Peak Points | Travis Howze - The Saddest Moments with a Firefighter

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One of the most tragic events in American firefighter history. I'd heard that my friend Lewis was missing.
This is the straw that broke the camel's back and kind of sent you into the downward spiral of PTSD. I looked down and I realized my hands were on the shoulders of one of our guys.
His head should be right here, but there was no head. What eventually ended your career in the fire service? We certainly weren't expecting any of that.
Often referred to that as a death trap. When did you decide to put the bottle down? It was something as simple as, how do I want to view my world? The word is perspective.
So the Sofa Superstore fire which claimed the lives of nine firefighters and is one of the most tragic events in American firefighter history, if I'm not mistaken. You're right.
And you were a part of that, and you responded to that. And you mentioned that this changed your life forever.
and out of all the traumatic events that you've witnessed and been a part of, this is kind of what, this is the straw that broke the camel's back and kind of sent you into the downward spiral of PTSD. And also, I watched a, I did a lot of research on this too, and it seemed to be a very

controversial incident, and a lot of lessons learned happened from it. And it seems that the

men, you know, like yourself that survived it are considered legends in the community.

But before we get going on that, I kind of want to put everybody in the mindset of how horrific this was.

So I want to roll the tape.

That was your best friend on the phone.

And, uh,

telling his wife that he loved her.

And, uh,

like, um, I really just want to set the tone on how fucking serious and tragic this was. The day started for you at a memorial golf tournament.
And I'd like to start from right there. Yeah.
Yeah, his last words that you heard was my friend, my best friend, Louis Mulkey. And his last dying words as he was burning to death.
Tough to hear. June 18th, 2007 started out as a normal day for us.
We certainly weren't expecting any of that. We actually all got together.
I was off duty that day. And we were having a golf tournament for another friend of ours who was a firefighter who was killed four months to the day prior in a car accident.
And that was another really good friend of mine who got me the job in Charleston, actually. Really? Yeah.
He was one of my other best friends. I mean, it is so paying homage to him, trying to raise some money for his family at a golf tournament, and we're doing what firemen do, and just like, you know, what SEALs do when you all get together and cops do when they get together.
We get drunk, and we have a good time. And that's what that golf tournament was about.
But by the end of the day, you heard the tapes. That's what we were all thrown into.
And at the end of the golf tournament, everybody's phones kind of started ringing. And we were all told the Superstore was on fire.
And we all knew that that was a horrible place to have a fire. We often referred to that as a death trap if that's one of the calls we ever had to go on.
Because as firefighters, you pre-plan buildings. That means you find buildings in your area that could possibly be a threat or be very bad.
So you had to kind of strategically plan how you would face this monster in the event that would happen. How many buildings were like that in that city? Tons of them.
Tons of them? Yeah. I mean, they're everywhere.
It's just an old furniture store. It's actually an old grocery store that was converted into a one-story furniture warehouse.
I mean, so it was a huge, like a hundred-something thousand square feet. Don't quote me on the square footage, but it was a big showroom and it had a big storage facility behind it.
And that's where the fire started. So we found out that that building was on fire.
We all got in our cars and just went. What were you thinking on the way there? I had heard that my friend Louis was missing.
You heard that before you even arrived? Yeah. When you heard that it was the sofa superstore, did that, did you know it was going to be fucking bad since, since the, that was already pinging on everybody's radar? Well it's like i you earlier, it never seems real until it's real.
Yeah. And it just seemed like another fire.
But when I heard he was missing, that extra adrenaline kicked in, and I drove faster. I broke through a police barricade with my vehicle.
I didn't drive through it like smoking a bandit or anything. We just went around it.
The cop was like, what the fuck? I'm like, fuck you.

I kept going.

When we got there, the building had just collapsed.

So I got there right when everybody had been pulled out.

My girlfriend was driving my car at the time.

My firehouse was right up the street.

I told her, I said, go to my locker in my firehouse, grab my shit, and get it back to me.

I got to find out what's going on.

And so this time, you got hundreds of firemen on scene, man. I mean, hundreds, there's probably 300 something plus people on the scene that night.
It was just a sea of red lights everywhere. And I ran up to my buddy, David Griffin, who was pumping.
He was the engineer on engine 11. And I ran up to him.
I said, David, what do we have? And he turned around. He said, Lewis is missing.
And he said, Travis, we got a lot more guys in there too. We don't know how many.
And I was like, in that? I mean, because now the building is down and there's just fire everywhere you look, it's just fire blowing. And in Charleston Fire Department, we didn't back out of fires.

