July 3, 2025 • 45 mins
In 1989, Reggie Payne became a local hero when he overcame the hardships of Oakland’s 69 Village to attend Grambling State University. Yet college life some 3,000 miles away is anything but easy. While he dives into journalism as an editor at the student newspaper, Reggie becomes a first-time father and endures an alleged beatdown via a fleet of Tiger football players that changes his outlook—and messes with his mind.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
The integration program has begun. Black kids on scholarships are
going to white colleges all over the South, and the
river don't flow one way.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
On the night of October fourth, nineteen eighty one, NBC
aired a made for TV movie titled Grambling's White Tiger.
It starred Harry Belafonte as Eddie Robinson, the legendary Grambling
State University football coach, and Caitlyn Jenner Bruce Jenner at
the time as Jim Gregory, who in nineteen sixty eight
became the first white football player at the historically black
(00:38):
college in Grambling, Louisiana.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
If you can't get along with one white boy here Grambling,
how you gonna get along with him? On the Rams,
on the jets, on the capitalists?
Speaker 1 (00:46):
What's you all going to do?
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Welcome to Grambling, white boy. If you guys think I'm
some kind of playing with beach bump.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
And then what do you expect.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
I gotta be honest, I don't remember watching that. Was
it any good?
Speaker 1 (01:00):
No, it was not good. Cliches and tropes and racial stereotypes,
black characters speaking in pseudo urban slang. Danton Wilson, who Is,
a columnist for the Detroit Free Press at the time,
called it a total distortion of the truth, and that
was probably one of the friendly reviews. But for scores
of white Americans, this nine year old included Grambling's White
(01:22):
Tiger served as an introduction to one of America's great HBCUs.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
And though Grambling had been around since nineteen oh one,
it wasn't exactly a household name. The school produced a
good number of famous athletes New York Nickson or Willis Reed,
Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Doug Williams, but otherwise not many
people knew much about a predominantly black school in rural
Louisiana with an enrollment of four thousand students.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
To be honest, I wasn't one of them either, But
that changed in nineteen ninety three when you and I
spent the summer interning at the Nashville, Tennessee and I
roomed with a guy who maywell have had more passion
for Grambling than any other person on the planet.
Speaker 4 (02:08):
Reggie Payne, our friend and fellow intern, loved Grambling. He
took pride in the school, pride in representing the school,
pride in being a black man in a place that
celebrated blackness.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
But I guess the question is, for as much as
Reggie aka Sexy Sweat was all in Ungrambling and as
great a university as it is, did his time there
produce a well rounded man ready to conquer the world.
Or did a traumatic instant ultimately damage him in ways that,
decades later we can mark as the start of his demise.
(02:43):
This is Finding Sexy Sweat, a podcast where me, Jeff Pearlman,
and my colleague Rick Jervis attempt to retrace the life
of our longtime friend and fellow journalist Reggie.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
Pain, better known by his rap name Sexy Sweat.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
We're trying to learn how our life paths differed so sharply,
how the demons of mental illness crept into his life,
and why he met sets an abrupt death after being
handcuffed on the floor of his parents' home in Sacramento.
This is episode three where everybody is somebody? All right? So, Rick,
(03:22):
when we show up in Nashville, how much do you
know about Grambling State University?
Speaker 4 (03:27):
About next to nothing.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Actually, it's funny because I grew up a diehard sports
fan and I always loved the Tampa Bay Buccaneers cream
school uniforms, and I always thought it was cool that
they had a black quarterback at a time when it
was very rare. So I was a big Doug Williams
guy as a kid, number twelve for the Bucks way
before he won a Super Bowl. And I also remember vividly,
vividly watching that really bad movie Gramblings White Tiger, sitting
(03:52):
on the bed in my parents' room, really really wanting
to be Grambling's white Tiger, like wanting to be the
white quarterback at Graham and thinking how cool was and
how they all accepted him, and weirdly, how cool Bruce
Jenner seemed.
Speaker 4 (04:05):
I had no idea any of that was actually going on.
I had no idea about that movie. I had very
little idea about Grambling. I had heard about it, but
I didn't really know anything about it. And I definitely
hadn't met anybody who had come out of Grambling.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
When Reggie, I mean, you first met Reggie before I did.
But when he sort of enters our lives, are you,
I don't know, do you have preconceived notions or expectations
or anything about him that feels in hindsight kind of
interesting or noteworthy.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
I was just extremely curious because up until that point,
I had like very limited contact with anybody from any
black neighborhood. Right, and so here comes Reggie. He's got
this swagger, he's super cool, he seems like a really
deep guy in so many interesting ways. Like I just
wanted to get to know him, and I was just
hoping that we would really become really good friends.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
I'll tell you I don't talk about this that much,
but the town I come from. I memt being a
kid and I had two black kids in my grade,
Larry Glover and Jonathan Powell, in a grade of about
three hundred and thirty people. And I remember being a
little kid and there would be this thing. People would
say one of my best friends was John Powell. They'd
be like, yeah, there are good blacks, and then theirs,
(05:19):
and they'd use the N word and they would say
to him as a compliment, you know, you're one of
the good blacks, Like you're one of the good blacks.
But like that's where I came from. So being in
Nashville and having sexy sweat as my roommate was jarring
is the wrong word, because I was pretty psyched too
as my roommate. And I don't want it to sound negative,
but it really was. And he wasn't there to educate me.
