem, but he's 6'3, 260, runs a 4'5, 140. That's pretty fucking awesome. I'm sorry. He doesn't need to be 6'5.

Who cares? So the 1990 NFL draft comes up. Mel Kuyper Jr. said that during the first day of the NFL draft, he called Keith the best defensive player in the draft. He said, in my opinion, Keith says in his opinion, he should have been number one overall. Someone once asked me if I wanted to be the next Cornelius Bennett, to which I proudly responded, no, I want to be the first Keith McCants. There you go. That's the way to do it. Now, Atlanta trades the pick, the number one pick, to the Colts, who pick up, Jimmy, do

you remember? 90? 90. No, I don't. Jeff George. Oh, embarrassing. Oh, man. One of the greatest arms of anybody who's ever played football and just never a more hated guy in football.

Everyone fucking hates that guy. Well, he could throw it really long onto the other team. No, he was a great— Dude, that— When he was a— He's an amazing guy dropping back and throwing a pass. Yeah. Everything outside of that, he just doesn't do well in the NFL.

Like, he would be— I remember that one year with the Raiders. I want to say it was like 97. Raiders? Yeah, he was with the Raiders at the end there. I remember that. The team was, like, terrible. I want to say they were 4-12 or something.

But he had, like, 31 touchdowns and five picks or some shit. Like, he had a, you know, smoke in the ear throwing the deep ball, but the team was awful. He was one of those type of guys. So they get him. Second overall, another bust. Blair Thomas, the running back from Penn State. The Jets pick him up and it doesn't work out.

He hurts himself and just fights his whole career with injuries. Third overall, though, a Hall of Famer, Cortez Kennedy, defensive tackle for the Seahawks out of Miami. It's big. Number four overall is the Tampa Bay Bucs, and they take Keith McCants with the number four overall pick in the draft. And that's going to sound very high when I tell you who's picked next. Number five overall is the San Diego Chargers,

and they take who? Phillip Rivers. Junior Seau. Oh, no! Who plays linebacker how do you take mccance over him so no matter what the bucks are always going to get oh you could add junior say out wow that was a fuck up a that would have changed the trajectory of your franchise possibly yeah because the i mean the chargers were shit for so long they suck until they get junior and

that's when everything started to turn around right not by 94 they're in the super bowl yeah i mean that's that natron means yeah it wasn't their quarterback situation marty schottenheimer yelling at him then now that he was still in kansas city yeah that was like june jones and guys like that i want to remember who the guy was in 94 when they went but okay they were there um so yeah number six overall another great defensive player free safety mark carrier for the bears out of usc was hard hitting son of a bitch number seven here's a draft bust for you heisman award winner i believe uh detroit lions quarterback you know who it is uh no andre where oh remember him yeah out of houston i want to say he didn't win the heisman i don't think but he was university of houston i want to say he had like record in touchdown passes or amount of yards or some shit but in the nfl it didn't translate they didn't really give him a chance either i'll say no

detroit detroit's famous for just ruining people especially quarterbacks back then because they were doing the run and shoot yeah then they were doing the thing where they'd switch out quarterbacks with pete and eric kramer back and forth which never works either uh number uh let's see dolphins picked richmond webb at number nine who was around forever as a tackle ronaldo turnbull lamar lathan oh my god this is a bad draft uh 17 overall dallas selects emmett smith oh that's good so that's three Hall of Famers in the first 17 picks is pretty good yeah and then after that Rodney Hampton it was a good Giants running back

through the 90s Rob Moore the Jets okay receiver that sort of thing here the San Diego Chargers picked Seau obviously like we said 12 time Pro Bowler and Hall of Famer um i guess seattle almost took mccants over cortez kennedy really they thought about it yeah um the uh this is uh

general manager of the seahawks here guy who went on to be one at the time he was in the front office he said i remember a big kid that was physical could could have probably played any of the four linebacker positions for us at that time. We played a four-man front, so he wasn't a great fit for us. And that's probably why he didn't get more traction at our place, just based on fit. And I think we were kind of in love with Cortez. We just thought Cortez was such a good fit for what we wanted to do. That's just obviously. Other guys in that draft as we go on.

A few, I mean, there's a bunchfl guys who've played all through the 90s we won't bore you with that but uh pick number 192 the broncos selected shannon sharp that far down far down so i think it's fourth round wow so i figured i'd tell you their sixth round so good for him let's just say this picked before a hall of fame player yeah grace yeah this is grace right if you're picked before junior say out yeah he's he's in a hall of fame sandwich basically unbelievable but he's the non-hall of fame meat in a hall of fame sandwich fourth fourth overall um two days after the draft he undergoes knee surgery two days two days so he's waiting to get out yeah he's waiting to get drafted so he you know didn't ruin his draft position and uh ray perkins who was

the bucks coach at that time he said quote and this is the guy who recruited him to college so that's why they picked him obviously he said keith had a really great ability to play the linebacker spot as as far as height speed weight everything else i felt like he had everything that could possibly make him a really good uh really good at the pro level. I knew when we drafted him it was going to take some time. You're not talking about a finished product coming out of college. So is he ready to line up in a regular NFL game and start? No, not yet.

That's fine. That's because he's a rookie. A lot of football cards, like I said, out on him. A lot of football cards, like I said, out on him. His one football card from score quoted Kentucky head coach Jerry Claiborne and said, quote, Keith is one of the best football players I've ever seen. Have you ever seen a linebacker as big as he is? I never have. He looks like an elephant and runs like a deer.

It's a big compliment from a opposing coach here. And also Ray Perkins, very excited to have him on the team, said he plays like he's never out of the play. That's the intensity level I love. So good for him. He signs with the Bucs, and Hugh Culverhouse, the Bucs owner, is notoriously a fucking cheapskate. Doesn't give bonuses.

Guys hold out. They drafted Bo Jackson first, and Bo said, I'll go play baseball. I'll go to the minor leagues and ride a fucking bus rather than play for your shit team. So that's where the Bucs were at this point, and that was only three years earlier. So what did he make? But they ended up having to open the checkbook for him

because Culverhouse is also an Alabama alum. Oh, and booster. And loves Alabama. So he's excited about Keith McCants. He's been watching him for four years. So McCants signs a five year, $7.4 million deal, which in 90 was enormous and a record setting for a defensive player,

$2.5 million signing bonuses. That was a record for a defensive player at that point. So he's fucking fucking this is good for him very well paid yeah um his agent called it fair and equitable for both sides yeah no shit i really like that commission check that's it it was pretty good i enjoyed getting that fucking four percent um he said he needed a week to get ready and we went to work and got it done keith is an intelligent young man and he made all the decisions okay uh also here uh here's a guy named danny sheridan he uh is a sports analyst and a handicapper he met mckay mccance when he was when mccance was 14 and this is this guy liked mccance

and uh you know thought he was a good kid and watched his football career approach. And when the draft approach here, when the draft came up, he ended up obviously going into the draft rather than staying for a senior season. And this guy Sheridan says, quote, I told him he had to take his signing bonus and put it away and invest it. Not pay any taxes on it,

just live very comfortably off his salary, which is 300 grand a year. Put that shit away and invest it. Don't piss it away and have to pay all these taxes and shit. Invest it in something. He said that way, if he got hurt and the money dried up, he'd have something to fall back on.

Very good advice. Brilliant advice. And if you end up signing a big contract next time, then take it and buy a fucking car with it. Who cares? Buy a house. Who gives a shit? But for now,

put it in the bank. Quote, he wouldn't hear of it i said keith if you don't listen to me you're going to have all this new wealth you're going to be surrounded by an entourage of people who like you who like you just because you have money and unless you're the next lawrence taylor in a few years you're going to be broke yeah um and he guess what happened to him yeah he said that sounds fun he said that he's literally on a documentary called broke in 2012 literally for espn not good um so shit uh ray perkins even his coach talks to him about money everybody around him tries to tell him hey look man yeah he's never had any money this shit's fleeting keith and he's never had any money. This shit's fleeting, Keith. And he's never had any money, so you can't expect him to know how to manage money. That's perfectly fine.

It's hard for... If you give someone who's never had shit and steals fruit when they're a kid and you go, here's two and a half million dollars in cash, you can't expect them to go, oh, what's the interest rate on T-bills right now? They don't fucking... You know? How the hell is he supposed to know? Is that a hedge fund or CDs?

Yeah. Yeah. He's 21 years old i mean 21 years old shitload of money and feeling like you're zeus yeah fuck and somebody telling you that you're about to have a bunch of new friends yeah that sounds great yeah i would say um now ray perkins the coach said he sat him down when he got the 2.5 million dollars and perkins said he knew of financial advisors in Alabama who could help him manage his money for free.

They wouldn't even charge him. They just don't want him to fuck up, basically. But, you know, alumni, people that would take very good care of him and not steer him in the wrong direction. And he instead, he hired his agent, basically, to do that sort of shit. He's dumb with money. That's one thing. He He's dumb with money. That's one thing. He's not good with money.

Shortly after he signs, McCants visited Jimmy Wigfield, who's a Mobile Press Register sports writer who covered him for his whole career. McCants offered to buy him a Jeep. Why? Just because he liked him. Hey, Wigfield. Yeah, he goes, hey, Wigfield, I'm going to buy you a Jeep. What do you think about the CJs? Yeah, and Wigfield said he couldn't goes, hey, Wigfield, I'm going to buy you a Jeep. What do you think about the CJs?

Yeah, and Wigfield said he couldn't accept it because it's not ethical. I'm a sports writer. I can't take a Jeep from a player. You crazy? Why don't you buy one and I'll go ride around with you? Yeah, that sounds fun. I'll write a story about it. He says, quote, I'm not sure he understood.

He meant well. I think for every one of me, there were 10 other people around him who would take him up on such offers. Yeah, that might explain where all that money went. And yeah, here's another story of him pissing money away. This is at a dinner before he's due to report back to the Bucks for training camp. He returned to Alabama with a pie, literally just a briefcase full of cash. Why would you just a pile of money? Oh, my God.

He got together with some of his old friends. Jesus, don't do that. And they had dinner at the Mobile's Riverview Plaza Hotel, which I guess is expensive. And here's a sports writer here, and one of his coaches talks about this. Quote, Keith was sitting at the table at the river view with some woman that he had brought with him from tampa he said uh uh wayne rowe was there it was a writer wayne rowe's wife was there i was going to treat everybody i left the table and told everybody you all get what you want and i'll be right back this is the the coach guy here um

he said i had a few hundred dollars in my pocket i came back and there was a 200 dollar bottle of dom perignon sitting on the table with the cork out yeah it was one of those corks that flared out when you took it out of the bottle so it doesn't go back you ain't going back in it's champagne it's over yeah i'm like who ordered this i took a steak knife and whittled the cork down to where i could get it back in the bottle and told them, come get this because I'm not paying for it. Oh, my God. That's hilarious. He fucking whittled away a cork and stuck it back in a champagne bottle.

