I am Defensive Coordinator for Sharpstown HS.
Houston, TX
Joined November 2010
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Coach Tealer-Jackson retweeted
Pamela Anderson married Tommy Lee four days after they met. On their honeymoon they filmed themselves having sex. An electrician Tommy refused to pay stole their safe with the tape inside, the one with their sex on it. In 12 months the tape made $77 million. Pamela got absolutely nothing from it and never even watched it. Then Hollywood made a whole TV series about it without asking her.
New Year's Eve, 1994. She was the biggest star on Baywatch and the most famous Playboy cover girl in the world. And her boyfriend was the drummer of Mötley Crüe. Six weeks later they ran into each other in Cancún. And four days later they got married on the beach. At her wedding she wore a bikini.
They filmed everything. Boats, beaches, bed. 54 minutes of a honeymoon.
Back in Malibu, Tommy was renovating the house. He fired an electrician named Rand Gauthier and kept his tools. Gauthier said he was owed $20,000.
So he came back at night and stole a 500-pound safe out of their garage. He was hoping for guns and jewelry. He found a videotape.
He took it to a porn producer. They cut it down to the sex. Then they sold it. In 1996 it hit the early internet, one of the first viral videos in history.
Pam and Tommy sued for years. In the end an internet porn company kept the right to stream it. The tape made $77 million in under a year.
"I blocked that stolen tape out of my life in order to survive."
Her career took the hit. His didn't. Late-night hosts asked her about it on air.
The marriage didn't survive either. In 1998 Tommy went to jail for spousal battery.
She says it was the only time she was ever truly in love.
Then the husbands. Kid Rock. Rick Salomon, the man who sold Paris Hilton's tape. Married, annulled, married again. A Hollywood producer: 12 days.
In 2022 Hulu released Pam & Tommy, a series about the worst thing that ever happened to her. Nobody asked her permission. She refused to watch it.
A year later she released her own memoir and her own documentary. No makeup. Her words.
Some lessons are written in other people's mistakes. Watch it once. Remember it forever.
Coach Tealer-Jackson retweeted
Pat Riley owns the trademark on the word three-peat, and he has never won one.
He won four championships coaching the Lakers in the 1980s. Two of them came back to back. He never got the third one in a row.
He started filing for the trademark in the late 1980s, while he was coaching that team and they were going for it.
Detroit swept them out of the 1989 Finals in four straight games.
Years later he was running the Miami Heat when they won it in 2012 and 2013. They lost the Finals in 2014.
Twice he owned the word and watched the season get away.
Michael Jordan's Bulls are the ones who did it. Six titles in eight years, in two separate runs of three.
ESPN has reported that the Bulls alone paid Riley about $900,000 in royalties on a word he came up with for a team that fell short.
This is what he said about the trademark back in 2005.
"It's like going out there and picking up a penny on the ground," Riley said. "I don't pay any attention to it."
"If somebody wants to license that phrase, we'll license it to them."
There is more than one of those trademarks in his name. Anybody who wants to print the word on a shirt has to come through him to do it.
He has been giving the money away for about 35 years.
Some of it goes to the Pat Riley Family Foundation. He and his wife have put the rest toward groups that help military veterans and their families.
One of them is the Special Operations Warrior Foundation in Tampa.
It pays for the college educations of the children of special operations soldiers who did not come home. It does the same for the children of Medal of Honor recipients. It writes grants for soldiers who came back severely wounded.
The Rileys have given it $200,000 in recent years. A Heat donor handed over another $100,000 and told Riley to send it wherever he wanted. He sent it there.
The Heat also run a program called HomeStrong that brings returning soldiers and first responders to their games.
"These are very patriotic, brave and proud people," Riley said. "What they do in serving our country to keep us safe is one of the most courageous sacrifices an American can offer."
He called his own giving very minor in comparison to what they deserve.
His head coach Erik Spoelstra was asked about it.
"There's a great story to it," Spoelstra said.