(05:41):
It wasn't his job. But I think being exposed to
people from totally totally, totally different worlds, not just a
black kid, but a black wrapper from Oakland, from the
inner city, like it kind of blew my mind. And
that's where I remember about Reggie for showing up.
Speaker 4 (05:53):
You know, It's funny because I grew up in very
different surroundings from you. But South Florida was also very
sort of segregated, right, Like the white people lived in
one neighborhood, black people lived in another neighborhood, Cubans lived
in their own neighborhood, and there wasn't a ton of mixing.
I'm first generation Cuban American, grew up in a Spanish
speaking household, a lot of Cuban food and culture and
(06:16):
music around me. So really, like the only black people
that I knew were black Cubans who happened to go
to my school. They spoke Spanish, they were more familiar
to us. So black Cubans stood apart from African Americans
and the neighborhoods around Miami, which happened to be predominantly black,
(06:36):
like Carol City, over Town, some of those neighborhoods that
also was, unfortunately where a lot of crime took place.
And in those neighborhoods in nineteen eighty, that's where the
McDuffie riots happened.
Speaker 5 (06:51):
When us of the McDuffie decision reached Miami, black leaders
called for a silent protest. That's the justice building here,
that those who came were in no mood to be quiet.
Speaker 6 (07:00):
That we are now and.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Well, people had a deep president of the road.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
I get that riots happened after a black man, Arthur McDuffie,
got beat up and killed by Mammy police officers.
Speaker 5 (07:14):
The large crowd began to move through the city. At
a police building, they broke windows and overturned cars, setting
them on fire. The County Hospital's emergency room looked like
a combat zone.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
And those riots, they were extremely violent. People were killed.
And that's really all I knew about those neighborhoods back then.
As I watched the actual McDuffie riots on TV, I
was kind of blown away by all the aftermath of that. Obviously,
back then, as a nine year old kid like I
didn't have any of the context. I didn't know of
(07:46):
the social economic forces that led to the riots. All
I saw was fires and police and riot gear. So
fast forward to twenty twenty and the riots following the
George incident. Obviously those are along the same lines. It's
like police brutality. But back then I just didn't see
(08:07):
it the same way.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
I will say one thing that's kind of weird. I
was actually just thinking when you were talking about that
is for me, none of this existed, Like it barely existed.
I was starting to listen to hip hop, so you
would hear whatever Public Enemy or NWA talk about this stuff.
But I never heard of the MacDuffie riots. And if
you think about it, if not for social media and
(08:29):
for all the awfulness of social media, like it has
spread the word about things going on that people in
little sheltered towns like I was growing up in the
eighties would never know about.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
Yeah, it was a really big deal for us back then.
Obviously I'd see it as a lost opportunity for my
family or teachers or somebody to kind of sit down
with me and maybe like explain some of the broader
contexts behind it. But nobody did, and so all I
got out of it was fear, you know, fear of
if something similar happened today, and like they did during
(08:58):
the George Floyd riots, I sat down with both my
daughters and kind of explained to them some of the
forces behind it, some of the context and had to
understand it. And I wish that would have happened to
me back then, but it did.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
It. Yeah, it's kind of weird, actually, I mean I
always think about the civil rights era. My parents were
in their twenties, they were in Brooklyn, New York. They
knew this was going on, and how can we didn't
get involved? Right? And then my kids can look at
me and look at things that happened when I was
a kid in New York. There were all different situations
going on in the city, civil rights abuses by New
(09:32):
York City police officers, and I didn't get involved. When
you kind of look back and you think, what the
hell was I doing? You listen to hip hop, but
you're not are you learning the lessons of it? It's
kind of embarrassing.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
Remember being told by my family over and over again
never to go into those neighborhoods. That's where shootings happened,
that's where drugs happened. So in nineteen ninety three, all
of that changes because I finally get some one to
one FaceTime with one of the more impressionable black people
that I ever meet.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
It's kind of funny. I thought about this throughout this podcast,
in this experience, and it shouldn't be incumbent on Reggie
to educate me on how difficult it is to be
a black kid growing up in America and what it's
like to be a black kid coming out of Oakland.
Like I understand there were things I didn't know, but
I think it's almost a little insulting when in hindsight
(10:20):
we're like and then I really learned from Reggie blah
blah blah, like he wasn't saying. And then I really
learned from Jeff how to be a white guy from
the sticks. I don't know, it's just kind of weird.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
Do you remember Jeff going on the We took a
weekend trip to Memphis and went to the National Civil
Rights Museum there?
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Oh yeah, do you remember that? Of course?