That's not going to work. No, that's yours. Yeah, you can't. You can't put the pop back in a champagne bottle. Wow. He says, quote, the fix was already in. back in a champagne bottle. Wow. He says, quote, the fix was already in. Keith was going to pay for it. Come to find out, Keith had an attache case with him, and I swear to God, it had $500,000 in it in cash.

Why are you carrying that around? Don't carry that. It was unreal. I told Keith, you can't be walking around with this kind of money. But he was from the Orange Grove Projects and never really had anything. I'm sure they took care of him up at Alabama. But he's like so many of these other kids. Once they get a chance, they buy jewelry and things that are expensive and cars, and they just go overboard.

Because they're young. Right. Anybody young is going to go, I want a fucking flashy car that makes girls want to fuck me more. I want something. I want a nice watch. I want a nice apartment. And fun. And fun, because I'm young and indestructible.

Look at me. I'm so athletic. I'm amazing. This is only a fifth of my signing bonus. It's fine. Yeah. Another coach tells a story of McCants returning to tuscaloosa around the same time and showing off quote a damn briefcase full of 100 bills to his former teammates

so he came in to show all his alabama teammates hey this is what the nfl can do um yeah he says keith does quote i was able to keep a keep good on my promise and buy my mother the home of her dreams it It was an enormous house. What do you think an enormous house is? For mom. 2,000 square feet. 8,800 square feet. What?

For mom. Mom does not need 8,800. Nobody's. Who needs 10,000 square feet of house? 9,000 square feet of house. Come on. God, Jesus. I mean, seriously, think about how that's just silly.

Got mom her dream house. Why does mom have that kind of dreams at this point? I guarantee you mom was like, that's too big for me. I bet you anything. She was like, don't buy me that. That's crazy. It was nestled in the middle of 40 acres of land. Oh, God.

8,800 square feet on 40 acres of land. How many dollars is that? A lot, probably. It's very expensive. He said, I wanted all of that and more in the house I was buying for my mother. We would never have to imagine what it was like sitting inside of one of those modern day castles any longer because we would have our own. He said that also, quote, my newfound wealth also meant I had a whole new set of, quote, best friends. Yeah, shit loads of them.

They all love you now. You're the best keith and the adoration of relatives whom i haven't hadn't spoken to in quite some time honestly i was on my i was my own worst enemy i was too generous my girlfriend at the time crystal thought so too my generosity contributed to our breakup wow suddenly i was helping family members with college tuition and car payments. Oh, boy. This isn't the first time you've heard all this too familiar story. When a person goes from rags to riches, people start to come out of the woodwork to get their hands in your pocket. I don't want

to leave the impression that I didn't treat some of myself to some of life's finer things because I did. Gold jewelry, Rolex watches, new cars, a home in tampa were just a few of the things that i indulged in and in the broke documentary he talks about he bought a boat he's got like a big boat yeah and that and something happened to that because he likes scuba diving he's got a big giant fucking boat he's got all this shit and he just said he just didn't even think where it would go just spent money and if he still had money, great. He keeps spending it. Oh, my God.

Which is a bad thing to do. 1990 in Tampa here, the Bucs finish. Ray Perkins gets shit-canned, by the way, the guy that drafts him in the middle of the season. And they go 6-10 that year. I don't know what they expected out of the Bucs. They sucked. They had their two quarterbacks, Vinny Testaverde chris chandler okay those guys absolutely gary anderson reggie

cobb is the running backs and raleigh's fucking guys from football cards and shit and the bucks games are never on tv yeah um yeah so he's still bothered by the knee injury during his rookie year one of his teammates said quote i remember seeing him move around that first year, and I said to myself, something isn't right with him. He's hurt. And he was hurt. He had a problem. He played in 15 games, only started four,

and he had 44 tackles, two sacks, and a fumble recovery. And he's had surgery. And he's had surgery, which isn't terrible. I mean, it could go either way. Ray Perkins said, when he got to our place it just blew up I don't really know what happened to him he had a great ability to play the game as far as I know he was a great kid he just went down an alley he shouldn't have gone down that's about it it's a shame and that just has to be about it now the problem is is they rushed him back from

surgery to get in the thing and he I'm sure he wanted to rush back and they wanted to rush him back he said he wanted to justify his signing bonus and his pick basically i'm number four overall i can't be sitting there's a lot of pressure on you a ton of pressure and it's at this point that he said he started taking pain medication to get into the game uh-huh um he said quote i was just thinking about going out on the field and proving that i should have been number one they would give you pills put them in a bottle i'd take them when i was in pain the knee started having wear and tear on it one of the coaches made the comment that i would not be able to play after five years um so yeah they start giving the danger with uh numbing that it's it's hurting because

your body's telling you no absolutely if you don 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'm Darcy Carden, and I'm inviting you to listen to my new podcast,

WikiHole, from Smartless 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 sciency term for eardrum we embark on a hyperlink roller coaster as we start out on a wikipedia page and go from link to link to link to link careening through trivia odd 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 Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. And all you're doing is numbing it and playing through the pain oh fuck yeah wait till you hear something he does with that or they they do with him yeah it's wild uh this is when he gets into scuba diving and buys boats and shit too scuba diving is good for your leg that's good you're moving it and there's no resistance that's good shit and maybe that's why he started doing they probably told him swimming was good yeah uh. There's a difference between swimming and spending $20,000 on fucking scuba gear.

And a boat. Don't forget the whole boat to go scuba diving. And off the coast of Florida, you're not buying a $20,000 boat. And down in the Caribbean, you eat scuba diving. You like to go around. This is a $300,000, $400,000 boat. This is a problem. Yeah, it's a lot.

So the next year, Coach Floyd Peters was brought in and he converted McCants from a linebacker to a defensive end. Okay. And Keith didn't want to do it, but the guy told him that he could be very successful

and told him that you could be the next Chris Dolman because that's what Chris Dolman did and he was a great player. Seahawks. Yeah, no, the Vikings. Seahawks too?

Maybe at the end, but he was a Viking forever. It was him and Keith Millard on that line and that whole late 80s, early 90s Viking team. He might have went there later, but his main team was the Vikings, definitely. He said, quote, although basically he accepted it, and he said, fine. He said that uh you know teams won't take me lightly i can play this any position on a football team except maybe quarterback that was the way he put it i'll play put me in there a wide receiver i'll go play it okay he said when

the season when it was over he said the guy told him he might be in the pro bowl and uh he said that he doesn't play he doesn't care he just wanted to play. Off the field, though, he's just living it up. He says, quote, You could say I hung around the wrong people, but I think it was more the wrong people came around me. I was green. I gave people the benefit of the doubt. I was trying to help them.

And in Tampa, that place is a party, man. Oh, it is. That can be a ruin of man in places like it's a port town yeah it's a fucking pirates and whores yeah that's what we've said pirates whores and roosters that's what's going on there it's a mess that town it's a it really is psychotic and when you do a live show there and you go pirates and whores they all cheer like this town is this town is different this is a different kind of place and then you you're like, what are these roosters? And they're like, yeah.

Let's eat them. Cheering about roosters. So he said, quote, if you want to know where my addiction to painkillers started, it was right there in the locker room. I was on the road to becoming an addict the first week of being a paid professional. They said that they basically gave him pills all the time. He said there was an assumption made by me that whatever pills they were handing out to me were both safe and in my best interest. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, a team doctor. If you're 22, you think, oh, they're doing this because it must be what it is. He said that I took the cup of pills out of my locker and brought them to the training staff. He said they just left a cup of pills in his locker. And he was like, did you put this in the wrong place? He said, hey, what am I supposed to do with those he said i never took pills before he said he'd never even smoked weed at that point he'd never snorted a line of cocaine he didn't even drink okay he was just into football um and he said these were a bunch of opiates in a little dixie cup basically and uh they said take them They're going to help with the swelling and the pain.

And yeah, he said they were to them the way they said it. He said they thought they were no more dangerous than an aspirin. Right. Same shit. Like your mom saying, chew this. Yeah. Strong aspirin. And they said, can I he said, can I get a prescription in case it's still bothering me over the weekend?

And the trainer looked at him and said, you don't need a prescription as long as you're with the team. We'll take care of it. Oh, boy. Not good. No. This is all bad. This is enabling.

A lot of reasons why a lot of these guys are on pills and all fucked up still to this day. Now, the 91 bucks, they go 3 and 13. Eee, boy. So, not good. He had a few successes this year. He got five sacks. And, yeah, a guy from the new york times said considering the

circumstances mccann's first year was a success despite having to learn an entirely new position his first full year um yeah so he did well uh the coach the coach at this point said i think he's played a decent season if you watch films keith is a producer okay that's good now it's at this point where needles start to come into play. Hell yeah. They start shooting them up. Oh, my God. He said, before our game against the Philadelphia Eagles, the team doctor asked me to drop my shorts.

Oh, boy. The next thing I knew, he was giving me an injection in my right buttock. Well, that's actually lucky. Yeah. With a needle as long as my middle finger. Yikes. Fuck. He said, it immediately numbed me from the waist down.

I tried to take a step, but I nearly fell to my knees. I took small steps to my locker. I was scared. I had never experienced anything like this before. Once I was on the field, I began to take a physical pounding. I was making tackles, and my legs were twisted in all kinds of positions. Not good for your legs. The strange thing is I wasn't feeling a thing.

Nothing. You're numb. The coach decided to move me to my old spot at middle linebacker to keep an eye on Randall Cunningham, who used to be very mobile at that point as he was running all over our team's defense. So they just put him out there and said, go run around and let your legs become. Go out there with your numb leg and shred your knee. Just twist your legs up like noodles. That's fine.

No worries. So that year he starts all 16 games. Really? it up with your numb leg and shred your knee just twist your legs up like noodles that's fine no worries uh so that year he starts all 16 games really uh 54 tackles and five sacks so they said fine new position he's learning 92 tampa they go 5 and 11 this is when they brought sam weishan remember him from the bangles at the in the 80s there year, in 92, he starts 15 out of 16 games. Looks like Boomer and Phil Seam's dad. Kind of, yeah. He kind of looks like Craig T. Nelson a little bit, too. It always reminded me of him.

He has 58 tackles, five sacks, so kind of the same as the year before. Not spectacular. Not, you know, terrible. 93 comes around. Training camp. Tampa Bay cuts him. 93 comes around. Training camp. Tampa Bay cuts him. What? They just cut him.

You get $10 million invested in this guy and they just cut him? Three years. Yeah. Gone. I guess the deal he ended up getting that they report here is five years, $9.5 million. And then there was the bonus on top of that. And only the first three seasons are guaranteed, though. And he already played that. They waived him rather than pay 900 grand in salary this year they shit canned him so within

48 hours new england picks him up okay and this is before new england was good everybody by the way this was when they were a fucking laughingstock this is an awful helmet this is bad yeah this is like right when they switched to that terrible silver shit that they fucking i hate that silver shit dumb fucking it looks like a flag on their head it's so dumb i hate that fucking i hate that helmet their old uniforms are terrible but at least they look kind of funny and cheesy these just look like shit the ones they've had the helmet of the old dumb as shit yeah well yeah obviously that that red pops that red and white fucking pops really screams make the guy less like he wants it to take it in the ass from you. And it's fine.