The Kansas City Chiefs had a deal in place with Riley to use the word if they won a third straight Super Bowl. They lost that game 40 to 22.
The word still belongs to a man who never got one.
Coach Tealer-Jackson retweeted
Nick Saban says he missed his children growing up due to his coaching career and didn’t want to make the same mistake with his grandchildren
“I never wanted to coach where my age and my inability to have a positive impact was going to start to see the program go down. And I felt like at 72 years old, that last season was really, really hard. We lost early on, and the team really improved and we got in the playoffs. They did a fantastic job, but it was very challenging, and I just didn’t know what I was going to do.”
“I think this is in the documentary, that I’m sitting there, I’ve got a 4:00pm team meeting. I’ve got two speeches. I’ve got one that says I’m staying and this is what we’ve got to do. We had a young team, so we would’ve been good the next year.”
“This is what we have to do, and then over here I’m going to tell the players I’m going to retire. And that was 10 minutes till four, and I didn’t know which one I was going to do.”
“I called Miss Terry, and she said, ‘You know, if you’re that stressed out about it and there’s that much turmoil, you have to do this at some point in time, whether it’s this year, next year, or the next year. So if you feel that much anxiety about making the decision, maybe now’s the time to do it while you still have your health and quality of life is good enough that we can do other things.’ So that’s basically what brought us to that decision.”
“Toughest decision, yeah. Maybe ever. It’s really hard. I’ve been part of a team for so long and enjoyed the relationships with the players and had such great relationships with the players.”
“And I knew a lot of those players sitting in that room came there because of the University of Alabama, but also because I was the coach. Generations of family, generations of relationships with the assistant coaches and the staff. And I knew all that was going to get blown up. And that was the hardest thing, the changes it created for everyone else.”
“Yeah, it was a weird drive home. But it also was a relief in a lot of ways that you didn’t have the stress of continuing or worrying about making the correct decision. And I do think it was the correct decision for me and Miss Terry and our family. Because, you know, I missed my kids growing up.”
“I didn’t really want to miss my grandkids growing up. So this has given me a little bit more time to have those relationships.”
I love it!!
A freshman basketball player at the University of California, Berkeley, asked a professor if he could take a graduate level class.
The professor said no. The freshman kept asking. The professor said no five times.
So the freshman went to a dean, got approved, and earned an A.
His final paper was about chess.
His name is Jaylen Brown.
Here is the whole thing.
It started at home. Brown has said his mom set the rules.
"My mom, she didn't care about basketball whatsoever. I wasn't allowed to get a B. If I came home with anything less than an A, I wouldn't be able to do some of these extracurricular activities."
He was one of the top high school players in the country. He could have gone almost anywhere. He picked Berkeley, for the classroom as much as the court.
The class was in the education school. The professor, Derek Van Rheenen, later said he gave the freshman no special treatment.
"I gave him no breaks."
Brown turned in a 23 page paper, three more pages than the class required. He wrote about chess as a way of looking at the world.
He had been captain of his middle school chess team. At Berkeley, he spent free Saturday afternoons at a local café, challenging the old-timers to chess.
He also taught himself Spanish. Bill Walton said he was fluent within five months. Later, he started teaching himself Arabic too.
He meditated. He studied philosophy. He kept a journal, and in it he wrote down things that had not happened yet, like winning a championship.
The Boston Celtics took him third overall in the draft.
At 22, the other players voted him a vice president of their union. He was four years younger than anyone else on the executive committee.
As a second year pro, he gave a lecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Education to a packed room.
"Just because I escaped the barriers of society, why should I forget about the people who didn't, or haven't, or won't?"
He became a Director's Fellow at the MIT Media Lab, and he has spoken at tech summits at both Harvard and MIT.
NASA had him speak about science education at its Goddard Space Flight Center, where he toured the control center that runs the Hubble Space Telescope.
Then he started a program that brings Boston high school kids to MIT to learn artificial intelligence and robotics.