Speaker 4 (10:38):
And I mean that, more than anything else, left this
huge lasting impression on me too. I learned a lot obviously,
but I remember, like the actual museum ends on like
Mahalia Jackson singing take my hand, Precious Lord in the
room of the actual Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King
Junior was shot. And I remember walking out of there
(10:58):
just like with my heart just shattered and just feeling
like the weight of it all, you know, everything kind
of crystallized for me then that there are these huge
racial forces which I didn't understand, which I was beginning
to grasp. So all of that together kind of plays
a role in forming your outlook.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Maybe you're a better person than I am, at least
back then. Maybe there's no maybe about it, Like there's
a part of me that thinks, like did I learn
that stuff from Reggie or did I just find a
novel at the time, like he's this guy and he
goes by sexy Sweat, And I know I went back
to Delaware to my you know, pretty white, safe cocoon
of higher education, and I was telling them about this
(11:41):
guy and he was this rapper from Oakland. I look
back now and I think, wow, I really gained a
lot out of that, and that was really an exposure
I needed. But I wonder at the time. Was I
more educated or was I more like entertained by just
who Reggie was and the character he was? And I
doubt I had the depth at that time, honest to God,
to understand fully what his path was.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
I don't know. I feel like it could be both. Obviously,
like we basically walked away with chunks of Reggie like
in our lives for a long times while we're doing
this podcast. So even if we didn't feel like it
was a learning lesson, then there are parts of Reggie
that lived on with us that we definitely learned from.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
There were a lot of entertaining characters in Nashville in
the newsroom of the Tennessee, and we haven't had conversations
and got any of them over thirty years correct. In
a way, I feel like our sort of ignorance and
lack of exposure explains why a place like Grambling would
appeal to Reggie. You know, like it must have meant
(12:46):
something to be surrounded by people who understand you, who
you don't have to educate, who you don't have to
walk through his blackness stage by stage. You know. He
graduated from Casmon High School and he traveled two thousand
miles across the country to Louisiana. You know, looking back,
most college brochures back then featured white faces learning white
lessons about white professors. I went to the University of Delaware.
(13:09):
I guarantee you if you look back at the brochures,
there was probably one black face in the background of
a photo. And he goes to this place where he's
just surrounded by in a way, a celebration of blackness.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
The university left a lasting impression on him, even the
school motto of Brimsworth promise where everybody is somebody.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Reggy had two uncles who attended Grambling State, so in
a way he was carrying on a family tradition. In
his memoir The Harassment of Reginald D. Pain, he wrote
that quote, Grambling takes no back seats to anyone. I'd
recommend the school to anybody of any culture or race.
This is what he said in a chapter he titled
Graham Days Days is spelled da Ze.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Going to college was the best experience in time of
my life. I decided to attend Grambling State because they
were the first to accept me. I could have gone
to other schools, but GSU was my heart. I had
two other uncles who attended the school. But I was
the first in my immediate family to go to college.
(14:15):
Black college, like Grambling, takes no back seats to anyone.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Tom Calling, Reggie's friend from high school, said there was
never a doubt where Reggie were to attend college.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
He told me, I'm going to Grammling. It was no
other colleges he wanted to go to.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
Reggie going to college felt like a triumph for his
community in East Oakland, in the sixty nine village projects
where he grew up, A few kids moved on to
higher education. Most of Reggie's classmates wound up staying in
East Ookland.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
What was it about him that he was the one
who's like, I am going to college.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
He was the determined one.
Speaker 7 (14:55):
He was just determined. If I say I'm going to
do something, I'm going to do that.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Ready arrived on campus in the fall of nineteen eighty nine,
and for him it was paradise. He was an ambitious,
intellectually curious teen thrown to an academic oasis. He was
surrounded by encouraging black professors, black classmates, black friends. He
lived in Drew Hall, a dormitory located on the South
part of campus named after a famous black surgeon. Not
(15:26):
far from Harriet Tubman Hall and Sojourner Truth Hall. He
ent up onto fellow Californian transplants, would sneak into a
nearby high school gym and run pickup basketball games. This
is Julius Irving. No, not doctor j This Julius Irving
was a fellow Grambling freshman.
Speaker 6 (15:43):
It's late, it's bout about one twelve in the morning,
and we would go over.
Speaker 8 (15:46):
To the high school, which is right next to the
domach Lord, and we would find a way to get
into the high school gym and we would run basketball
every Friday for like three hots, like four in the morning.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
I can't emphasize this. The positive power feeling, accepted, a
sense of belonging. The struggles of East Oakland faded, and
suddenly Reggie was immersed in a world of basketball games
and parties. Alex Harris was a friend from Grambling.
Speaker 8 (16:13):
Reggie had natural careism. You know, it was something that
you want your dearware. It was something to where, yeah,
every time you see Ridge, it was you know, what's up?
By God?
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Everything good?
Speaker 8 (16:24):
And it was just a lively conversation, especially when we
were at the parties. He was one of the hobbies,
and it was like a bob was born.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Up until moving to Grambling, Reggie's world consisted of squat
brick public housing, drug slingers, and money that never seemed
to stretch far enough. Now he had entered a world
of ideas, new friends, and limitless promise.
Speaker 4 (16:48):
And Grambling would change his life in ways he never imagined.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
All Right, So, Rick, when was the first time you
knew you really want to be a journalist? So?
Speaker 4 (17:04):
I was in Missus Black's tenth grade English class, and
I was not a very good student. I was always
talking in the back of the class. I was not
really paying attention. But she would assign us these essays
and I would go home and write these essays, and
she loved them. And she would make me stand up
in front of the class after every single essay that
(17:25):
I wrote and read it. And I think I was
the only one doing this. And after a while, I'm like,
Missus Black, why are you making me read these essays?
She told me, because they're really good essays. They're beautifully written,
and I think that you should write for the school newspaper.
Like after class that day, she walked me down to
the journalism class and introduced me to the journalism teacher
(17:48):
there and said, this is Rick and he's going to
be writing for you. And that's what really launched it.
And I just got into it then, and that was
my introduction to journalism and to newspaper and then I
loved it. And then I started going to college and
wrote for a college newspapers there. But I think it
was in college. I might have been a freshman in
(18:09):
college that I sat down and read All the President's
Men by Woodwind and Bernstein, the sort of Bible of journalism.