We were very cowboyish, and we were very prideful of the way that we did things, and we were very, very aggressive.

And this is hundreds of years of tradition, and it finally caught us.

And it bit us, and it cost us nine guys.

And I remember hearing reports of like 19 or 20 initially is what they thought

but by the time the smoke settled it was nine and it was nine really good dudes and all those dudes I knew very personally I'd worked with every single one of them we we sat around that table breaking bread many a nights having having jokes, having laughs. You knew their families.
And Louis just happened to be my best friend because I wasn't his best friend. He was one of those really cool dudes that had a lot of best friends, but he was my best friend.
And when I started with Charleston Fire, he took me under his wing and showed me the the ropes and I had a very special

connection with him and I didn't know by the end of the night I still didn't know what lie ahead I didn't know that I'd be the one next to his burnt corpse sitting there looking at him in a manner I can try to describe but it's gonna be hard be hard. You did make entry.
Yeah. You know, if I remember correctly, did you make entry and you got pulled back? Was that right? Well, we went around the Delta side of the building.
So when you're looking at a building, the front is Alpha, and then you go around clockwise. So we got to the Delta side, which is where a would be the right side.
And we go through this place, man. It was just twisted steel, like spaghetti, spaghetti noodles.
And it was still hot. There was still a lot of fire present but we had guys missing.
We didn't have time to not get in there. We really wanted to find these guys.
And I guess some of us thought that we were going to find them alive, but it's just not the case. There was, I think around 15 to 20 of us on the body recovery teams, we were all broken apart and put into five man teams.
And we all came in from different parts of the building. And my five man team, we went in and it was literally, you couldn't move two or three feet and you had to stop and you had to figure out a way to get through the voids that were there.
There'd be like a little hollow opening here and we'd crawl through that and the next two seconds you're standing on what used to be the roof. So you're in it at this point and how many guys are with you? Four other guys.
And so just to paint a picture because you got really descriptive in your book about the. You can't see your fucking hand in front of your face, the heat.
And there was nothing. And I could see how it would be easy to get disoriented and fucking lost in something like that.
And you couldn't even bring a hose in with you to retrace your steps to get the fuck out. And, I mean, the amount of courage that takes, I mean, and it doesn't, did it seem like it was even a courageous thing? Did it, probably didn't even go through your fucking head.
It was just, we're going. Only thing is is they wanted volunteers and a lot of guys didn't raise their hand no very very I think because those guys knew they didn't want what was on it on the inside of that building it's not that they're less of a firefighter yeah I think that they just knew I don't want to fuck with that man we're here to do whatever we got to do.
But there was a select group of us that did. And I certainly often say the worst decision I ever made was going inside of that building that night.
But the best decision I've ever made in my life was going inside of that fucking building that night and carrying them all home. And it didn't seem like anything courageous.
It's just what needed to be done. Our guys are down.
We got guys down. We got to do what we got to do.
Let's push forward and go get it. So we didn't even have fucking air packs on our back because they were all used.
So we're choking on smoke, and we have what we call flash hoods. The firefighters have flash hoods.
And when you put your face piece on, you pull your flash hood up, and it protects the skin right here. It protects your neck and your ears.
So we're choking on smoke, literally gagging on black smoke. And you can't see.
You know, when you're crawling next to big flames, fires, and they have ladder companies dumping water on top of us. And in a normal fire situation, you would never be operating inside of a fire when you have tower units raining water down because they're just so powerful.
It could hurt you. It could injure a firefighter blow debris on them they could push fire on top of them and kill them

but we had no choice we had to go in we had to do what needed to be done and

it seemed like it took a long time to get to to them and once we started finding them

um you would hear a team shout out i got somebody and and we would do the same. And, um, I saw something silver and, um, it didn't look like anything we had seen up

until this point because everything was just black.

And then I saw something and I went over to investigate what it was and it was by myself and I crawled up there on my hands and knees no I started looking at this thing and I say it in my book I was just turning my head like a curious dog trying to figure out what the fuck is this and I realized that uh it was an air pack of one of our one of our guys and it was uh we wore several silver scott air packs and it busted open it didn't look like an air pack it was just like it was like filleted open. And once I realized what it was, I had my hands, I looked down and I realized my hands were on the shoulders of one of our guys.
And we wore black gear. It just looked like a pile of black shit, like debris.
And then when I realized that, I pushed back and I looked down and I realized these were his shoulders. That's his back because the pack is on his back.
So his head should be right here. But there was no head.
There was nothing. It was just a couple of teeth.
There was no helmet. There was no skull.
There was just teeth. And I looked down at the opening.