When the news broke that he had signed a contract worth up to $304 million, the richest in league history at the time, he was not at a party. He was at MIT, in a robotics session with those students.
"So I was able to put my phone down and just get right into class with the Bridge students."
And that championship he wrote about in his journal came true. He won a title with the Celtics and was named Finals MVP. That fall, TIME put him on the cover of its list of the world's most influential rising stars.
This summer, Boston traded him to the Philadelphia 76ers.
Here is the honest part. Not everyone has loved it. Before the draft, there were reports that some teams were wary of his intelligence, and worried a player that curious might not stay locked in on basketball.
He has always pushed back on that.
"I identify as both, intellect and athlete."
The professor told him no five times.
He just kept asking.
For more stories like this, follow us on any platform The Sports on Tap
Coach Tealer-Jackson retweeted
Jaylen Brown's grandfather drove a truck across America so he could find the gyms and offer himself up as a sparring partner for heavyweight champions.
Willie Brown says the list includes Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and Sonny Liston.
He was a Marine first. He served a tour in Vietnam in 1963.
He wanted to fight for a living and did not believe it would feed a family, so he took the truck job and worked the route around it.
"I always knew where the gym was," he said. "At that time, it didn't take that much to find out who is who, so I kept running from city to city."
"Once in the '70s I sparred with Joe Frazier in Philadelphia, and he hit me with a left hook down below," Willie said, "and it kept me on the floor of my hotel room for three days."
He got older. He was living by himself in Atlanta.
In March of 2020, Jaylen brought him to Boston, and he never mentioned the virus. He told his grandfather he needed a trainer and that Willie was the best man for the job.
"We said we needed him to help me train and get back ready for the season," Jaylen said, "so he could feel comfortable sticking around here."
Willie was 78. He started knocking on his grandson's bedroom door at 7:30 in the morning.
He held the pads. He had an NBA All-Star jumping rope and sprinting up and down the street carrying five pound weights.
"He has me doing a lot of things I've never done before," Jaylen said. "It's the old way of training. Everything he does is kind of a throwback, but it's good."
Jaylen's mother Mechalle watched the two of them go at it every morning.
"We didn't want this quarantine, but sometimes things pull you together," she said.
Then, right before the league went down to Florida for the bubble, Willie was diagnosed with cancer.
He did not want to start chemotherapy.
Jaylen thought about skipping the restart entirely. Instead he made him a deal.
"I'm going to go down there and play, but you got to play, too."
"He liked the sound of that, and he signed up."
Jaylen went to Florida. Willie started treatment.
In October of that year Jaylen sat down on television and talked about him.
"He's like a superhero," he said. "He's had a heart attack, cancer, COVID, all at the same time and has beat it all."
By the following January, Willie was 79 and still running his grandson's workouts.
"He's definitely the best trainer I've had, in terms of pushing me," Jaylen said. "No excuses, no limits."
"He's never been stagnant, and I got that from him."
The man Joe Frazier put on a hotel room floor in Philadelphia has a grandson who plays in Philadelphia now.
Coach Tealer-Jackson retweeted
Michael Irvin got a $1 million signing check from the Dallas Cowboys. He didn't cash it. He left it on the table so everyone who walked in could see it.
He came from Fort Lauderdale. He calls it Brokeville.
"I was young, too, man. I was crazy."
First, the house. He picked it for one reason: an 8-foot gate.
"All I knew is I don't want nobody to see me in the pool."
Then the check.
"That million dollar check. I left that right there on the table."
His financial people kept calling. Every day it sat there, he was losing money.
"I'm winning. What you talking about?"
Why leave it out? Because of where he came from.
"I was getting $20 a weekend and mom took the first 15."
$5 a weekend. Then $1 million on the table.
And a big family waiting on it. Mom. Brothers. Sisters.
Shannon Sharpe puts it plainly: "There ain't a whole lot left over."
It took Irvin that whole first contract to learn the lesson.
"Making money is one thing. How you let it go is as important."