That's one of two books that I've ever finished, picked
up and read again, and that book really made me
want to be a journalist.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
How about you, I'll tell you I was okay. I
was a freshman at the University of Delaware, and I
had been the sports editor of my high school newspaper,
the Mailback High School Chieftain, and then i'd interned that
summer my local weekly newspaper, the Putnam Trader. And I
got to Delaware and I was this really, really cocky
and sufferable kid, and I begged the editors at the
(18:47):
student newspaper, the Delaware Review, to let me write, and
I begged, and I begged and I begged, and they
started letting me write. And I was just a jackass,
and I would argue about edits and all this stuff,
and they ended up telling me you can't write for
the paper anymore. And I was devastated. Devastated thought I
was going to have to transfer, and I begged them
to let me write and eventually they'll let me come back.
(19:09):
And I decided I really want to prove myself. And
at the time, the University of Delaware and Delaware State
University the two major schools in the state of Delaware,
the tiny state of Delaware, even though they both had
Division ONEWA football programs, they never played in any sports.
They didn't play basketball, they didn't play in football, they
never played And I said to someone of the paper,
(19:30):
I want to write a story about why Delaware and
Delaware State never play. And they were basically like, yeah, okay,
go ahead, do it, like get rid of the annoying freshman.
And I just started calling people and calling people and
calling people, and I got the athletic director of Delaware
to tell me on the record quote, I just think
it would serve as a divisive in the state, and
(19:51):
you had this Delaware State was a small black college,
a HBCU, and Delaware was a big white university. And
I wrote this article Delaware versus Delaware State, and I
remember handing it in and the editors are like whoa,
And they ran on the front page above the fold
of the newspaper. And a couple of weeks later, Delaware
(20:12):
announced that they would start playing Delaware State in sports,
and the local newspaper, the Wilmington News Journal, had a
column this with named Kevin Noonan, who credited my work
with making it happen. And now is the moment when
Delaware and Delaware State agreed to play in sports. I
even get shows telling that story when I was like,
holy crap, you can actually do something with this business,
(20:33):
and that really gave me the buzz.
Speaker 4 (20:36):
In some ways. Reggie's path was very similar to ours.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
He joined the Grambling Knight as a freshman, and it
definitely felt like an instant calling. If you go to
a journalistic powerhouse like a Syracuse or a Northwestern you
might have to wait one or two or even three
years to cover football and basketball. There's just a lot
of competition. But at Grambling Reggie was able to jump
right in.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
He covered football games as a freshman, wrote columns too.
The newspaper's tiny office was located on the north side
of campus. Reggie loved it. He loved hanging out with
the other staffers, talking sports, talking journalism, debating politics, feeling
a deep sense of belonging. By his junior year, he
(21:21):
was named sports editor.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
One day after Grammling State lost a game against Alabama
State at the Pontiac Silver Dome in Michigan, Reggie got
to sit on the bus next to Eddie Robinson, the
team's larger than life coach. It's a memory that burned
in him for years. He writes about it in his memoir.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
I was so nervous being that close to the legend,
not to mention his wife. Imagine that me, a little
boy from Oakland sitting next to college football's most winningest
and successful coach, a man who has sent dozens of
his boys to the NFL and others to the NFL
Hall of Fame. I was so nervous. But that, for instance,
(22:04):
is Grambling, a place where everybody is somebody.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Reggie was good too, Who's provocative, fact driven well read.
In one column where he griped about Grambling not appearing
on a division wonder boy pole. He quotes a nineteenth
century English poet, William Wordsworth, we wear a face of
joy because we have been glad of your in another
right before the holiday break, he implored readers to consider
(22:29):
the racism simmering in the NFL.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
As you leave school this semester and prepare for the
onslaught of bowl games and NFL playoffs this holiday season.
Take them with a grain of salt. There still exists
racism on your television screen and inside your radio, even
if you refuse to recognize it.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
I have to say Reggie was ahead of his time,
not that it took a psychic. This is years and
years before players trying to stand up and owners suppressing them,
Before you had Colin Kaepernick being literally blackball by the
NFL and never playing again for the crime of kneeling
on the sideline to protest police brutality. Reggie was seeing
things a lot of people weren't seeing at that point,
(23:10):
and he had a vantage point that allowed him to
see it where someone like myself probably wouldn't have.
Speaker 4 (23:16):
Reggie took the newspaper very seriously. I spoke with Omar Ali,
who worked with Reggie at the grambl and I. He
said Reggie was fun, talented, principled. Omar says he brought
a lot of passion to the job.
Speaker 9 (23:29):
My college roommate who was off on the paper, and
then Reggie almost came to blow in the newsroom over.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
Who can write a better lead.