I don't get what the problem is. So, yeah, he's picked up by the New England who had hired Ray Perkins as an offensive coordinator. They were like, pick him up, pick him up. So he said when he gets signed, this is a lot off my shoulders. The rumors had been spreading for some time now concerning my future with tampa uh so he played in a pre-season game on the day he was signed against the kansas city chiefs and then they released him oh no new england does too not exactly what they were looking for yeah uh so he goes to the houston oilers yes that was a team

yeah uh the houston oilers who then turned into the Tennessee Titans, which they had. Fuck, I love their helmets. The Oilers. They were cool as shit. Warren Moon. Nobody ever looked cooler than Warren Moon in an Oiler uniform. Maybe blue and white and red. Man, when they were like the white jerseys with the baby blue pants and the cool.

He just looked like a bad motherfucker in that. He was cool. So he basically he Buddy ryan really liked him okay and he liked buddy ryan yeah uh so he uh he brian once joked that mccance was his third son along with robin rex ryan the two coaches uh now the oilers go 12 and 4 that year so this is his first year with success okay now they do great They go to the playoffs that year and play against the Kansas City Chiefs, who have Joe Montana at this point, and they lose to the Chiefs 28-20. So, yeah, this is the year where, I don't know if anybody remembers this,

but there's footage of this, of Buddy Ryan and Kevin Gilbride, two coaches both on the oilers getting into a fist fight with each other in the sideline you remember that buddy ryan throwing an old man punch at him throwing an awful old man mccance is the guy in the middle of them oh no that steps in between them that's mccance okay he's right fucking there hey guys chill out that's him you guys are gonna hurt each other you're gonna hurt yourselves let's be honest yeah this is the defensive coordinator punched the offensive coordinator in the face following a fumble the team fumbled he's like you son of a bitch like he dropped the ball so told you it was a dumb play yeah so um anyway uh about the playoffs he mccann says let me tell

you this is something big this is big time this is football i haven't had a winning season since i left college and it feels great to win again yeah i bet uh now joe montana we're going to talk about here who you should know joe montana is just by even if you're not a football fan he's probably the second best quarterback ever maybe the best we don't know i thought he's too fragile just like the one everybody else thinks is great too tom brady if you hit him once he breaks sorry he's made of crystal and i don't care what anybody said everybody's been all seven times i don't care if he has 48 rings i don't care if he plays till he's 96 years old and wins every year until then he's the most boring quarterback i've ever watched in the history of professional football. I swear to Christ, I would rather watch Phil Simms quarterback every team than watch Tom Brady.

He's so fucking boring. Everything he does is boring. I would rather watch fucking footage of Dan Marino throwing 12 interceptions than fucking watch Tom Brady do have Brady put together the greatest drive in football history. It's so fucking boring. Well, he kisses his children on the mouth. Yeah, he takes no chances. He's the most boring quarterback. He's really great.

Yes, if you don't like watching football, he's fantastic. If you just like seeing the results and looking at the stat line and going, yeah, they won. Great. Terrific. If you like fantasy football, good for fuck me so fucking boring i get that he's great because he wins whatever but he's boring at least joe montana even was exciting yeah still very fragile i think tom brady's been hit twice in his career and he was out the whole year both times one time he got i saw one smash he fucking got his head taken off good and he bounced back up but i guarantee he's not right

no but i mean that one shot in the knee and then he was up but i guarantee he's not right no but i mean that one shot in the knee and then he was out for a year he's never gets hit and when he does he is terrible so that's how it works so much money and he makes a ton of money and he wins so i mean well of course he makes a ton of money why wouldn't he and so he says here in this playoff game against joe montana he doesn't name joe montana but he says he says that he one case that stands out in my mind involved an offer of two hundred fifty thousand dollars cash under the table from the team to, quote, knock a top flight quarterback out of a game during the playoffs. He's only played in one playoff game in Montana's the quarterback. So he's talking about Montana. He said the exact quote made to me behind closed doors when something

like this i don't care if you have to break that motherfuckers back on his way to the huddle you get him out of the game and this is extremely common yeah he talks about that happened all the time the only gate's not a one-off no it's just how football was played it was just the first it's just a one-off that got caught exactly that's how it's played uh he said i told the coach straight up that i was looking at a suspension and a fine from the nfl and if they wanted to take if they wanted me to take out a future hall of fame quarterback with a hit it would cost him 300 000 cash and nothing less their response was it's a deal so he said i tried like hell to get to the quarterback that day but i just couldn't get there

i got my ass kicked with two and three people blocking me so that year he doesn't start at all he plays in 13 games and he has four tackles he's a hockey goon that's it that's what they hired him go out there yeah 94 uh he plays a few games for he plays five games for Houston or four games for Houston. And then he goes to the Cardinals because Buddy Ryan gets hired as the coach. And if you remember, there was billboards. They made it like, now it's different. Now it's time. Now we got hard-nosed football.

They called it Buddy Ball. They had huge billboards that said Buddy Ball is here. And what does that mean? Going fucking eight and eight? It didn't matter. Yeah. So they pick him up. And in a game against the Bears, he picked off a Steve Walsh pass and ran it back 46 yards for a touchdown.

Awesome. So that was a cool deal. And he was very proud of that. Plays eight games there. 95, he plays for the Cardinals again. They go four and 12. Because Buddy Ryan wasn't as good of a head coach as they thought he was. Because the Cardinals are perpetually shitty.

Well, yeah, they had Dave Craig as their starting quarterback. Dave Craig, Mike Buck, and Stoney Case are their quarterbacks. My God. There you go. Today's Cardinals are so much fun to watch, though. I can't stand them. I love that. That Buda Baker is fucking lights out.

I just want them to lose 75 to nothing in every fucking game. I love that they're stacking their defense finally. They've never done that. I don't care what they do. I hate them. I hate their boring stadium that looks like a fucking mall. I hate the whole fucking team. Nobody here.

Have them have two four and 12 seasons, and that place will be half fucking empty again, just like it always was. Fuck this place and all their teams except this one. It's crowded for the 12 seasons, and that place will be half fucking empty again, just like it always was. Fuck this place and all their teams except this one. It'll be crowded for the Cowboys, and that's it. And the Packers and the Bears and everybody else. It doesn't fucking matter. You know what's funny is I just talked a whole bunch of shit about Tom Brady, and everyone knows I hate the Patriots

that listens to this show. The greatest game I ever saw was watching the Patriots kick the shit out of the cardinals like 51 to 3 in the snow in like 2010 or something watching kurt warner slide all around whenever the fuck it was i don't remember oh seven or some shit oh eight whatever it was great so i found out wow i don't hate the patriots the most i hate the cardinals the most because i was cheering the whole time watching them get pummeled. Not a good team.

Rob Moore, Larry Centers, Gary Hurst. Garrison Hurst, that's pretty much all they had. Larry Centers was good. He was real good. Garrison Hurst was fucking great on every team except the Cardinals. He was terrific. I remember when they brought him here and everybody was jacked and then he shit the bed. And then he went to San Fran.

It was fan-fucking-tastic. Yeah, it was right there. It's here's here it was here that was the problem larry centers they wasted that guy's poor talent oh he was so good he's all they had for a while they were just throwing to him all the time he had like a hundred catches one year as a fullback or some crazy 80 catches ricky prole too then that guy ended up leaving and going somewhere yeah fine that's a little white guy did fine somewhere else yeah it was st louis he went to the best show on turf, and he was a bad motherfucker. Joined that with Holton and Bruce and all those guys.

So that year he plays in 16 games in Arizona, has the touchdown, doesn't have that many tackles, half a sack, not doing well here. Ends up, that's about it for his career. Oh, boy. So his whole career, 88 games he played in, started 39. He has 192 tackles, 13 and a half sacks. It's his whole career.

That's not great. December 27th, 1995, he is arrested for speeding. Too much speeding. Very fast. I believe this was in Florida. Okay. This was. So his career is over. Yep. Too much speeding. We're very fast. I believe this was in Arizona or in Florida. This was so his career is over. Yep. And he says people who don't understand the game, people who watch or people who understand the game, people who watch film.

No, I wasn't a bust. I got double teamed a lot and other people made all the plays. I switch. I switch positions. They call me a bust. I played six seasons on one leg. I think that's remarkable. I was always hurt. I was so shot up all the time.

Without the dope, I couldn't play. My body was so wrecked, so I didn't want that needle anymore. I was ready to leave the game. Yikes. What I regret most is moving to defensive end and changing my position. I wasn't able to display my true talent, and the speed I had going

sideline to sideline that's where i was really explosive they put me at defensive end and teams targeted me because they knew i would they always knew i was hurt which makes sense um buddy ryan said quote this young man played on one leg for six years it was incredible which is true yeah um he needed a mentor at this point uh one of his, the mobile press register reporter named Darren Patterson said, I don't know if Keith had a mentor. He had a mentor who could have simplified things for him and kept him on the right path. He might have been a real success in the pros. Okay.

He just kind of was left on his own. Well, what the fuck, Emmett? Yeah. Yeah. No shit. You needed advice. zone well what the fuck emmet yeah and guy yeah no shit you needed advice and dude the other thing is once you retire even if you're very successful guys get bored yeah they get really bored and that's another problem if they don't have something lined up to do what do you do besides piss money

away and go scuba diving yeah um what this is a crazy story i just wanted to put this in of a bored guy uh troy vincent who was a retired defensive back for a lot of teams, including the Patriots. He says that he killed time after that by washing clothes every single day until his wife told him that normal people don't do the laundry every day. And so the guy says, this is a reporter covering a quote. So he started cutting the lawn three times a week. He literally didn't know what else to do. Just, I guess I cut the lawn every day now. I don't know.

I need something to fucking do. Holy shit. Keith, at one point, said he was doing about 120 pills a week at the height of his addiction, which isn't bad compared to wrestlers who I've heard plenty of say they were doing 150 a day. Yeah. Like Raven. Is he doing this after football?

Yes. During and after. He said, biggest regret was taking the painkillers. I thought it was switching positions. Not knowing the effects it would have on me later. That's the biggest regret. That's what he regrets. Yeah.

He didn't know. Another one is taking a pay cut to leave Tampa to go to other teams and get paid to give a guy a concussion under the table and not knowing concussions were killing people. He said, that was the biggest regret of my life. It made me so sick to my stomach. I helped promote the movie Concussion with Will Smith when I saw what was going on. I was paid money to give concussions, and I received them as I gave them. I suffer from slight dementia as we speak.