Coach Tealer-Jackson retweeted
Netflix spent $21.4 million on the first season of Squid Game and valued it at $891 million, 42 times more.
Its creator, Hwang Dong-hyuk, got a fixed fee with no percentage of the success. After the premiere he said: "I'm not that rich."
In the video below, Hwang explains at Oxford why he invented a survival game for money: "I was desperate. I was dreaming of winning the big money."
He wrote the script more than ten years before the premiere, after his first film flopped at the box office. He had $5 in his account and, at 38, still lived with his mother.
People he knew in the film industry didn't like it: "This is too absurd." The actors said no too, and after a year he gave up because he was too broke.
Ten years later Netflix took the script and spent $21.4 million on the first season. The stress of the shoot cost Hwang eight or nine teeth.
It became the most popular show in Netflix history, but Hwang said: "Netflix paid me according to the original contract." Neither he nor Netflix named the sum, and a month later Bloomberg reported that Netflix paid the show's team bonuses.
Three years later the BBC asked him why he took on a second season, and he answered at once: "Money." "Even though the first series was such a huge global success, honestly I didn't make much."
Which is fairer for a creator: a guaranteed fee up front, or a cut of a hit that may never come?
Coach Tealer-Jackson retweeted
A stranger called the hotel where Erin Andrews, the NFL sideline reporter, was staying, asked for the room next to hers, and got it. Then he took apart the peephole in her door and filmed her through it.
"There's naked video of you all over the internet."
He tried to sell it to TMZ first. When they said no, he put it online for free.
In the video below she tells it herself. Wait for the part where she says you can hear him breathing on the tape.
Around 17 million people watched it. For months the internet said she leaked it herself, a sideline reporter chasing fame. "I'm not the girl that you think that I am."
When she called home screaming, her dad thought she'd been in a car accident. Later the FBI had her sit and watch the video with her dad. She threw up.
"The first thing I said was, my career is over."
In court, the hotel's lawyers walked her through how well her career had gone since. A Reebok deal. Diet Mountain Dew.
His name is Michael David Barrett. He picked her because she was trending on Yahoo. He admitted stalking 10 to 15 other women. He got two and a half years.
In 2016 a jury awarded her $55 million and put 49% of the blame on the hotel. The hotel settled in secret. She'll likely never see most of his share.
Back then no law forced a site to take a video like that down. Since 2025 the Take It Down Act does, within 48 hours, and posting it can mean federal prison.
"I'll always have to tell my kids, mommy didn't do anything wrong."
Two and a half years for filming a woman through her door and putting it online. Was that enough, or should the hotel that gave him the room have paid all $55 million?
Coach Tealer-Jackson retweeted
When Keisha Lance Bottoms was 8, she used to come home from school and find her father making dinner. Major Lance was a soul singer who sung “The Monkey Time” and opened for the Beatles.
One afternoon, Keisha found police officers in the house. Her father was in handcuffs. “Babies, it’s going to be OK,” he told his children as the officers took him away. “I will be back.” The police told Keisha to sit on the sofa, and she was so afraid of getting in trouble that she stayed there until her mother came home.
Her parents divorced while her father was in prison. Her mother, Sylvia, worked several jobs, and the ballet lessons Keisha had taken were suddenly more than the family could afford. When Keisha talked about her daddy in those years, she kept it simple. Her dad was living in Columbus, she would say. Then he was living in Jackson, or Eatonton. Those were the towns where he was being held.
Isitoshe,
Major Lance died suddenly at 55, the year his daughter finished law school. She was 24 and thought 55 sounded old. As she approached that age herself, with four children of her own, it struck her how young he had been. She knew what it was to come home one day and find your father being taken away. Now she thought about her children waking up one morning and finding her gone.
Becoming their mother had taken years. Keisha had severe fibroids, went through failed rounds of IVF and underwent what she remembers as more than a dozen surgeries, including a partial hysterectomy. When her husband, Derek, suggested adoption, she worried that saying yes meant she had given up on what she had been asking God for. They went ahead with the interviews, the home visits and the paperwork. Then, in 2002, while they were away on a cruise, word came that a six-month-old boy was available for adoption.