Speaker 9 (23:41):
That's how passionate we were. Back John was going back
and forth and to turn to cussing, and then somebody said,
and you can't write a lead. And next thing, you know,
deaths start to scrape and everybody turned around and had
to separate them. And I mean it wasn't a long
you know, the next week everybody forgot it happened, but
(24:03):
it was hilarious, like we're at a college scraper. Nobody's
getting paid, but they was raither scrap over who's gonna
put whose story where.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
That totally totally resonates with me back when I was
at the student newspaper at the University of Delaware. Number One,
we all thought it was the most important thing in
the world and that we were changing the universe. And
number two, there were actual outbursts of violence. I remember
someone throwing a chair at me in the newsroom. I
remember someone coming up and threatening to beat me up
because of a crappy headline. Like we were young and
(24:36):
filled with pists and vinegar and just almost like this energy,
this untapped. We are the most important people in the
world because we are journalists, and this is journalism.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
I remember writing for the student newspaper back on Mimmi
Day Community College, and it was similar, like everybody was
really passionate about what they were doing. I don't remember
anybody throwing chairs or getting into fisticus or anything like that,
but there were really heated, sort of like editorial meetings
where like you had this point of view which you
(25:06):
would convince was the best point of view of the
entire paper possibly of like the entire country, and so
you basically really wanted that in the paper. And I
kind of remember having these passionate arguments back and forth.
So yeah, I could totally see that as well.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Also. The funny thing is a lot of times it
was about the most ridiculous stuff in hindsight, Like it'd
be like, how can the University of Delaware take seasoned
French fries out of the dining hall? That is ridiculous.
I am going to write a scathing editorial about this
and looking back, the prizeword even that could. In short,
Reggie's love for journalism blossomed at the Grahamlin night covering
(25:44):
Eddie Robinson and the Tigers traveling on the road, writing
game stories and profiles. It's freaking addictive. You're young, and
you're talented, and you're optimistic, and you're rolling with your
school sports superstars. Reggie was riding high.
Speaker 4 (26:00):
Gets hit with the surprise of a lifetime.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Okay, number one, how did you meet Reggie?
Speaker 10 (26:07):
H a Grambling Only cats that stay Grambling. I don't know.
If we were just hanging out at under the Tree
of Knowledge in Metal, I'm not sure. I was probably
looking for someone else and he came up.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
What is the Tree of Knowledge? I don't even know
what that is.
Speaker 4 (26:27):
Oh, that's a.
Speaker 10 (26:27):
Tree that's in front of our student union there and
Grambling or people kind of just go up under it,
especially in the summer time for a little shade.
Speaker 4 (26:36):
That's Tia Nicholas in nineteen eighty nine. She was a
Grambling State freshman, like Reggie, a California transplant, although she
was raised near Los Angeles. The two met that first
year on campus, and Tia, who was pretty quiet and reserved,
was instantly enamored.
Speaker 10 (26:55):
He can stick on anything from politics to sports to
it's just about anything. I always think it's gonna be
pretty smart. No said great debtas always debating with people,
not so much with me because I didn't speak much.
I just remember an outgoing young man.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Everyone liked Reggie. In the early days of workout this podcast,
Reggie's family members implied to Rick and I that they
weren't super big Tia fans. It wasn't anything nasty or mean.
You could just kind of feel a sense of hesitancy.
And I think, honestly, it's not about Tias so much
as about the circumstance. Tea and Reggie never married, and
(27:36):
as a result, she was never particularly close with his family.
But I talked to her for this podcast, and I
have to say I genuinely liked her. She was forthright
and she was no nonsense, and her basic stance was
asked me anything. She and Reggie dated throughout the first
three years of Grambling. Tia says she wanted a committed relationship,
(27:56):
but that Reggie had a wandering eye. Tia put up
with Reggie straying because, as she emphasized to me, she
generally loved him. She said, he was a good guy
who was just young and immature. I mean, Rick, were
you at your best when you were twenty?
Speaker 4 (28:11):
No, not my best? Maybe my funnest though exactly so.
Things between them were going pretty well.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Then around fall September of nineteen ninety two, when they
were juniors, Tia got a surprise that shook her world.
She was pregnant. Immediately, she thought of her folks and
her college career and her life.
Speaker 10 (28:38):
I mean, like, oh, man, what are my parents gonna say?
That's like fift off?
Speaker 1 (28:42):
That's it.
Speaker 10 (28:44):
Oh I gotta make it along.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
But Tia thought back to her home in south central LA.
She knew of other people who had babies in high school,
and others who got pregnant at Grambling who are doing
just fine. When it came time to tell Reggie, she
was a little bit apprehensive. Howard he take the news?
Would he stick by her side or would he bolt?
There was only one way to find out.
Speaker 4 (29:10):
Reggie was shocked, stunned, but genuinely happy. He offered to
be there throughout her pregnancy. Tia said he should put
his studies first and assured him she had family to
help see her through.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
On May twenty seventh, nineteen ninety three, Tia gave birth
to Reginald Raith Nicholas Paine.
Speaker 4 (29:31):
And Reggie's sexy sweat wasn't there. Tia gave birth at
a hospital in Los Angeles while he was at orientation
for the Chips Quinn Scholarship program, just outside d C.
She says she wasn't upset. She told us she never
expected Reggie to neglect his studies for them.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
From the time he entered the world. The baby was
known as little reg.
Speaker 10 (29:54):
I just wanted a girl, so I had girl names,
but I don't even remember anymore. And I had a
boy who was like, oh, I guess I just name
After that.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Her folks wanted to keep their daughter and lower Reggie
in California, but Tia refused. She wanted to continue her
studies and she was bringing the baby with her. She
and Lil Regg left for Grambling.
Speaker 10 (30:17):
I could take them back, and they wanted to keep them,
and I think, no, I can do it. I can
take them back. I'm gonna show you what it's going
to be done. And I left.