Losing your memory, can't hardly walk, can't hardly talk, don't know who people are anymore. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. That's the biggest regret of my entire career. He's got so many regrets over the biggest. So many. Well, he probably doesn't remember what he said before. Right.

And in that broke documentary, he is the hardest to understand. Really? Speaking-wise. He's got to realize his talks kind of i mean some of it is southern alabama yeah but some of it is a lot of it is he's just kind of minding he just mumbles his brain you can tell he's like sounds like a boxer yeah that's what he sounds like and he's also when he's on it you're like how many pills are you on right now he's learning to oh it's he's on something when he's talking he's like we sign a bonus in history i just went out threw it all away you could see the way his hand gestures

are he looks wasted um he said the national football league can do anything they want to when they when they was giving me drugs i had millions of people rooting for me but when i got them on my own because i couldn't afford them i I'm the biggest criminal in the world. It's not a point. That's a great, great fucking point. At one point, he needed money for medical shit, and he said that he called the NFL Players Association to confirm what people had told him. He said the NFL believed I was a drug addict. The call quickly turned into a hostile conversation. I wasn't about to pull any punches. Quote, as we said to the Players Association,

if I'm a drug addict, it's because the NFL made me a drug addict. You fed me pills, and when that stopped working, you gave me shots in my legs, my ass, and everywhere else that was hurting. I didn't ask for that. It was either take the shots or get cut from the team. If the NFL thought I was addicted to drugs then, why didn't they put me in drug rehab? I gave up my health for them,

and now they're turning their back on me. That's bullshit. So somebody said something back to him, and his response is, quote, okay, motherfucker, which I love. Yeah. I'll tell you how we're going to handle this. How about I come up to your office in New York

or where in the fuck you're at, and I start killing everybody in that joint if I don't get my money and when i'm done and when that's done i'll blow out my fucking brains maybe the nfl will take the next guy seriously then and not make them go through all the bullshit i had to go through oh he is at the end of his rope yeah he's fucking yeah he's got nothing else to lose at this point and he's he's on drugs he's hurting he's pissed he threw his whole career's gone he's fucking upset he said that he got hung up on there and he said i immediately went to where this is a quote from his book i immediately went to where i kept my gun and stuck it in my pocket i grabbed my car keys out of a dish that sat on top of an entry table in the entrance i

was two steps from making it out the front door when two of my friends were in the house at the time stopped me one friend in between me and the front door while the other friend put a bear hug on me from behind before i knew it i was wrestled to the ground and the gun and the keys have been taken away from me in my current physical state i was no match for the two of them they lean their body weight on me and pin me to the floor that's fucked this poor guy i feel it's i mean i feel for the guy yeah he's one of the guys who's like, they did this to me. Some guys don't even realize that that's what happened. And he at least realizes it.

He said that all the money, he said he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on his own medical expenses, too. He said, I shouldn't have, but I was given no choice. The NFL rejected my claims, and I couldn't delay getting the medical attention that I needed. I spent so much money on my own medical bills that my home in Tampa went into foreclosure. Oh, no. That is fucking horrible. He said his financial situation worsened. My savings were being exhausted as I tried to keep up with my medical needs. I started selling my possessions. First, it was my Rolex watches, then my jewelry.

Eventually, it was my cars and rolex watches then my jewelry eventually it was my cars and later on my soul jesus my house in tampa was lost to foreclosure in the end i was forced to move back to my hometown of mobile alabama i would be living in the home that i purchased for my mom way back when when i was a rookie life had come first full circle for me in a way soon that circle would turn into a spiral for me a spiral that would fought that i would follow all the way down oh no mom doesn't have that house anymore well for now she does um next up is crack yeah oh god jesus yep um he said he didn't realize he was in the midst of a dark depression at the time now he does and he said he didn't care he said he was in no mood to explain why he was living back in Mobile.

He said people would see him in like a shitty car and be like, Keith, what the fuck, man? What's going on? Came back home, dog. Yeah. What you doing? And he said that he would hide in a black room just with thick, heavy drapes and hide in a room. And then he quote, it was on New Jersey Street where I first puffed on a crack pipe. And then he quote, it was on New Jersey Street where I first puffed on a crack pipe. Weeks after being shuttered inside my mother's house, she talked me into borrowing my sister's car and taking it out for a drive.

So he took it over to a friend's house and he was sitting there and he said there was a woman there hanging out. And she said, what's the matter, baby? Where does it hurt? And he said, the pretty little lady with the soft and sexy voice asked me when he said where doesn't it hurt and she he said she reached down with her hand and began to rub uh up and down on my knee gently does that hurt and he said you're rubbing it doesn't hurt it hurts on its own she he said quote the stranger lifted a pipe and held the lighter to the end unlit it was red until it was red and glowing here baby try this it'll make it feel better. Suck motherfucker. Yeah, I was.

I was never into marijuana, but as bad as my knee felt, I grabbed the pipe and sucked out a thick white cloud of smoke and pulled it into my lungs. As much as I had experienced already in my short life, I thought I was puffing on some on some herb. He thought it was weed, he said, because he just didn't know drugs that well. He was naive. Crack cocaine is an insidious and evil monster unfortunately i fell headfirst in love with her yeah oh boy she is a she is a sexy oh an evil monster look at those tits on her she's got tits and ass and she's like

giving you the come here i'm here the truth of the matter is is i didn't even know i was smoking crack yeah the first time i took a hit of the matter is, is I didn't even know I was smoking crack. Yeah. The first time I took a hit of the crack pipe, I thought I was smoking marijuana. Let me tell you, it felt great. Never heard anybody say smoking crack wasn't wonderful. That's the thing. Like, first time I smoked crack, man, was it good.

Holy shit. It was the best. It looks terrible while you're doing it. It sure doesn't look good. It smells gross. It looks bad as fuck. Not good. It sure doesn't look good. Yeah, it smells gross. That looks bad as fuck. Not good, but man, does it feel good, apparently. For the first time in a long time, the pain in my knee evaporated.

Okay. I hallucinated for a few minutes. A few minutes? Wow. I watched the pain in my knee grow wings and take flight. This is going to be a problem. It stood on my kneecap, launched itself into the air with the grace of a butterfly and then disappeared through a nicotine stained wall wow that's a great place this wasn't

the beginning of my downward spiral my life started unraveling long before i fell in love with crack oh that's good since my retirement from the NFL, I had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on medical treatment and months upon months in rehabilitation. Repairs to my knees and elbow

left me lying in bed for days at a time. Crack turned out to be a flirtatious little beast. That's a good way to put it. And she summoned me

toward the doorway to eternal damnation. Oh. Usually leaving somewhere you don't want to be is as easy as turning around and going back the same way you came in. I closed my eyes. A

massive feeling of total serenity took over. It was better than any pain medication I'd ever been injected with or any alcoholic beverage I'd ever drunk. It was damn near an out of body experience. I was pain free, calm and peaceful. I opened my eyes to find the pretty little lady

beside me staring at me with a look of amazement he said quote damn i never smoked any weed like that before and he said she had a gigantic smirk as if she was in on a joke nobody else knew yeah she is she said quote that wasn't weed baby that's That's crack cocaine. Yeah. Oh, boy. In it the shit? Yeah. He said that it was a first. He said crack cocaine was a poor man's drug as far as I knew. Well, you're poor now, motherfucker. That's why. You borrowed your sister's car to go smoke crack with a stranger.

This is not below you, sir. No. Yeah, but he said he felt good. And he said, I asked the girl if I could hit the pipe again. She happily handed it back to me and held the flame up to the round bowl he said this time I took two deep puffs in hopes the pain would subside for a little while

longer than it did the first time the pain vanished but eventually it returned I took another hit from the crack pipe that was the way the rest of the night went a steady mixture of drugs and alcohol I barely remember the trip home I woke up to woke up to cotton mouth and a severely swollen knee. Yeah, because he's been walking on it.

He said the first thing that crossed my mind was finding my way back to that pretty little lady that held the magic elixir. Whoa. I was craving that hit of that crack, but I was stuck at my mother's house. I went through my luggage and found a few pain pills that were left over. They would have to do for now. Two weeks passed. I still couldn't get my mind off the crack I smoked. To get a new prescription for a pain medication from a doctor meant I would have to get a

complete physical x-rays and blood work. My finances were in shambles. Getting legit pain medication prescription was out of the question. I now had another option. I could go back to new jersey street and find the lady i met at my friend's house it was a lot less of a hassle and less expensive you bet uh he said a parasitic little vamp named crack had slithered inside of me and getting her to leave was not going to be easy i would say yeah uh things got so bad financially in 1999 he's arrested and for bouncing checks court records show he bounced

34 checks in a matter of three days in 1999 that's not an accident 34 no he went on a spree yeah 34 checks it's a lot that's just saying you know i'm fucking sick of living like this i don't i'm just gonna fucking live well for a couple days i don't care i'm just doing it because it feels good you know 34 checks 34 think about how much shit that is what and do you like buy all the stuff and then just return it or what do you do he was just i don't know if he was just trying to act like everything was fine again or i don't know what uh 2000 oh man the state of alabama seizes his mother's home because of unpaid taxes that's the when your mother's house that you bought for gets seized yeah that's when you're fucked that's the end and by the way when you buy a 9 000 square foot house on 40 acres you then have to pay taxes on

right forever that's so much yeah put that money aside for a while because that's you're gonna need to pay mom isn't gonna can't pay for it. So December 10, 2004 comes around. So he's not doing well here from there to there. He's arrested in a car here, and this is not good. Well, he's not arrested in a car. He's arrested because of a car. He's indicted on a charge that he stole a vehicle from a car dealership. We haven't had this happen to an athlete or do this since eddie johnson

who was arrested over a hundred times and probably loves crack more than anybody we've ever done in a crime and sports episode uh eddie johnson did this with a porsche he just took off and never fucking came back apparently he did this as well keith does uh they arrest him on December 4th for failure to return a 1998 Lincoln Navigator, a six-year-old car, taken on a test drive from Cottage Hills Motors in Mobile. It was later recovered abandoned. He just left it somewhere. He just needed a ride somewhere. No, he had a car. That's the fucked up part.

His lawyer said his client was allowed to drive the car from the lot. He says, quote, he kept it longer than he was supposed to. The car broke down at a particular location, and he called them. They still charged him. That's the lawyer's thing here. The car dealership's general manager said the police recalled when McCants didn't return the vehicle after three hours. Too long. Can't have it for that long.

Longer than he's supposed to. Three-hour test drive? What's the point where they go, he's not coming back? What's the point? It's 20 minutes, right? An hour is like, he must love the car. I bet he's going to buy this thing. There's a sale.