Sylvia spoke to the caseworker. “Hold that baby!” she writes in her book. Keisha and Derek brought Lance home. In time, they adopted Langston and then the twins, Lennox and Lincoln.
Yesterday, Georgia elected Keisha Lance Bottoms governor. She became the first Black woman elected to lead a U.S. state.
May the day break
Coach Tealer-Jackson retweeted
Dwyane Wade says the Heat were caught off guard when LeBron left the team to go back to Cleveland in 2014, and says there was a dark cloud around them because they realized they weren’t going to be good anymore
“One thing I didn’t like about it when Bron left, first of all, I don’t think it was handled well. And I was surprised about that because this was a gift that we all got to play together for these four years. That man wanted to leave. Some things got messed up in the process because there wasn’t enough communication. And I think that’s the hard part.”
“If we would’ve all just been able to communicate and sit down and say, ‘Hey man, it’s been a great four years. Do what’s best for you. I’m going to do what’s best for me. One, two, three, break,’ maybe I wouldn’t have opted out, or maybe I would’ve opted out with a different conversation. Maybe this guy would’ve done this. That was the part that sucked.”
“But from the standpoint of people feeling a way about him leaving, everybody needs to get over that. The man came here, he conquered, he did what he was supposed to do here, and he’s continued to go off.”
“I was a little surprised that everybody, Pat Riley was really in his feelings. I was shocked. Me and Riles got into it at practice about it one day. There was a little dark cloud over us after Bron left for a while. Because we weren’t good no more. The dark cloud was like, ‘Ah, we’ve got to go back to being not good. D-Wade, you old. You can’t do it.’”
“Then Chris had the blood clot thing. Things just kind of went off the rails. The wheels just fell off. So there was a lot of sensitivity around here, and a lot of it was pain with him and how he left. I think a lot of it, once again, was probably how he left and the communication.”
“But that man has his life and his career. Obviously, that man is going to do what he wants to do. So I got out of my feelings with it, and I just looked at it like, all right, what are you going to do? We went to the Finals four years in a row. All those memories we have forever. It’s a blessing.”
Coach Tealer-Jackson retweeted
Josh Okogie says having an entourage in the NBA is needed and thinks people misunderstand why so many NBA players have their friends live with them because they can be on the road for weeks at a time, their schedules are public, so people can literally know their house is empty and when to rob them
“I had my homies living with me. They had the dogs, they packed the house up, and they were people I had there that helped me out with that type of stuff. You need that, though.”
“There are so many things. In the NFL, it’s easier to have a normal life because you don’t leave the house that often. Whatever city you’re in, you live there. If I was on the Atlanta Falcons, I’m only leaving the house maybe Wednesday for a Thursday night game, Sunday for a Monday night game, or Saturday for a Sunday game. Then after the game, I’m flying back home. If I have two home games in a row, I’m probably home for three weeks without leaving.”
“But in the NBA, we’ll leave for two weeks, come back, leave again. And just from a safety perspective, the thing people don’t understand is our schedules are public. People know when you’re not home. People can rob your house and see, ‘Oh, I don’t know when he comes back home. I see him on TV.’ They’ll rob your house while they’re watching you on TV.”
“So people don’t understand that you need that support. Like I said, I have dogs. You still need the dogs walked, and you don’t want to give your dogs to boarding companies because you don’t know what they’re doing with your dogs.”
“And if I’m doing something at my house but I’m not home, they can help me out and facilitate everything. Also, after a long game, because we play a lot of games, sometimes you just need somebody to talk to. You need to go grab some wine. Your homies are right there the whole season.”
“Some of them will fly home and come through. Parents will fly in. If you’re playing on a championship team, you’re in your market from September to June. That’s nine months. So you need somebody to be able to chop it up with through the ups and downs of every season and kind of help you navigate the season as well.”