Speaker 4 (30:24):
Tia says, Reggie was a present, stand up father. By now,
the family was living together in an off campus apartment.
Reggie helped bottle feed, changed diapers, and would wake up
in the middle of the night to swaddle his son.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
And this is when you and I first met Reggie,
because when the summer of ninety three began and we
all gathered in Nashville for our internship, his son was
only a month old. And I vividly remember Reggie moving
into our dorm room at Tennessee State University and taping
up a small photograph of Tia holding a baby. And
when I asked Reggie, and weirdly, I remember this vividly,
(31:00):
who are the two people in the picture? He said, proudly,
that's my girlfriend and that's low Rege, my son.
Speaker 4 (31:09):
So, Jeff, what's actually going through your mind when your
roommate shows up with a picture of his infant son
and hangs it on the wall.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
I was literally a virgin. I was a virgin. I
hadn't even kissed the girl. So I'm this virginal loser
who's never had game at all. And my new roommate
not only as cool as shit, but he's got a
freaking kid. It's just like so out of my depth
and out of my stratosphere that I was kind of
(31:40):
blown away and been dazzled. I don't even know what
about you.
Speaker 4 (31:46):
I kind of remember that being something which set him
apart from us, right, because he's our same age, He's
doing the same things we're doing. He and I had
just come out of the same scholarship program, so we
were we were contemporaries in every other way except for
this one, right, And I just remember thinking how it
(32:08):
made him so much more mature. I'm like, wow, this
is a guy who is starting his family already made
me admire him. Actually, So I have my first daughter, Ell,
when I was thirty nine years old, and even then
it was you know, obviously jarring, and you feel like
(32:30):
you're embarking on something which you have no clue of
how to do. And there's a lot of kind of
baby steps learning, there's a lot of growing up and
actually maturing even at that age. So I can't even
imagine what it's like as a twenty year old having
a son and trying to get your career going and
(32:51):
making that all work. It just had a feel overwhelming
at times.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Yeah, I don't know how you know what's up and
what's down, and how to change the diaper and what
the crying means and what this means and what that
means for both of them, for Tia and Reggie. Again,
at that age, I didn't know anything about anything. I
was very self absorbed and very sort of all about
me and my career and my rise and everything, my writing.
So tall of a sudden, I have this crazy responsibility
(33:15):
of parenthood. I mean, it's just I don't know how
you do it at that age. I actually think one
thing that shouldn't be overlooked. When we were in Nashville
and we were having a gay old time and we
were all going out and we were pursuing our dreams, well,
Tia was responsible for this infant child. And you know
it's easy to say, oh, blah blah blah. He was
(33:37):
great and he loved but she really was, Like, the
one changing diapers at that point was Tia. The one
waking up with a crying baby was Tia. The one
having to handle all that was Tia. And I don't
think that's not a damnation of Reggie, but I don't
think we should overlook all that she had to deal with.
I mean, it could not have been easy at all.
(33:59):
After a so I'm in Nashal wrapped, Reggie Payne drove
back to Gramley, but the pressures of school and fatherhood
were tightening around him, and Tia was noticing the darkening
persona around her baby's dad. Reggie was suddenly becoming intensely jealous.
If anyone looked at her while walking to class, Reggie
(34:20):
would become unreasonably animated and upset. The two argued constantly.
Speaker 4 (34:25):
Then one day the pressure got to Reggie. He got
in his car and left, driving all the way back
to California.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
I couldn't get along with my baby mama Tilla. So
I hopped in my Dodge V Larey and rode that
bad boy all the way back to.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Oakleand Reggie had surrendered the dream. He decided he was
done with it all to hell with journalism, to hell
with college life, to hell with Tia. He took a
job at FedEx.
Speaker 4 (35:02):
That must have been really hard on him. He loved Grambling.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Yeah, I think he quickly realized this wasn't the best
life decision. That's one of the problems with a young impulse.
You just lacked the wherewithal to see the results of
your rash decisions. It turns out Reggie hated being back
in Oakland and working at FedEx and facing the disapproval
and the disbelief from family and friends. He had won
(35:27):
the lottery ticket out of sixty nine village and now
he was back.
Speaker 4 (35:32):
A college dropout slogging through a minimum wage gig. That
sense of letting everyone down hit Reggie hard, but.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
The FedEx's job also motivated Reggie to snap out of
his demise. This was not the dream he had envisioned.
After a year and a half of dropping off packages,
Reggie returned to Grambling, determined to help a lower reg
earn his communications degree and ultimately land a job as
a sports journalist.
Speaker 4 (36:00):
Reggie's life seemed back on track. He was spending time
with his son and refocusing on his studies, but Tia
noticed the change. Reggie's mood would swing sharply between moments
of pure joy to dark depression. It happened repeatedly.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Then one night, he's invited to a party. The exact
location or host of the party is unknown, but Reggie goes.
He thinks he's going to hang out with his friends,
maybe throw back a few drinks. He's not the young,
brash freshman on campus anymore, but he has a few
years of campus smarts under his belt. Little does he
(36:38):
know the night will forever change the trajectory of his life.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
I sat down on the floor in the hallway in
a midsize campus literally as I began to play Jodasy
less than two minutes into the album. Still sitting on
the floor, the voice said to me, you disrespected my
sister in a country accident. The voice, I now know
belonged to someone I've seen on campus. The more shocking
(37:02):
aspect was a very tall and extremely bulky dude stood
directly across from me, making me paranoid for a split second. Now,
being on a small college campus, I knew most faces,
but these guys were the biggest dudes on campus. So yeah,
I'd seen them before. Who cares, I thought, So the
big guy stood across from me, immediately garnishing my attention
(37:26):
with his size. Next thing, I know, you disrespected my system. Now,
as I'm taking this beating, two things are happening in
my mind. Who did I disrespect today? And more importantly,
get up and fight back. My two friends who I
came with didn't come to my aid. They must have
been six or seven dudes jumping me. Lasted seemed like forever.