There was an opening, and there's a spinal column sticking out.

And this one that got real for me, and I realized,

because I'd been to calls where we had burned up kids on Christmas.

I've seen burned kids.

I've been to burnt people many times, but.

Nothing like that one. No.
No. I realized right then, whoever's in here is dead.
Whatever count that they have on the outside, every one of them is fucking dead. And I knew Lewis was in there.
And we just... We had no way to tell who was who.
It's one thing when you got a dead body there that you can recognize, but when you know it's one of yours and you don't know who the fuck it is. So what we had to do is we were tasked with not moving the bodies and just trying to identify them the best way that we could without doing too much.
And what the coroner was going to do after all the smoke cleared was come in and GPS them and locate where their bodies were. So that's what we did.
So this one individual, Captain Billy, was a really good dude. He'd been in fire service 30-something years.
He was off engine 19. And we ended up pulling his fire pants down, and his wallet was in his pants.
And we opened it up, and we saw his driver's license with his credit cards, man. And it was just like, God damn it.
It's one thing when you're working with dead people and you have no relationship. You don't know them because it's not real.
Now you go to these things and it sucks. It fucks with you from time to time, but it's not personal.
This is personal. No, there's no get back.
Like we talked about and you're just like, what the fuck do I do? So, but we got a job to do, man. And we can't sit around too long.
So we got to find more of our brothers. And then we go, we go not too far away and stumble on another one.
Because at this point, smoke's starting to lift a little bit more. As the fire got knocked down and I found Mark.
And he was, he was face down. I rolled him over.
His hands were in front of his face. And it's almost like, like he saw the flashover that happened in that building.
It's not a backdraft. That's movie shit.
I mean, those things happen, but flashovers happen all the time in fires. And that's when everything reaches its combustible limit at the same exact time and everything just the, all the superheated gases in the building go and it's just a big ball of fire and 99% of firemen that are caught in these things die because it's so quick and it's so violent it's almost like he felt it or saw it and did like this and then turned and fell his hands were like this but i didn't know it was mark mark was off my truck ladder five and i had a great relationship with mark we worked together um many times and so we roll them you got to think your bodies are still hot man you can still feel when you're touching them i'm not wearing gloves at this point and i had them i would take them off from time to time but every once in a while we'd roll a guy over and you'd have your gloves off and you could feel that heat in your hands from their gear how hot it was and they were fucking burnt so bad and when i rolled mark over the best description i can give you is we have a plastic face piece right here that covers our eyes and right here is usually rubber and it's black i don't know if you've ever seen an ultrasound of a baby, that's what his face looked like.
It was baked into his mask. Damn.
And we undid his coat, pulled his coat open, and we had metal name tags back then, and it had his name right there. And that's how we identified Mark.
And we heard other teams yelling out that they were finding guys.

And, you know, it sounds selfish and everything, but I was so worried about Lewis. You know, all of these guys were important to me, but this is my dude.
Yeah, he's your best friend. And I don't want it to be real.
And I want to hurry up and find everybody. And I'm not wishing that it was somebody else, but you can't help but in that moment to be like, please, don't be my friend.
and uh

the next brother we found was

Bray you can't help but in that moment to be like, please don't be my friend.

And the next brother we found was Brandon, my team.

We go into this back storage room.

It's like one of the only pieces of building that was really left intact.

There was a lot of smoke damage, not a lot of fire damage.