Coach Tealer-Jackson retweeted
Derrick Rose says people called him washed for years while he was quietly rebuilding his entire game after multiple surgeries, and says he had to come to terms with the fact that he was never going to be the same player again in order to fully heal
“Mentally, you’re having to deal with, like, ‘I’m never gonna be the same.’ That’s rough. Like, ‘I’m never gonna be the same, bro.’ Can I play through this pain? Because every day, it’s not going to be pain-free when you’re dealing with an injury. Can you play through the pain?”
“After my ACL injury, all the way into my 15th year, I played through some type of pain for all those years to get to where I was at, to get to where I am right now. I wasn’t letting nobody pressure me to come back early. Something don’t feel right, I’m telling them. When I run, when I decelerate, I ain’t decelerating right. They’re like, ‘What do you mean?’”
“Something about when I decelerate, bro, it’s not right. They’re like, ‘No, we think you can play.’ No, bro. Something about what’s going on. I took two more months off.”
“The moment that I did come back too early, two flaps in the back opened up, and I had to get them taken out or halfway removed. So I’m not bone-on-bone in either knee, but I had to get two flaps removed back-to-back.”
“That’s like four or five surgeries within three or four years. So I’m like, bro, after the surgeries, I’ve got to figure out myself. I ain’t listening to nobody. You’re trying to figure out your rhythm, bro. And I did that for like four or five years while people were telling me that my game wasn’t it, that I wasn’t the same player.”
“My numbers were still good NBA numbers, but they were comparing me to my MVP year and saying I was trash. But I’m telling them the whole time, ‘Man, I’m gonna get to a place where I’m gonna put this together.’ I said that the whole time: ‘I’m gonna put it together.’”
“And me putting it together at the end was me shooting 40% from three for numerous years, three or four years. And for me, that’s huge because coming in labeled not a shooter, and to go three or four years shooting over 40, it showed that I adapted.”
Coach Tealer-Jackson retweeted
Kevin Garnett says he used to run three miles a day so he wouldn’t ever get tired during games, and says he would lean into opposing players during the 4th quarter just to hear how hard they’re breathing and make sure they knew he wasn’t tired at all
“Stretching is another thing. I don’t think our kids are in the best shape either, bro. I’m watching the league, a lot of dudes out of shape in the league, bro. I ain’t going to lie. I don’t see nobody running, racing.”
“The secret weapon of being in shape... I was literally just hell on the whole team. It’s different when you’ve got your hands on your knees in the fourth quarter and you see a dude in your face ready to go. Like, ‘I’m not even tired.’ That’s just a mental advantage.”
“They don’t run the miles. That used to be one of my main workouts, two or three miles a day. I never got tired on the court, ever. That was part of my play. I wanted to outwork you so much that I could hear you breathing. I’d say something: ‘Boy, you breathing. I can hear you. You sound like Biggie out here.’”
“I’m dead ass, boy. You can’t play me. You out here huffing and puffing, boy. What? It’s definitely an advantage to that.”
Coach Tealer-Jackson retweeted
Andre Igoudala says he once rejected a $60,000,000 offer as a free agent because the analytics said he was worth $80,000,000
“When I came out, or I’m going into my free agency, I’m not a max guy. But I’m comparing all my good numbers, how many games I’m winning based on the team I’ve got, how many points, assists and rebounds combined, I’m in the top five in the league, steals I’m always top five in the league.”
“You’ve got to be able to pull different numbers to put yourself in the position because you’re negotiating. You’re negotiating, man, and they’re trying to pay you as little as possible.”
“I remember I had the equipment manager like, ‘Man, why are you asking for so much money?’ I remember I turned down $60 million on my extension. Sixty was like 200 now, it was just 60 back then. I turned it down because I’m like, ‘Nah, I’m worth 80. Eighty at least.’ And the equipment manager was like, ‘Well, do you need all that money?’ I said, ‘Well damn, bro.’”