(37:50):
Next thing they ran off, the first thing on my
mind was revenge. But a guy said to me, don't
go back to the dorms because usually when a cat
gets jumped, they're going to be waiting to try to
punk you again. I was nervous, scared, bad all rolled
into one.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Later in the book, Reggie identifies his assailants as members
of the Grambling football team. He said he contacted the police,
but they didn't help. Reggie told friends he reached out
to Eddie Robinson, who he said, took no action. We
would have talked to coach Robinson, but he died in
two thousand and seven. When we memb with Reggie's family members,
(38:31):
they all knew about the fight. Here's Harriet, Reggie's mother,
and he.
Speaker 7 (38:35):
Said that the guys asked him to want to go
to the washhouse with us, brown radio, blah blah blah,
and then that turned into a bunch of them coming
over him, hitting him, punching him, jumping in. He was
trusting if I could see him, like they saying, come on, red.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Go down here with us the wash House.
Speaker 7 (38:56):
Yeah, you could sit there playing music, which he would
you know, I probably love to do.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
And he said before he knew what they were all on.
His sister Janine says no one was held accountable.
Speaker 7 (39:08):
Players could get away with anything that was probably wasn't
there only beat up other Knights.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
This is such a pivotal moment in Reggie's life, literally
the point on the graph where everything starts to unravel.
He was jumped by six or seven members of the
Grambling football team over some perceived slight done to someone's sister.
Speaker 4 (39:30):
He describes the event in such detail in his book
that we have to assume it happened.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Except we're not exactly sure it did. Here's Omar, his
close friend from Grambling, when we asked him about it,
that I do not remember.
Speaker 9 (39:48):
And there are a couple instances of fist or people
getting jumped I remember, and I do not remember one involving.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
And Julius, his other close college associate. I'm sad here
about that. I'm not sure when that happened. And Alan
Scott Gordon, another friend, getting ass chicked.
Speaker 4 (40:15):
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (40:18):
That might have been one of his adventures that didn't
happen around me.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Here's an extremely traumatic event that may have left Reggie
with lifetime emotional scars, and literally not one person from
Grambling remembers it. I also reached out to ten Grambling
football players who are on the roster that season. None
of them knew anything about a fight involving Reggie, and
I never got the sense that they were lying. They
(40:42):
simply didn't know what the hell I was talking about.
Speaker 4 (40:45):
The only ones who seemed sure that it happened are
his family members. But that's based entirely on Reggie's account.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
Another friend, Andrew Evans, said he saw Grambling football players
fight students all the time. One time, he helped drag
his cousin out from under a car after a number
of football players jumped him. We asked him about Reggie's story.
Speaker 6 (41:09):
Man, now thats you mentioned that that dad sound a
little familiar. But the football team is just, wow, a
bunch of you know, hyped up kids, you know, after
the higher tier of social life and schools.
Speaker 8 (41:24):
You know, that's how they were.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
All right, Rick. From early on in this project, we
sort of worked under the presumption that there was this
fight and Reggie got his ass kicked by the Grandbling
football players, and now we're kind of left here uncertain
about what happened.
Speaker 4 (41:42):
It's such a pivotal moment too. It's been shocking that
we haven't been able to find literally a single person
who even recalls this. Granted, like it's happened more than
twenty years ago, so people's memories fade, but to not
find a single person after speaking to the probably is
just shocking.
Speaker 1 (42:02):
Really, I have three hypotheticals to what happened, and I
think it's one of these three. I think number one,
it's certainly possible didn't happen, like it is certainly possible.
You read Reggie's book, you know, who knows where his
mind was, and maybe this is something he created or
you know, imagined. Number two, it happened, and these jocks,
(42:25):
these football players are just sort of embarrassed by it,
and collectively they've kind of decided we're just not going
to talk about it. And number three is it happened
a long time ago. To Reggie, it was this enormous moment,
this pivotal moment in his life. But maybe to the whoever, two, three,
four or five football players who were involved, it was
(42:46):
just a whatever drunk moment at a party with some
guy and they roughed him up a little bit, and
to them, maybe it just wasn't that big a deal.
And maybe to Reggie and meant everything. And if I
were guessing, I'm going number three, I do think it happened.
You've been around college athletes and the collective of youth
and testosterone and whatever beer or whatever drinks. Like there
(43:10):
are brawls and there are fights until a lot of
those guys are probably forgettable. But to the guy who's
getting his ass kicked is not forgettable. It sticks with you.
I mean, you just think about your memories from college
and just from that long ago, and like, you know,
like memory is weird. It's kind of the flaw of
this old professional a lot.
Speaker 4 (43:26):
Always it almost doesn't matter because regardless of all of that,
it had this really deep seated impression on him, and
it really is the point of his life where his
life just takes a bad turn.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Yeah, And so that happens, and he moves into a
trailer off campus where he's paying one hundred dollars a
month in rent. He slogs through two more semesters and
I feel like and I know you agree, like that
fight and the distancing from Tia and his worsening mental state.