And Brandon was huddled down in a corner and his body was just normal. We rolled them out of this corner and he just had a cut over his eye.
And what happened was Brandon ran out of air, but he got away from the fire but he died from smoke. Damn.
And he just looked peaceful, man. His wedding invitations were in the mail.
We're still being delivered everywhere around. He died that night.
He was actually just working for somebody else. He did a buddy shift for somebody else, and it cost him his life.
Damn. So Brandon was, I knew we had eight at that point, and by this time it had come through that we have nine confirmed.
This is hours into the night. What what's the uh what was the fire completely out was there still smoke at this point smoke was smoke was still there but it was nothing like it was i mean it was we were in there for hours yeah um so the the whole fucking building came down and there was really nowhere for the smoke to go except into the atmosphere part of the show showroom was still there, but after the bulk of the fire was knocked down, because, yeah, I think fire was in all these different little pockets where the collapses were.
Yeah. And so once those were done, man, all the smoke pretty much dissipated.
That's why I think it took us so long to start finding guys is because there was so much smoke. I really think we probably crawled over them a couple times possibly.
just didn't know it so now I know we have eight and some guys were in there with Brandon and I love Brandon too man and just like I want to spend some time with him do whatever we need to do but I gotta find Lewis you know that limousine company you talked about that I owned I drove for Lewis Lewis's wedding. We had a lot of fucking fun together, man.
This is actually the night after his anniversary. He lived one year and one day after his anniversary.
So I put my helmet on and I got a job to do, man. And I was actually in a part of the building where you could stand up and I start walking out.
And, man, I it 10 or 15 feet and I walked through what seemed to be a doorway. I'm having to relive this because I can describe it to you.
And when I did, as soon as I cleared that doorway, I looked to my left and he was laying right there.

So, I looked to my left and he was laying right there. So.

I knew it was him just by looking at his skull.

You know, I didn't need confirmation. I knew.

Because he had to, he had a distinct face.

And even when the, when the skin is baked off of somebody's face, you can still recognize them.

And it's a sick thing to say. But I've witnessed that.
And Louis was on his back, man, and his left leg was underneath his right. His right leg was straight out, and there was a piece of big-ass piece of steel across it.
We ended up having to dig that out, but his arms were sticking up in the air, and his fucking sleeves were burnt off, his fire coat. All the skin was burnt off of him, and just his arm bones were sticking up in the air and his fucking sleeves were burnt off his fire coat

All the skin was burnt off of him and just as arm bones were sticking up

his radius and all those hands were burnt off and

His head was his head was back and his eyeballs were burnt out the fucking skin was burned off of his face and his mouth was wide open

and I just got on my knees next to him. Told him how much I loved him.
What eventually ended your career in the fire service? So it was a culmination of a lot of things building up to one major incident. So you say I got in a fight.
I ended up going hands-on with a lot of guys in the department over the course of two and a half years, and it's not something I'm proud of. I'm actually very embarrassed about it, but it happened, and it needs to be talked about because the reason I talk about it is you can see a shift in people's behavior.
We're family, and when you see somebody acting differently, something is wrong, and nobody ever pulled me to the side to help me. Nobody ever pulled me to the side to try to figure out what was going on.
What happened was this new behavior that I was taking on was just becoming normal. At the funeral for one of our guys, I got into a physical altercation on the bus.
We had a bunch of buses brought in because the funerals were so big, we couldn't take everybody's cars. So they had to bring families on buses.
And firemen mixed with families. And I was on a bus with some firemen and some families, some young children, some old people.
And something was said to another fireman and he threw his hat at me and kind of joking around, but kind of not. And I just stood up and slapped him and slapped him into the seat, the empty seat.
And everybody witnessed it. Yeah.
And this is somebody I supposedly love, you know, and protect. And I just did that.
In that event, everybody got up, they left the bus, and I was kind of alone on the bus after that. And then after that was more of the same.
I got into physical altercations at the training facility where I assaulted one of our guys that needed help. He fell down and he was having flashbacks of the fire.
He was there that night too and he was screaming all of our dead guys' names. And I picked him up and started slamming him into the wall with all of his gear and I was like, knock it the fuck off.
And when I did, one of the training instructors came over and grabbed me and turned me around. And he did I threw him into the wall and told him you put your fucking hands on me I'll kill you and then we had an academy instructor standing right there and I looked at him and I threatened to throw him out of a window and that was accepted and I swept under the rug and then again behind a grocery store training one day I slapped one of our other guys right in the face because he just came close to me and said something.
And I just lashed out and hit him. And at this time, I was drinking a lot, though.
You know, I was drinking. I was coming to work drunk and everything.
It wasn't acceptable. It's embarrassing, man.
But nobody, it was just not an issue to anybody else. And it was just kind of all this was on my plate for me to deal with and to figure it out.
And this is what happens to these cops and these firemen out there.

They end up losing their jobs or hurting somebody else because of all the shit that they're going through.

They bring it to work, and that's what I was doing.

I had no outlet for it.