“That’s how your interactions become with people you work with, with the fans. The minute you start negotiating, you go from being the best-liked person to now the narrative starts, burning jerseys kicks in, and nobody knows what the hell is going on.”
“I used to joke with the coach and the GM of one of my teams. They’re my guys too. They would be like, ‘Hey Andre, you’re not one of the guys that cares about money. You handled your business well, and you’re doing well off the court. Do you need...’ And I’m looking like, ‘Wait, what?’”
“Then what happens when both of their contracts expire? Both of them got the max. The coach and the GM. I’m like, ‘I thought we didn’t care about money. I thought y’all were doing good. What happened?’”
Coach Tealer-Jackson retweeted
Devin Booker turns 30 today, and he has never been the obvious guy in the room.
He did not start a single game in college. Not one, all season.
Kentucky went 38 and 1 that year and Booker came off the bench behind the Harrison twins for every game of it. He played 21 minutes a night and averaged 10 points. His best game all year was 19.
He was named SEC Sixth Man of the Year and then went 13th in the draft.
Now go back further, because the better story is his father.
Melvin Booker was a point guard at Missouri. As a senior he was Big Eight Player of the Year, he took Missouri through conference play at 14 and 0, he got them to an Elite Eight, and he was named a first team All-American.
Then in the 1994 draft nobody took him.
He went undrafted and spent the next fourteen years as a professional basketball player anyway. Italy. Turkey. Russia. Back to Italy.
He played 32 games in the NBA in his entire life. Thirty two.
Devin grew up in Michigan with his mother Veronica Gutiérrez. His parents never married but they raised him together, and he spent most of his childhood with her.
Then the summer after his freshman year of high school, Melvin went and recruited his own son.
Here is how Melvin describes it. He approached it the way a college coach would. He was selling a 14 year old on moving 1,000 miles to Moss Point, Mississippi to live with a father he had not lived with.
Veronica did not want to do it.
"Mom didn't want to send her son away from her for the next three years."
She let him go anyway.
Devin called it a culture shock. He also said this about what it did to him and his mother.
"It didn't change."
And that same year, 2011, Melvin Booker took a job as an assistant coach at Moss Point High School.
Be straight about it. This was not some hardship story. Devin had two parents who were both there, and a father who had played at a high level and knew exactly what to teach him. Plenty of kids would take that deal.
But think about what Melvin was actually doing.
A man who was the best player in his conference, who nobody drafted, who spent fourteen years in gyms in four countries for 32 NBA games, looked at his kid and decided he was going to do everything in his power to make sure it went differently.
Today that kid is 30 years old. He has played his entire career with the Phoenix Suns and he got to an NBA Finals.
He has already started more NBA games than his father ever played.
Coach Tealer-Jackson retweeted
Bill Belichick says Carl Banks found the best film tell he’s ever seen against the Eagles that the coaches completely missed
“One thing in the book I talk about that I think you guys would love, best key I’ve ever seen. Best key I’ve ever seen. Banks comes up to me when I’m with the Giants. We’re playing the Eagles, and of course we played them twice a year. There’s no free agency, so it’s the same team every year. You keep playing them over and over again.”
“Banks comes up to me and says, ‘Coach, I got a key.’ He says, ‘When Spagnola comes up and puts his arm here like this, it’s a run. And when he wiggles his fingers, it’s a pass.’ I’m like, ‘Come on. No chance. Are you kidding me?’ He goes, ‘I know. I know. But just check it out.’”
“So I look at all the end-zone film, and I’m like, ‘God, it’s unbelievable.’ He wiggles his fingers every time. What are you going to say? It was 100%. We go play the Eagles. First series, we come off the field on defense. We get a three-and-out, and Banks is like, ‘He’s still doing it.’”
“We play them the next year, or play them the second time around. We go into the game, first series: ‘Coach, he’s still doing it.’ I mean, I’ve never seen anything like this. It was crazy. It could be fourth-and-inches. It could be third-and-20. If it’s a run, no wiggling. It was unbelievable.”