You're high-fiving. An hour and a half, you're like, he probably stopped maybe for something to eat. Maybe he's showing people, see if they like it so he can buy it. By two hours, you have to go, he's not coming back, is he? It's over. I to eat maybe he's showing people see if they like it so he can buy it by two hours you have to go he's not coming back is he over i don't think he's coming i think yeah i think we gotta find the cops do we call someone i don't think we're getting that car back yeah um and his lawyer said we know keith or i'm sorry this is the mcgill this is the dealership's general manager they know his name name. They know everything about him. Yeah. He's bought cars there before. He said, we know Keith. We all like him.

It's just not like we said here, Keith, go take this car and don't bring it back. He just didn't bring it back. And he left a Ford Explorer in their lot. You guys hang on to that. So he left that there. What was he thinking? It's a little Ford.

The big one. Yeah, but this one was repossessed by another dealership at the time. So they were trying to repossess it to find it. So it was foreclosed upon, basically, for nonpayment. Not terrific. Lincoln Navigator, Jesus Christ. He was indicted by a grand jury and later pleaded guilty to unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. It's theft, isn't it? Isn't that grand theft?

I think they probably didn't want to press it. I think the dealership felt bad for him because they knew him, so they gave him the unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. It's like, you borrowed it without technical permission. Right. Because he didn't steal it. No. But Eddie Johnson took it and went away.

He just didn't get permission to hang on to it all goddamn day. Yeah, I feel like that's if they feel bad for you, you're getting that charge. So it feels like doing that, it can't get any lower for him. Yeah, it's pretty low. Except it gets a lot lower. Mid-2000s, this is described from the Tampa Tribune article. There was a time when he roamed the streets not knowing his name, sleeping in cars, eating out of garbage cans,

showering in gas stations, wondering where he belonged. Jesus fucking Christ, man. That guy broke up a Buddy Ryan fight. Yeah, in uniform. He hung out with Warren Moon, for Christ's sake. I mean, Jesus, fuck, man. Mobile County Sheriff Sam Co cochran uh who was formerly the city's police chief said it was some crazy stuff that people here had never seen from from him when he was growing up it was a huge surprise from him it's it's really no longer a

surprise i don't want to say people are numb to it but it all kind of blends together at this point so they're saying we expect him to be a fuck up at this point it's been 10 years he's got a lot of problems uh february of 2008 jesus christ police find him in a dilapidated building near downtown mobile yeah when they raid it's like a crack house it's a crack house he is in possession of a crack pipe in a back room somewhere they find him he's charged with possession of drug paraphernalia and loitering for the purpose of drug activity and uh yeah apparently this state this house had been a subject of repeated complaints of drug activity it's a fucking crack house he served several days in march in the chickasaw city jail

in lieu of a fine levied against him for driving without insurance. He, from now on, by the way, never has a license, never has insurance. No, he can't afford to fix it. No. Yeah. It's so much. It adds up. Yeah.

You're right. March 30th, 2008. This is bottom tier. We have grace. This is rock bottom here. This is as bad as it gets. March 30th, 2008. He is flagging down drivers with I'll read the papers thing.

He is panhandling in the company of two apparent prostitutes flagging down drivers along U.S. Route 45. What is he trying to do? Flag down people and ask them for shit. Right. Literally. Is he trying to get cash to fuck these hookers? They're all like they're all. think they all hang out yeah they're all going looking for smoking crack together yeah so they're for it's a highway we that's a bad

pitch you can't do that you do all people are walking like outside of a store when someone's driving by at 70 miles an hour they don't go i'm gonna stop and give him money right hold on let me slow down um the police uh subdued they had to subdue him with a taser gun god damn it they had to tase him and uh they saw him panhandling like we said um this is fucked up the reason why they had to tase him though was because he had a pair of pliers a screwdriver and a crack pipe he held them all and eventually threw them at the officer so he threw a crack pipe at the officer then pliers then a screwdriver and i guess the screwdriver almost hit the cop in the head right and then the cop tased him and uh that was that so he's taken in on charges of possession of drug paraphernalia for throwing a crack pipe

at a police officer i'm surprised that's not an extra charge like if you try to assault a police officer that's a charge but if you do it with a crack pipe i feel like that should be extra really anything that's illegal but a crack pipe especially like come on don't even even have in his pocket he's like fucking pow i'm looking for anything to throw at you how about this illegal thing i'll be arrested for so he's arrested for resisting arrest loitering all misdemeanors, drug paraphernalia. He remained in jail. It was 745 at night, basically. And that was that.

So Keith's fucking that's as low as it gets, man. I mean, Jesus Christ, this guy. How do you recover from this? That's what I'm saying. I mean, he could be anywhere at any time, just sitting there doing anything. I mean, Jesus Christ. Somebody needs to take like something with him, an interest, a pity, a fucking anything. Take him to a group.

At this point, who cares if it's even you know pity who gives a shit just take it i mean anybody like possibly i don't know my grandmother italian grandma you know if keith ran into her she would say ma how is it you've come to arrive here? Why are you here? Ma, you have, I read the paper, the thing, you have so much money. You have everything. And now you have the prostitute with the pen.

Why you do that? No, I don't have no $5. I give you, here I make food for you, but I don't give for you. Ma, why? Why you do that i don't know you you're such a handsome man you're very handsome shiny like the skin of the seal wonderful i just i know oh you're breaking my heart please why i no you can't no you can't borrow my car either i'm sorry i can't give to you no i i you not bring back i can't poof and

she's gone and keith is very confused she's gone in a cloud of marinara sauce and confusion and brandy and brand and whiskey she likes whiskey really oh grandma in her old age likes whiskey thing now that's it is that a new thing no she the last like two years i buy her like a really good bottle of whiskey every few months i'll buy it for her because that's what she drinks when she goes to bed now good for her she never drank anything but wine in her fucking life or lamaretto maybe or something and she said ma i like some whiskey before i go to sleep she's like i know you know you shouldn't drink it every night you're 93 lady drink all of it all day who cares drink the whiskey but yeah she has a couple of shots before she goes to bed at night which is great hilarious she made me hide the one bottle from my uh aunt's husband pat yeah um because uh as she

put it she said i put it over here put it behind in the cabinet behind there and i said why grandma and she points to pat and goes irish but dead serious he's gonna going to drink it. He'll steal it because he's a drunk. Irish makes a face. I'm like, Jesus Christ. Okay, fine. She meant it, though. Yeah. I think she's just drinking it and forgetting about it because she's 100.

She should have pointed at her own chest. Irish. Irish, yeah. No, just likes booze. I got to hide it because I'm Irish. That's right. Jesus Christ. So at this here. I got to hide it because of my original. That's right. Jesus Christ. So at this point, people start to, this is a very public arrest and people who knew him

go, Jesus, this is too much, man. Come on. Is there another NFL player that's done this apart from? I mean, fuck. Apart from. Guys you've never, not number, top 10 draft picks probably. Not a lot of them. The Raiders quarterback running from the cops.

Yeah, yeah. Marinovich. That's true. How high was he drafted? I mean, pretty high, but fuck, man. I mean, this is a pretty similar situation, honestly. It is close. I think his might have been even more pathetic.

Remember, he was nude on people's porches and shit. Everything that Keith has done. So far, I haven't heard a heard a cop go keith stop keith we know you're fucking but the car dealership go keith bring our car back we know you this is a mirror image yeah so i i feel like todd's worse because all the other thing is everything he does is just a problem for him he's not like hurting other people ever it's all inflicted self-inflicted which also he's got injuries he never got therapy for being fucking molested he's got a lot of problems here a friend of his though

or not a friend of his a guy named paul souza who was his principal at murphy high school gathered a dozen mobile community leaders and uh souza really liked mccants and uh he said he was never a disciplinary problem he's always a really nice kid. And for this to go so wrong, he really felt terrible. And he said we wanted to get him some work, but he's really not able to do much work because of his physical state. He said he couldn't even get up and down out of a chair, and he couldn't get another type of job because people knew about the drugs. Just when things seem to be going well, he falls back, usually because of the drugs. It's a hard, hard road.

Yeah, no shit. He says about all this, quote, how did this happen? I'll tell you how this happens. You want to kill the pain. You're out of the NFL. They throw you out the door and those expensive prescriptions are gone. They take away your health insurance. The next best

thing is street drugs because you're desperate for the pain to go away. And you can't get those, so you resort to something that's less. Whatever you can get your hands on. I didn't indulge in drugs to get high. I wanted to moderate my pain. It didn't go away totally, but it felt better. I could get out of bed, go to the store. One thing leads to another.

You end up going to jail. Your picture is on tv you get ridiculed ripped apart you just wanted your pain to stop that's how it happens and we've heard that how many times man cyclical man uh yeah april 2010 he's arrested trying to buy crack at a sleazy motel of course he is in a kind of like a sting operation deal. Arrested there. November 17th, 2010, he's arrested for failure to obey a traffic signal and no seatbelt. Also, no license. Shouldn't even be doing this anyway. Anything else that you need to drive a car, I'm sure.

Hit crack. You know, crack? No, that's a wrong answer. Come on, Keith. Keith, we know who you are now. It's fine. Late 2010, he moved to the tampa area again but i guess he has a wife still in mobile which is weird he leaves his wife in mobile he's divorced twice and

has four kids but soon here too so he's got that going on november 30th 2010 he's arrested for speeding in a school zone which they're not great um less than two weeks later december 8th 2010 he's arrested for speeding in a school zone uh-huh which they're not great uh less than two weeks later december 8th 2010 uh he's coming out of a strip club called tina's house of angels we we've heard yeah a lot of stories that start out with and then he was pulling out of a strip club before he got pulled over right and we usually try to get the names that's a particularly good one it's pretty solid tina's house of angels no one is tina's house of angels no one else's tina's got the right idea those are angels those are angels here um he is pulled over for failure to yield coming out of a parking lot of the strip club and he's arrested they stop him

and they find a crack pipe in the center console of his 99 Chevy Tahoe in 2010 police also 99 which is fine but not if you're a number four draft pick police also found one piece of crack

in the purse of his female passenger so they were probably going to smoke crack, I assume. He was taken to the jail, $2,000 bail, blah, blah, blah. Taken to the jail, put on bail. There's that. February 5th, 2011, here, which is Jesus Christ, less than two months later. In five months, he has had so much police interaction. It really picks up from here.

He has had so much police interaction. It really picks up from here. February 5th, 2011, he's arrested for possession of cocaine and resisting arrest without violence. He removed identification from his pocket during a police stop, and the cop noticed a bag of Coke fall out when he took his ID out. You put your Coke with your ID? Right. Put your Coke somewhere separate. So they were like, oh, you're arrested. When they attempted

to handcuff him, he pulled away and fled. He walks with a cane. I don't know how fucking fast he was trying to... You don't even... Why are you charging him for that? He's not getting away. You don't play in the NFL because you can't. We know you're not getting away. If you're the cop, what do you have to do?