The straw that broke the camel's back for me was I came to work one day, my house, Engine 10, Lighter 5.

And we had a new guy in our house, and he put his coffee

cup on our dead guy's monument.

And it pissed me off.

I went over there, and I grabbed it, and I shattered it on the ground, and I opened

the door and told him if he wants his cup, it's in a million pieces, and if he does it

again, I'll fucking kill him.

And those are the words that I use, and that's how I truly felt.

Yeah.

And when I said that, one of my other good friends said, why are you being such an asshole? And when he did, I took that as him defending the new guy's actions and not defending our guy's honor. Yeah.
And I told him if he says another word to me, I will kill him too in a minute. And he said something to me.
And at that time, a bomb was lit inside of me, and the fuse was about that fucking short.

And when he said what he said, it's like somebody poured gasoline on that fuse, and then the bomb ignited.

And to this day, I can't tell you what happened because I completely lost it, and I blacked out.

And I just remember being outside with my captain shaking me, and I'm crying.

And he just pretty much told me that I'd assaulted my entire firehouse, and the cops were called, and they were on the way to arrest me. Did they offer any help at all, the department? Man, I can't.
So our department did the best they could with what we had at the time. We'd never, in the fire service, there had been other incidents, but not like this magnitude, I guess.
Man. So it was kind of like a free fall to trying to figure out the best way to help guys.
And they came up with some counselors really quickly. I don't know the timeline on it, but they wanted guys, hey, man, we got these counselors for y'all to go talk to.
And of course, me being alpha male like I am, I'm like, fuck them. I them i was like these motherfuckers they've never looked at their friends like we have they've never fucking held dead babies in their fucking arms they've read books who the fuck are they to tell us how to feel and how to be yeah and that was the problem because looking back that was the worst fucking thing i could have ever done i hurt myself with that mentality and i hurt other guys around me because I would tell them to, if you go talk to anybody, you're a fucking pussy.
And that's one of the biggest regrets I have because I talk about being a coward and it's not easy to say that. That's me being a coward.
That's me being too manly, too macho and having too much of a fucking ego to accept the help that is available to us. We had people, licensed professionals, who would listen to us.
Maybe had I listened to them, I wouldn't have fucking shoved a gun down my throat and pulled the fucking trigger. Maybe if I listened to them, I wouldn't have burned my entire fucking inner circle down to the ground, you know? But I wouldn't even give it a chance because I was too macho, the culture that I had been exposed to my entire life.
And that's what I speak on now. I speak about how we're killing each other with this suck it up mentality because it's bullshit.
I understand it. Suck it up.
We have to deal with certain things. But there's nothing wrong with, hey, suck it up while we're doing this.
We got a job to do. Let's go get our guys.
And then when we come back, if it fucking bothers you, let's about it. Because there's nothing wrong with me and you being completely human and not being okay.
It's okay to not be okay. And that's what I'm trying to instill when I speak at conferences and everything.
It's okay. It doesn't make you less of a man.
Fuck, it makes you more of a man. It's worth me doing that if it reaches one fucking person in our community or even outside and it helps them become a better mother, father, husband, wife, child, whatever.
If it helps them realize that they need help and they can go get the help they want, then fuck it. I'll relive it because that's what we do.
We lift people up. We don't fucking help bring them down.
And I got caught in this vicious cycle of bringing people down because I was so fucked up for so long. When my whole world crumbled down on top of me right after that, when everything just started, I mean, everything just started eating shit around me.
I fell into the victim mindset. And it was the whole, why me? Why me? Why me? Why have I been exposed to all this? Why have I experienced this? I got scared to go to fucking sleep at night.
I would cry alone away from my wife. I would be in another room crying because I was afraid to go to fucking sleep because of what was coming for me in the middle of the night.
I knew it. And I would hide that.
And I'm not ashamed of that anymore. How long did it take you to be able to talk about that?

Long time.

Many years.

To talk about it the way that I talk about it now.

Yeah.

Long time.

Fucking decade.

I tried.

I tried later on in life to talk about it, and I'd shut down.

Every time.

I just couldn't do it.

Yeah.