Coach Tealer-Jackson retweeted
Gilbert Arenas says NBA players who earned over $100 million could face at least $150,000 in monthly expenses, pointing to Paul Pierce’s reported $96,000 in bills for mortgages, car payments and child support
Arenas explains that players forced into retirement often have little time to prepare for losing their NBA salaries, leaving them with expensive lifestyles they cannot immediately adjust. He points to multiple homes, mortgages, payments on as many as six cars and child support as major expenses that continue long after a player’s career ends. The conversation then turns to Pierce’s reported $96,000 in monthly expenses, with the hosts questioning whether the figure fully reflects his actual spending.
Gilbert Arenas explains why retired NBA players go broke, saying car payments, mortgages, child support and family expenses can leave them paying nearly $100,000 a month long after their careers end
Arenas says the problem goes beyond reckless spending. Many former players are still dealing with expensive cars, mortgages, child support and family responsibilities even after their NBA income stops. He argues that loyalty and the pressure to maintain a certain lifestyle make it difficult to cut costs, leaving players struggling to keep up with expenses they can no longer afford.
Coach Tealer-Jackson retweeted
Cooper Flagg says he didn’t expect to end up playing in Dallas but got excited when the NBA Draft Lottery ended up having two Texas teams in the top three because he realized what that meant for his paychecks
“The lottery was crazy because my agents were talking to me, and they were like, ‘Whatever you do, just don’t react to anything.’ I guess guys in the past, if it was a team they didn’t want, would react in a bad way or make a face like they were upset.”
“So the whole time I’m sitting there thinking, ‘All right, just don’t react.’ If it’s somewhere I didn’t want to go, just don’t act upset. Then once it got to the top three and it was Philly, San Antonio and Dallas, I was like, ‘I mean, being in Texas would be great.’ I was thinking about state taxes. I was like, ‘This is amazing.’”
“So then I was like, ‘All right, now I just have to contain my excitement.’ And when I saw San Antonio and Dallas were the final two, I was like, ‘Okay.’ People said from my reaction that I didn’t look happy, but I was trying not to react in any way. I was just trying to be stoic and keep a straight face. Meanwhile, I had my teammates from last year sitting next to me, smiling, laughing and poking at me trying to get me to react.”
“Then they brought me over to do an interview seconds after the lottery happened, and they’re asking me questions about Dallas. I’m just trying to answer without saying, ‘Yeah, I’m going there.’”
“Especially because Dallas was never even a thought. I never thought about coming to Dallas. There were a lot of teams in the mix where I was thinking, ‘Oh, I hope they get it.’ Dallas, I never even thought about them getting the pick.”
Coach Tealer-Jackson retweeted
In 1975, Steve Jobs told Steve Wozniak that Atari had paid them $700 for a game they built together. He handed Woz a check for $350.
Atari had actually paid Jobs about $5,000.
In the video below, Woz says: "Who cares about money? Well, you do care about friendship and honesty."
Jobs was working the night shift at Atari. The company wanted a new arcade game called Breakout, built with as few chips as possible.
Jobs couldn't build it. Woz could. He already had a full-time job at Hewlett-Packard, and Jobs said they had four days. Woz went four days with no sleep. Both of them came down with mono.
Woz did it in 45 chips. Atari's own engineers were using 150 or more.
He took his $350 and was happy with it. Jobs took the rest and went up to Oregon to buy into a farm.
About ten years later, Woz read the real number in a book about Atari. By then the two of them had built Apple, and Woz was a multimillionaire.
If Jobs had just told him he needed the money, Woz says, "I would say take it all."
It wasn't the last time. Before Apple went public in 1980, Jobs refused to give stock options to Daniel Kottke, his friend since college, who had helped build the first Apple computers.
Woz did the opposite. He sold his own shares cheaply to Kottke and other early employees who had been left out.
One friend kept almost all of a $5,000 bonus. The other gave away millions.
Was Jobs a genius who knew what business takes, or just a bad friend?