Walk behind him and fucking grab him and shove him to the like don't charge him with anything for that that's just silly be like dude there's no way he's getting away come on man make me run or fuck keith don't make me fucking run keith you make me jog i'm gonna kick your ass i'm gonna kick that fucking cane out from under you if you don't stop right now other than that making me jog what do you do uh april 23rd 2011 a couple months later uh he is arrested on a cocaine possession charge here he's also booked on a charge of resisting an officer as well uh and in addition to that once they get him in there they find out that he is also wanted on a fugitive warrant from mobile alabama uh for guess what possession failure to appear on a controlled substance charge so um a lot of problems here uh this is

when he pleads guilty in both the 2010 december 2010 and february 2011 cases they just mush it into one he pleads guilty here and he's gonna you know he's gonna do all of that the judge withheld adjudication and sentenced him to the 15 or 16 days he had already served there but he remains in jail after that on the fugitive warrant for mobile where he didn't appear the year before on a substance abuse charge so maybe that's why he moved to tampa also that was the same time he came to tampa he's got so many troubles and problems right now there's no way to get out of this. No, it's just from now. It's just the system.

You're just you can't get out. You're just in that. There's no way. Yeah, there's no way to build back out. No, you're like in a well. You're like the kid in the well. Yeah, there's no just I think his head's too big to get him back up. Oh, man.

Former teammate of his here, Ian Beckles, who was also drafted in 1990. He says, I don't know much about the demons that keith is fighting it's scary to see all of this it's easy for people to judge him and say he's done all this stupid stuff but he has a disease i just know that deep down he's not a bad guy maybe a very naive guy but not a bad guy that's the whole vibe i get off of all of this is he was not ready for any of this. And,

uh, which I mean, there's nobody's fucking fault, I guess, but it's also kind of not his either. So it's, it's hard to really, you know what I'm saying?

He's never like, I'm the best and I know what I'm doing. He's always like, shit, I think I'm fucking up. And he's to his own debt. Not even, I don't even know how to describe it,

but he would, he was dealt a hand already that uh stuff yeah he can't that set him back several years before anyway he's just a late bloomer that's even later blooming because he's got so much trauma from childhood that's a fucking fact man uh you're right absolutely uh now his attorney says that he said basically this whole thing could change if he would commit to a rehab program for probably a year so it would probably take a year to like get his life towards the right track he's got to do a complete like he can't just go in and come back out again it's not going to happen um they he also says quote if he solves his life problems he solves his legal problems

it's people in places unfortunately keith has been hanging out with some people who are horribly He also says, quote, if he solves his life problems, he solves his legal problems. It's people in places. Unfortunately, Keith has been hanging out with some people who are horribly negative influence and crack has been involved. That's always bad. Bad places. Yeah. Until he gets different people in places, history is going to repeat itself. I would say so. So at this point, he is in the Pinellas County Jail.

All right. And from jail jail he does an interview here and uh let's do it in their own words shall we uh in their own words quote i wish i never had any money i would have been great without money it's a sad story but it's a true story money destroyed everything around me and everything i care for. My family, my so-called friends. I just want enough to live on. I never want to be rich again. Cream, baby.

I just, I never want to be rich again. He feels like it was like a. It ruled him. It ruined everything. Cash ruins everything around me. Cash ruins everything around me. Fuck yeah, it does. So, yeah, he's a goddamn mess um he he's he's trying to talk to his kids at this

point and having a hard time of course he enters into the drug rehab program at saint petersburg solid rock ministries and he says quote i'm trying really i am that's a good start i believe him uh at this point he doesn't think he's a drug addict anymore oh my god all cleaned up yeah jesus saves that's all he says i'm uh i'm clean and i don't believe i have a drug addiction problem um didn't they tell him that didn't how do you go to a place that treats you and how does that treatment place not say forever you have a problem i don't know if they just did it with jesus or what because it's a ministry i don't know if they gave him like medical i don't know if it was just in the ministry and or if it ministry. I don't know if they gave him like medical. I don't know if it was just in the ministry or if it was like a medical thing or if they were just

like believe in Jesus and you don't have a drug problem. I'm not sure what they're doing. I don't mean to besmirch them if they're doing good work. He says, quote, I have a sex addiction. Now that's what he's addicted to, he says. Goddamn. I didn't really want to get into

that, but that's it uh what people do for drugs i do for sex drugs just happen to be in it i've been messing with women who did drugs sometimes i took the rap for them and ended up in jail i'm not saying what i did was right but that's what happened for all this to go away i know i've got to change everything about me. Very true. May 15, 2011. This is an article. This is from that Tampa Tribune article. Quote, he walks with a cane. He said he's been diagnosed with clinical depression

and early stages of dementia. Sometimes he can't recognize family members. More than once he's considered suicide. He's 43 years old. Put that into perspective for a second they just described a 72 year old man and then said he's having a hard time years old and then 43 holy shit think about that no you should be feeling great yeah a little sore i mean 40s are supposed to be your best you should be good your mind still should be fresh and your body should be decent enough. He says at this point he's had 29 surgeries.

Yeah. 29. Many on his knees. Also six concussions as well, which is six he knows about. Right. He's got more. Yeah. He said he had an addiction to painkillers, which led to cocaine use.

He tells his story. He says that eventually he believes he'll have Alzheimer's from the early stages of dementia. He says he wants to go see his mother, who was in the hospital recently. He says he's fighting against time and time he wants to spend with his children and the whole thing. He doesn't know how much time he has. His son, he said at that point, was nearing high school graduation. His daughter is a professional model and another daughter is a tennis player like in school so um yeah he said

that at one point here the reporter reminded him of a game at auburn in 89 the one where he had 18 tackles and an interception and caused a fumble and prevented a touchdown with a field-length chase and catch of their one of their wide receivers who had a 30-yard head start that's how amazing he is. They asked him about that. Remember that? And he hung his head and said, quote, I can't remember that far back. Oh, no.

So he forgot the only good times he really had, and they're gone. He erased the best day of his life. It's fucked up, man. He said, quote, I ain't mad at nobody. I don't want anybody to feel sorry for me. Maybe it's a good thing that I can't remember everything. It keeps me from being depressed. Jesus Christ, man.

He said, I can make money again. What I can't get again is my body and my mind. That's true. At this point in 2011, he has had 11 arrests since 2002. 11 arrests on drug possession charges. That's not his traffic shit, too. He says he has no idea how it went all wrong. And he says that in the 2012 30 for 30 ESPN broke documentary where he said he's lost more than $17 million through a variety of bad investments.

He only got paid nine, so I don't know where he lost 17. How do you make nine more? I don't know where he got the rest of the eight, but it's there. It's a lot. He says he draws an $1,100 disability check every month from the NFL. $1,100. Thanks, guys. Gee, thanks.

That's his only regular income at that point in 2012. And he said he's petitioned the league for an increase based on his physical condition, and his pension didn't kick in until 55, which is uh yeah when is it now 68 he's born so five still got four more years he's still got some years here uh march 14th 2013 he's uh arrested for having no registration or no insurance uh october 1st 2013 he has a red light camera violation. Those goddamn cameras. Ran a light or something. October 4th, 2013,

three days later, arrested for no registration, no insurance, and unlawful speed. Stop driving. Why would he? But he had, does he have to?

I mean, I don't know what he's doing here. October 8th, four days later. Jimmy, this is a week. This is three times in a week. Unlawful use of a temp tag. No taillight and no license.

Jesus Christ, man. Oh, my God. November 28th, 2013. Arrested again. So in a month and a half, he's having a bad time. He's also arrested for resisting arrest without violence uh possession of a controlled substance again so he's back into that again uh which he wasn't for a while there because all those times getting pulled over no no crack on him why because he

doesn't have a drug problem now he has a drug problem now he's back with controlled substance here um april 8th 2014 he's arrested for driving with a suspended license. July 7th, 2014. He's arrested for having no tags and no license on his car. How bad do you have to drive to get police attention like that? Dude, how many times? You are a fucking awful driver. I'm a monster.

You're driving all over. You're not looking. How often have you been pulled over? Well, quite a bit because I've been pulled over twice with you. I have police involvement maybe six times in my life. No. All right. All right.

Listen. Okay. Maybe twice a year. But I'm the worst. I don't know anybody that drives worse than me. You're the whitest driver ever. You have no fear of anything. I still have this fear. When I was a teenager where i grew

up basically and you've heard about it on small town murder and this might be rightfully so because i told you what my teenage years were like and basically if we if me or anybody else of my friends if we ever got pulled over there was a 1000 chance we were getting pulled out of the car and they were going searching us like motherfucker, ripping the whole car apart because they knew we had fucking drugs on us or something or something that we weren't supposed to have. Yeah. I mean, I don't remember. We've got as kids got pulled over all the time. I don't remember.

I remember one time not getting searched literally one time and it was on the night of high school graduation. None of us in the car had graduated, mind you, but the guy said, you guys graduate tonight? And we all went, yeah. And he goes, well, it's a graduation present. Then get the fuck out of here. Every other time it was get the fuck out of the car,

hands on the fucking thing, fucking with us. You know, so I'm very much not wanting to get pulled over. I was in a park after dark and the cops came by to check on us. And then they said that somebody was following their car with out-of-state plates. Because my brother had Arkansas plates on the car. But they were on the back.

And I was like, how could somebody see that there was out-of-state plates if we were following them? And then he was like, and then he just kind of looked at us funny. And then he goes, just get out of the park. And I was like, all right, fine. We got back in the car and then my brother pulled his bong out of the console and took a rip off the bong and put it back in the car. Good lord, that's ballsy. But we're in a park after dark.

Wow. That's not even, we're not, you're not even supposed to be, shouldn't even be there. That's some ballsy shit, man. And we've been called the cops on. Wow. Yeah, no, that's crazy. And they still didn't search us. That's nuts.

Oh my God, what the fuck, dude? They all, they know the fuck was next. They used to just fucking every fucking single time they do it man and they would fucking take such fucking yeah joy in it yeah i told you they were shouting shit at us we were trying to push a car in the snow they just followed behind us making fun of us in a loudspeaker calling us fucking racial slurs at each one of us that were all different races jizz when i got arrested for shoplifting they didn't search me uh what jimmy what the fuck man they arrested me and told me i was under arrest for shoplifting did i have anything and i said no and then they took me to a room and sat me down and took all this information they were doing all the documentation and then they were like search them again and then they searched my pockets and then they found all this stuff

what the fuck man that is insanity i'm sorry but you should have anything in your pockets that belongs to them and i was like no and they were like okay okay great we trust you fuck so july 7 2014 no tags no license december 10 2014 arrest possession of drug paraphernalia again february 4 2015 less than two months later careless driving and no insurance and no license either for that matter february 13 2015 uh no failure to wear a safety belt. Oh, guess what? He doesn't have a license either. It's shocking. Fuck, man. 2016, I couldn't find the story, but he ends up doing two days in county jail from a battery count that was against him.