But I realized at some point that my experiences may help other people too. And by me speaking about it, it may help me as well.
And that it did. And that's why I do now.
I always say, when you're in a place that makes you sick, you can't get better. It's like a cancer patient testing cigarettes for marlboro or whoever you're only gonna get sicker i tried to stay i hung on tooth and nail man but i realized when i realized i had problems and something needed to change when i finally because people ask me what made you reach out for help yeah you know and it was me sitting in my living room dry firing a weapon in my mouth i'm choking on the on the on weapon.
The barrel down my throat was slobber and drool all over it. My tears running down my face and a bottle of whiskey next to me.
And then I load it. And then I go to pull the trigger and I stop right where I thought it would go off.
And luckily, I stopped prior to it going off. And I knew right then I needed help.
So I got the help, but it wasn't in time. But yes, to answer your question, um, when I got away from the fire department, things started drastically changing for me.
The, the anxiety, the, um, I always had the nightmare shit. I still do.
Um, but that, that rage inside of you, it, it calms. So getting away from there was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.
I didn't want to leave like that. I wanted to stay on the job 30 years.
I wanted to retire. I wanted to do the right thing for my guys, ride that rig for them.
But it wasn't in the cards for me. So I got away from there for a long time and now I'm back.
And now I do a lot of work with fire departments, police departments, but I'm better now. And I'm with them at a different capacity now, you know? So I'm not completely immersed in it all the time.
I can step away from it. Yeah.
Yeah. When did you decide to put the bottle down? At the day after our wedding in 2012.
No shit. Yeah, man.
I got so fucked up at our wedding that my poor wife, she had to eat cold grits with the cab driver that took us to our hotel because her husband was passed out upstairs. Oh, shit.
Yeah. A great first night together.
Oh, shit. No, but I had been thinking about it for a while.
That was just, for me, that was just the thing. I woke up the next morning and I said, man, I don't ever want to touch this stuff again.
And I haven't. Cold turkey.
Yeah. Done.
Yeah, I looked at it and I started looking at if I'm ever going to get better, it's going to be a long road to hoe. But I need to look at the things I can control right now that are not helping me.
And the biggest one that stuck out to me was alcohol. It didn't add any positive thing in my life, nothing.
Everything that it offered me was negative. So I was like, dude, just got to go.
So I just, I quit cold turkey right then. That's not easy to do.

No, but it's at first

you know the hardest part about it is now being the

sober guy around all the people that are

drinking. Yeah.
And you're sitting there

when you don't want to be there like you talk about

in your social anxiety posts.

I get it.

Because I don't want to fucking be here.

But I have to put on this smile

and that doesn't mean I'm not contemplating fucking everybody up in this room.

Yeah.

But it's just something I've had to learn to accept and deal with. And I'd rather have that than going back home with that bottle and putting myself in a position to not be here anymore.
Yeah. Yeah, well, for everybody that's listening who is from, you know, the fire service or military police who's fucking drowning themselves in a bottle right now, and there's a lot of them, I mean, how fast after you quit drinking did – how fast did that acceleration start to get you into a better mental state? And I'm sure your business fucking started taking off too at that point.
Well, honestly, I'd love to tell you it was lightning fast, but it wasn't. It was a culmination of things because I was so fucked up.
The biggest hurdle I had yet to face was ownership and acceptance of everything. Yeah.
And I always was asking why, and I became the victim of like, this only happens to me. Why me? My life is in such a horrible spot.
Even though I wasn't drinking, I still had that mentality. And that's never who I was prior to all of this.
I was a very positive, upbeat guy. But this thing does something to you.
It rewires your brain. And you have to be your own surgeon and go in and fucking reconfigure the wire.
It took years of me going in and trying to rewire until I finally fixed it. And it wasn't until last year when I realized what it was.
It was something as simple as how the word is perspective, something as simple as perspective. How do I want to view my world? Do I want to look at it through this victim feeling bad, horrible, or fucking poor, poor me lens? Or do I want to look at it from a standpoint of, look, you have this beautiful life.
You have these horrible experiences, yes, but you can do something with them for the greater good. And you can make a positive impact on people with what you have experienced.
And so I chose that. And the second I chose that, it was like a light switch.
Well, how the fuck did that come to you? That's funny you ask. It came to me sitting in my car with a gun in my hand, ready to blow my brains out for the second time.
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You get a chance to dig into my 14 year career career in the NBA and also get the input from the people that will be joining.

Charles Barkley.

I'm excited to be on your podcast, man.

It's an honor.

Spike Lee, entrepreneur, filmmaker, Academy Award winner.

Next hand.

Now you see it.

I got you.

But also how sports brings life, passion, music, all of this together.

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