So something happened. He hit somebody, and obviously not that hard because he only spent two days in jail. January 3rd, 2018, driving with a knowingly revoked license yeah i don't know why all of these weren't that certainly suspended no tags no registration just nothing just driving a car with no legal ability to do so whatsoever uh june 25th 2018 he's not good now let's just. He's going to say I'm good now with I just I'm just a sex addict. I'm good now. All right. I just love pussy. I just love pussy. God damn it. June 25th, 2018

424 a.m. I mean good stuff always happens. Yeah. He's arrested by the Pinellas County sheriffs and booked in on possession of crack. Yes. Felony cocaine charge held on $ 200 or two thousand dollars bond and an additional 150 for a second offense of driving with his license suspended or revoked which is

like his 19th offense um this is his ninth local arrest over four different counties since 2010 unreal um he says quote learn from me is what what he told other players in a sporting news article before, but it didn't quite happen. I mean, Jesus Christ, man. People are trying to help him. It's not working because he's got problems that need to be dealt with before the symptoms are dealt with. Obviously, he's got a bigger illness than this, and it's a bad thing. And you kind of have to feel bad for him. You really do.

I mean, he was assaulted, and that's what started this whole spiral. Yeah, kind of have to feel bad for him. You really do. I mean, he was assaulted. And that's what started this whole spiral. Yeah, I do. I feel bad for him. I mean, not nearly as bad as I feel for Keith McCants, senior associate director at Trinity College in Hartford. College Hartford in Woodbridge, Connecticut. Keith McCants, who looks like he's a black dude who's driving a tractor and smoking a joint in his linkedin picture which might be my favorite fucking thing i've ever seen oh that's a boat is it a boat he's that's a water in the background he's driving a fucking cool boat

smoking a joint i like this guy hire him for whatever he wants and his his occupation love life that's all he says atlanta metropolitan area that's the coolest keith mckeith mccance in the country uh keith mccance manager at bed bath and beyond in jacksonville florida though so that's bad uh on many because it's jacksonville and because that's where keith is florida keith mccance engineer at sheraton norfolk in virginia there. So at a hotel. Yeah, he fixes shit. Maintenance guy at the hotel. And finally, and this is a bad one here for this guy. Keith McCants, Houston County Commission candidate for Post 5.

He's running for office in Texas. And when you Google Keith McCants. Oh, God. Third page, baby. No way you get front page for that. Oh, we smoked crack? Oh, no. I'm not voting for him.

Finally, September 13, 2019, it looks like things are turning around for Keith. He begins co-hosting a show called Hear It Now with Barry Edwards every Friday on 820 a.m. in Tampa. So he got a gig. It's his first full-time gig at all. He interviewed Cornelius Bennett. At this point, Robert Jones, George Teague, Willie Anderson, who's his cousin, so that's not a hard get, and Kato Kaelin. One of these things is not like the other?

I would love to hear him interview Kato Kaelin. What do you do, man? You fucked your life up. Well, actually, Kato Kaelin is probably the best thing that ever happened to him. We still know his name. Right. Otherwise, he just sleep over. Yeah.

Otherwise, he'd just be a guy that has like eight shitty credits on IMDb for his B movies before that. April 2020. He lives in an apartment in St. Petersburg. He's supporting himself with his NFL disability money. He says that he's not well at all physically uh he needs a hip replacement very badly god damn it he's limping around he's walked with the aid of a cane he said it's a struggle every day i've had 33 surgeries he's had more now that's a lot he said i'm extremely lucky to be alive extremely the only thing i want to do now

is take all my experiences good and bad and spread my story make sure the next man doesn't have the same problems and go through the same things i went through i want people to go down a better direction than i had to go down all that doesn't kill you makes you stronger so the nfl has some talk to rookies right i would fucking hope so this is the guy that he should they should to first. Fuck everybody else. That's your guy. Not even talking to. They should have to hang out with him for five days. Go live his life.

No, he has to come live. You've got to go live at his house and help him get to the bathroom with his cane and shit. Go, fuck, man. This sucks. Get arrested with him and everything. Yeah. Let him drive always. Don't worry.

You'll get pulled over. He says that this is another guy here who's trying to help him. He said, at this stage, this is Bill Curry, who was a coach at Alabama for him. He says, at this stage of my life, the best thing that could happen to me is to hear from my old players. That happens every day. But the worst thing for me is one of my guys to have a hard time. And I'm really sorry to hear about how things have gone for Keith. That's depressing.

So March 2021. Just now. Is he good now? Yeah. This was last month. He said his life has taken a positive turn. He's become close friends with a guy named Robert Blackman, who is a real estate agent in South Florida and real estate developer, who is also a St. Petersburg city councilman. real estate developer who is also a st petersburg city councilman uh this guy here uh robert blackman helped mccance put together uh and market his autobiography which is the what we talked

about here which we quoted from and you should get it's very interesting actually if you want to read like a a tale of a player just letting it all out and saying what happened to him when the in the dark side of the nfl like he says it's a good fucking book for that i would suggest getting it and if you want to take a chance at maybe supporting a crack habit buy this book yeah i mean help him out it's on kindle i don't know it was like you know four bucks i hope that dude doesn't take a cut of it i think he's trying to help him though he better be um yeah because he said that uh blackman's friend barry edwards devoted one hour each week of his political talk show on tampa's 8 20 a.m to feature mccants too as well mccants said quote it's going pretty well he's now he's also had

herschel walker and emmett smith so he's starting to get some bigger names it feels good talking to these guys seeing how they view me how i viewed them getting a chance to open up it's been real nice um the blackman said the guy he said the whole thing came about in 2010 i was home from college and was reading the newspaper and saw mccance was arrested for the 14th or 15th time for crack possession uh crack cocaine possession and his mugshot looked so incredibly sad and we'll post one of his sad mugshots and uh he said he was only 21 at the time but he wanted to help the guy anyway. So I reached out to him and said, hey, I understand where you're coming from. I know life can be tough.

Is there any way we can save your life? He said he immediately called back and said, I think this is a godsend. I feel I have no options. I don't know where to turn to or what to do. So this guy, Blackman, said quickly, I understood that I had no expertise in dealing with such things, but I tried to just help him out with whatever he wanted. So he says all McCants wanted was a friend. And he said he's known him for 10 years and he's helped McCants overcome his addiction. And he says, you know, after walking with a cane for 20 years, he said the NFL declined to help pay for his hip surgery. That's unbelievable.

Dude. Okay. We bitch about Vince McMahon.cmahon yeah all the time about yeah he leaves these people in the fucking lurch and all this type of shit but i i fucking dare to say that the goddamn wwe's aftercare program is better than the nfl's i'm fucking based on this it has to be they'll send you to they sent sunny to rehab 14 fucking times they won't do shit for this guy not even his jack shit his knees anything dude if you're a first round draft pick i feel like fuck that they should have to that's ridiculous man so surely get him away from the fucking pain the pain is what's ruining his life causing

everything right uh so blackman says he's paying the thousands in copay out of his own pocket because he wants to help him so he's helping him with that he said anybody can change a life and he says that mccant says after the surgery he hopes he'll be able to walk on the beach without a cane and he can inspire others he said quote uh, quote, I would say live life one day at a time. Take it in stride. I know it's probably your dream to play in the National Football League. Out of 600,000 college football players, I was ranked number one in the world. What are you willing to do to get to the NFL?

And what are you willing to do to stay in the NFL? That's the question I want each and every individual to ask themselves because myself i became addicted to painkillers i was pushed out left for dead i became an addict i'm four or five years clean now not really because you got arrested in 2018 with crack uh doing extremely well but he's got dementia so that's fine he might have thought it was longer ago but it was a battle i not the only one. When you get a pill bottle in your locker and take four, five, six lore tabs, Percocets, morphine shots after games just to go out there and play in the game that you love and not knowing you're becoming addicted to the medication, that was probably the biggest regret I've had.

There he goes again. Biggest regret I've had is that and switching positions. That's how he ends everything that sucks. That's thegest regret I've had is that and switching positions. That's how he ends everything that sucks. That's the biggest regret I've had. He says he's partially paralyzed. I can barely walk right now. There's an everyday battle for me physically and mentally. I've been through it.

The best years of my life were in college. That's fucking sad to say. That's the biggest regret I have. Make the right choices. Keep your circle tight. Close with God, fearing people in your life, because when you're going to a level like that, you've got people coming at you at all angles. One of my best friends now, Robert Blackman, he helped me out a lot. We became real good friends. He helped me get this gig, helped me get back on a lot of television shows and stuff like that and just wanted to see me come back.

Out of the biggest downfalls I had in my life, I'm one of the few athletes to climb my way back to the top. I'm almost there. It's just an everyday battle, brother. I'm pushing for the College Hall of Fame, though. That's the biggest regret I have. That's the biggest regret I have is not making the College Hall of Fame, which he actually has got a shot at. He should, yeah. That would be normal if he got that.

Can't get enough of Keith McCants? No. Well, just drive in Tampa, and you'll see him get pulled over at some point, and you can say hi to him. But you can follow him on Twitter. He is at Keith McCants on Twitter, and he has 854 followers.

What? That is not a lot. So follow Keith McCants, I guess. Give him a follow for fuck's sake. He's trying hard. He looks great in his picture on Twitter here. First of all, he's rocking the same mics we have. He sure in the fuck is.

Same fucking deal, so it's a good radio station. But he's looking good there, right? That's a younger picture, I feel like, over here. That's not recent. That's like Tampa Orange. That's four or five years ago years but the one of him at the studio he looks real good and good for keith and we hope we root for keith we want keith to do well perhaps his measurement of time was thrown off by covid that's possibly it too but you know what honestly it's possible we go how long ago was that shit so and we don't even smoke crack or get pulled over every day. So that's how that works.

But that is the biggest regret I have. That is the biggest regret I have. The biggest regret I have. I can't believe he has so many. All of them. The biggest regret you should have is if you have not given us five stars on Apple Podcasts because that helps a lot. Please help us out there.

Give us five stars. Helps drive that helps a lot. Please help us out there. Give us five stars. Helps drive you up the charts. Head over to shut up and give me murder.com right now. Why? For everything crime and sports and small town murder, but especially to get those virtual live show tickets. March the 6th or May the 6th, not March, May the 6th. That's a Thursday and it'll be available for 72 hours after that.

So you can do a Friday night, Saturday night. If you miss this, it's going to be the biggest regret. It probably will be. I'm just saying that right now. And you know what? If it's not a great show, it's going to be the biggest regret of my life. So I guarantee you it's going to be a great

show. God damn it. If we have to get arrested panhandling with prostitutes on camera to make it a great show we will god damn it because that's how committed we are and that wouldn't even be the biggest regret of my life no it really wouldn't it'd be well worth it to get you everybody there so please uh do that shut up and give me murder.com yeah and uh yeah this is probably this is going to be the only crime and sports virtual show we ever do so fucking sign up if you want it uh do that please don't make it the biggest regret of my life no that this could this whole show could be the

biggest regret of my life why because they wanted us to do small town murder where we know we'd sell a shitload of tickets and we said no the crime and sports people said why can't you do crime and sports stop doing so much small town murder they're're asking for it. They've been so loyal. Let's do this. And then they're like, yeah, they don't buy tickets at the same rate as small town murder. So do that and also get on there and you can get all sorts of merchandise on shut up and give me murder dot com. And in addition to that, you can find tickets to live shows, crime and sports and small town murder. We will definitely do a crime and sports at the Tempe Improv on November the 19th. And we have a small town murder we will definitely do a crime and sports at the tempe improv on november

the 19th right and we have a small town murder the same night so come to both shows hang out and i think we have a crime and sports in nashville that we haven't set the date for and it's been sold out for two years anyway yeah we'll set the day it's on like a tuesday night so we can pretty much just waltz in there whenever we kind of want to at that point next tuesday yeah i think next tuesday if we don't jimmy if we don't make that show be the biggest regret of my life that's all there is to it so we have to do it i don't want jimmy to regret it for the rest of his life so get on there do all that uh follow us on social media at crime and sports on twitter and facebook at small town murder on instagram and in addition to that get on If you're missing out, if you're not a Patreon subscriber,

it's working, it's working. It's so great. The episodes are so fun. Last week we did, and you can get all of this, uh, this and all of them,

every one of the back ones. We did sports movies that we both love and hate and talk a lot of shit about movies. And then we did an episode about reviews of jails and prisons around the country. And we did all different regions and LA.A. County jail to everything. It's very interesting and funny as shit. So check that out.

That is Patreon.com slash Crime and Sports. And in addition to that, Jimmy is going to mispronounce your name. He's going to mispronounce it terribly. Trying his hardest to get it right. So that's a lot of fun. You do all that shit. Line it all up. Come see us.

Patreon dot com slash slash crime and sports. Be a producer. And if you just want to have good karma and hear your name mispronounced at the end of the show and know that you're a producer, you can also get on PayPal using our email address. Crime and sports at Gmail dot com. And you can do that and make a donation. And God damn it do we appreciate every fucking cent of that we appreciate it so much that i think it's time for you to tell me a list of all these people who've been so wonderful to us this week jimmy i need it right

now if you don't give it to me it's going to be the biggest regret of my life to not hear it so hit me with it right now this week week's executive producers are Hoot Mama. Hey. I don't know. She bought a new house with a better T-Bowl to B-Hole ratio. Fuck yeah. She's jacked. Work those B-Holes on them T-Bowls.

Jessica Christensen, of course, Jordan Bennett, Rish Birjit Kursing-Tariko. That's somebody. That's a person. Oh, wow. That's a name. That's quite the handle. Chrissy Ann costaldi of course jennifer baird jake and kim moore caitlin fox and kelsey dexter thank you guys so much

truly you're fucking you're everything amazing other producers this week are monica's friend dustin and he lost his pup spike so i'm terribly sorry dustin hang in there buddy it gets it gets worse uh cheyenne right had a birthday. Happy birthday. Peyton Meadows, Carl Kirshner, James Marder, Liz Vasquez. Thanks, Liz, for being around for so fucking long and sending birthday gifts and you're amazing. Thanks, Liz.

Samantha Tooley, Julianne Beth Pinkerton, custom colored by Moe, Charlene Yin, Nels and Harriet Olsen, Rabbi Shmulalovich, Bad Billy Pratt. All right. There we go. Some overboard happening there.

I read it and had to stop because I was giggling so hard. Erica Geisler, Steve Schnell. Of course, Steve sent us some chocolate cakes. The ringdings. Yeah, I ate those ringdings. Thank you so much. My daughter, thank you. You're the best, Steve.

Melody and Holly Hoffman, Lisa Coltrane. And Lisa is fucking, she goes to bat for us. So thank you, Lisa, for everything. Thank you, everybody. Jennifer Visconti, David Beers, Christine Lyschel, Ashley and Corey Barraclough, Jennifer Stevens, Carissa Blanche, DJ Jellyfish. That's Daniel Salas, but I love DJ Jellyfish. That's a great name.

Good work, bud. Daniel Salas has said that. Emmy Dumont, happy birthday. Monica Hernandez, Janice Hill, Carly Hetherington, Kimberly Henley, Vanya Vinter, Amanda Burke, Jen Peek, Allison Morris, Bill McClellan, Candice Roop, Ashley Veal, Amy Conley was three weeks in the hospital and the audience helped her get through it. Oh, hope you're recovering. Because this audience is fucking amazing.

Amy, hang in there. Jude Kendall, John Lawson, Siren Head, Siren, yes, Christopher Kreitz, Belinda Gray, Heather Carroll, Danielle Sherb, Allie Henley, Palmer Owens, Tracy Valencourt, Aaron Murray, Meredith Graves, Eduardo Santana, Andrea Quarenghi, Sylvia Concha, Brian Gilbert, Justin with no last name, Shelby Rose, Marcy Bush, Colleen Lambert, Jerry Lee, Jameson, Quinn Riley, Monica Kolesny, monica oh boy colons oh colosny uh kennedy that one took me for a ride kennedy barosi kayla ann heather adley brandy mendoza carrie wilhelm chase scott jamie levec art the maritime negro i guess art sales uh yeah it's the funniest fucking thing j Josh Nichols, Sierra Marks. You better be black, you are. You son of a bitch. That's not cool. Alicia Raymond Austin, Lisa Rucky,

Steph Kisson, Sean Smith, Valerie Little, Ruben Franco, Laurie Pierce, Danella Barker, Kurt Eckert, Marcy Goodfellow, Todd Cooper, Samantha Warren, Alan Cable, Susan Boder, Candace Bruce, Valerie Church, Amber Miller, Dan with no last name, Dylan Betts, Jason Blue, Natalie Reeds, Ann Dutchess, Fern Berry, Jamie Boyd, Annabelle Lexion, Will Mazingo, Jenna Benjamin, Mike Abler, Derek with no last name, John Maynard, Carla Hansen, Kristen Campbell, Kai with no last name, Cassie Harlow, Luis Maldonado, Laura Magner, Lauren

Magner, and Neil Eachern, Savannah Fox, Kelly Seltman, what did I do? No, Otto Miso, Kelly Seltman, Kenny Fisher, Abby Lee, Mike Elias, Marcel Destine. I was doing so great. Jeff Irvine, Anna Elker, Lori Rustovan, Jaden Cooper, Tara Camilli, Alma Monarez, Alex Capel, damn it, Kate Dunlay, Rhonda Shuh, Vanessa Britaisha, Dope Hippie Turnbull, Glenn Hamilton, Lucy Fry, Kylie Stadd, Jesse Bones, Sam Hatch, Audrey Wise, Joe Vandenenden, Ty Huffman, Lucas Guy, Kim Martini, Steven with no last name, Rachel Gustafson, Ben Hudnall, Emily Perea, Ashley Culpepper, Elena Jennings, Darla Bagan, John, oh boy, Cornelia, Haley Sparks, Jennifer Jacopek, Michael West, Casey Doerr, Caitlin Smith, Cindy Torvik, John McRoberts, Bill Jenkins, Memphis Roscoe, Zach Perez, Jesse Medler, Stella with no last name, Camilla Jones, Tiffany Cook, Alfonso Tyler, Caleb Reeves, Michelle Siebert, Turd Ferguson. Of course. Shabor, Jason O-Ring, Hannah W., Michael Kuling, Marshall Rurda, Sherry MacArthur,

Derek Baker, Joseph Bondi, Anna with no last name, Joe DeGroat, Mitch Collard, Willie J., Brad Glendhill, Constance Johnson, Christy May, Thomas Evans, Tony Peacock, Rory Daly, Lindsay Schaefer, Caroline with no last name, Alex Ann Orchard, Mark Sargent. I'm going to start just giving people last names that have no last name. I'm just going to assign one when you say it. I'm just going to shout Robinson. Tim Zelezi, Kelly Gaspard, Shays Six, Jennifer Bartz, Kayla Dunstan, Scott Sawatsky, Sean Duggan, Dakota Smith, Ashley Hernandez, Devin Franklin, Jerrica Kunkel, Lindsay Cain, Keaton O'Neill,

Marquise, nope, that's Karen. Whoa, that's way different. Megan Dalquist, Courtney Lowe, Jacob Fipel, Amanda Weckerle, Kenny Hyslop, James Stockham, Nicole, oh boy, Crewanewi Nick. Yeah, that's probably close. Lolo Brinkham, McGillicuddy, Jaron Schmaltz, Amanda Gillum, no, Amanda Dunn, and Dustin Austin Gilman. Hey.

Emily Young, Ray Thomas, David, with whose last name? Ruben Amanda Dunn and Dustin. Austin Gilman. Hey. Emily Young. Ray Thomas. David, with whose last name? Rubenstein. There it is. Andrew Miso. Derek Baker. Tyler Blevins.

Simon Baylor. Madison Barton. Oh, Jesus. Demetrius Brooks. Sidney Baskind. James Bardsley. Holiday Jeremias. And no, it's not right.

Nico Oosthuizen. Yeah. No, it's not right. Nico Ousouzin. Yeah. Ryan Bardwell, Sean Phillips, Rachel Malice, Beth Bryant. Nope, that's Ben Wilson. Diane Quagg, Jose Sanchez, Kira. And her last name is? Baracus. Clark Smith, Kelly Klinker, Hannes Schrewer, Jeremy Freese, Jason Williams, Donna Salmon,

Emily Graper, Kirsten Chase, Cassidy with the last name of... Rose Staslicevich, Tom has a sweet last name. Carlin? Dalton Brown, Allison Carrier, Chase Wojcik, John McManus, Joe Buchanan, Joanna Nugent, Anthony Renaro, and Angela Pace. And all of our patrons. You guys are terrific. Thank you so much.

Thank you, everybody. Thank you so much. Honestly, we just can't do the show without you. You're tremendous. You're gorgeous. You are. All of you. You're so pretty even

the ugly ones are gorgeous we don't care you're just wonderful fucking people look at that ass it's great even with a cane so do that and hang out with us jimmy what if they wanted to talk to you how would they talk to you you can find me and uh tell me about james's great ass on the internet uh wisman sucks w-h-i-S-M-A-N sucks. Absolutely. Twitter and Instagram. Where can they tell you about your fantastic rump? Boy, you can tell me

and you're going to regret it for the rest of your life if you don't. If you don't follow me at Jimmy P is funny and follow Jimmy as well here at Jimmy P is funny. You can just Google us.

You know where the fuck you know how to find people on the goddamn internet. So do that. Keep coming back. Get those tickets to the virtual live show. And I think it's about time.

Can we go? Oh, boy. Let's get out of here. And live from the Crime and Sports studios, we will see you next week. Bye. Hey, Prime members, you can listen to Crime and 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.