They just beat him up and as far as we know,
he never saw up on campus for his condition, and
(44:01):
he just spiraled.
Speaker 4 (44:03):
Reggie was broke in May of nineteen ninety six, seven
months after the alleged encounter with football players and seven
years after first arriving on campus. He bought a one
way ticket on a Greyhound bus to northern California. He
was leaving grambling a few credits, shy of graduating.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Then as a bus rumbled along Northern Texas, Reggie had
what appear to be a psychotic episode.
Speaker 3 (44:30):
I must say this somewhere close to Dallas, Texas in
the Satin arrear the Greyhound. I filled my head.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
Snap Finding Sexy Sweat is a production of School of
Human's and iHeart Podcasts. This episode was reported, written and
hosted by Jeff Peerolman and Rick Jervis. It was produced
by Gabby Watts with production support from Eedily's Perez's Aaron
(44:59):
Burnett Is. Our story editor Jesse Niswanger scored and mixed
this episode. George Washington I read the excerpts from the
Harassment of Reginald DP. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Curley,
and Brandon Barr. Please leave the show a review and
you can follow along with the show on Instagram at
School of Humans.
This is nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
The integration program has begun. Black kids on scholarships are
going to white colleges all over the South, and the
river don't flow one way.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
On the night of October fourth, nineteen eighty one, NBC
aired a made for TV movie titled Grambling's White Tiger.
It starred Harry Belafonte as Eddie Robinson, the legendary Grambling
State University football coach, and Caitlyn Jenner Bruce Jenner at
the time as Jim Gregory, who in nineteen sixty eight
became the first white football player at the historically black
(00:38):
college in Grambling, Louisiana.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
If you can't get along with one white boy here Grambling,
how you gonna get along with him? On the Rams,
on the jets, on the capitalists?
Speaker 1 (00:46):
What's you all going to do?
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Welcome to Grambling, white boy. If you guys think I'm
some kind of playing with beach bump.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
And then what do you expect.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
I gotta be honest, I don't remember watching that. Was
it any good?
Speaker 1 (01:00):
No, it was not good. Cliches and tropes and racial stereotypes,
black characters speaking in pseudo urban slang. Danton Wilson, who Is,
a columnist for the Detroit Free Press at the time,
called it a total distortion of the truth, and that
was probably one of the friendly reviews. But for scores
of white Americans, this nine year old included Grambling's White
(01:22):
Tiger served as an introduction to one of America's great HBCUs.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
And though Grambling had been around since nineteen oh one,
it wasn't exactly a household name. The school produced a
good number of famous athletes New York Nickson or Willis Reed,
Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Doug Williams, but otherwise not many
people knew much about a predominantly black school in rural
Louisiana with an enrollment of four thousand students.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
To be honest, I wasn't one of them either, But
that changed in nineteen ninety three when you and I
spent the summer interning at the Nashville, Tennessee and I
roomed with a guy who maywell have had more passion
for Grambling than any other person on the planet.
Speaker 4 (02:08):
Reggie Payne, our friend and fellow intern, loved Grambling. He
took pride in the school, pride in representing the school,
pride in being a black man in a place that
celebrated blackness.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
But I guess the question is, for as much as
Reggie aka Sexy Sweat was all in Ungrambling and as
great a university as it is, did his time there
produce a well rounded man ready to conquer the world.
Or did a traumatic instant ultimately damage him in ways that,
decades later we can mark as the start of his demise.
(02:43):
This is Finding Sexy Sweat, a podcast where me, Jeff Pearlman,
and my colleague Rick Jervis attempt to retrace the life
of our longtime friend and fellow journalist Reggie.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
Pain, better known by his rap name Sexy Sweat.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
We're trying to learn how our life paths differed so sharply,
how the demons of mental illness crept into his life,
and why he met sets an abrupt death after being
handcuffed on the floor of his parents' home in Sacramento.
This is episode three where everybody is somebody? All right? So, Rick,
(03:22):
when we show up in Nashville, how much do you
know about Grambling State University?
Speaker 4 (03:27):
About next to nothing.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Actually, it's funny because I grew up a diehard sports
fan and I always loved the Tampa Bay Buccaneers cream
school uniforms, and I always thought it was cool that
they had a black quarterback at a time when it
was very rare. So I was a big Doug Williams
guy as a kid, number twelve for the Bucks way
before he won a Super Bowl. And I also remember vividly,
vividly watching that really bad movie Gramblings White Tiger, sitting
(03:52):
on the bed in my parents' room, really really wanting
to be Grambling's white Tiger, like wanting to be the
white quarterback at Graham and thinking how cool was and
how they all accepted him, and weirdly, how cool Bruce
Jenner seemed.
Speaker 4 (04:05):
I had no idea any of that was actually going on.
I had no idea about that movie. I had very
little idea about Grambling. I had heard about it, but
I didn't really know anything about it. And I definitely
hadn't met anybody who had come out of Grambling.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
When Reggie, I mean, you first met Reggie before I did.
But when he sort of enters our lives, are you,
I don't know, do you have preconceived notions or expectations
or anything about him that feels in hindsight kind of
interesting or noteworthy.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
I was just extremely curious because up until that point,
I had like very limited contact with anybody from any
black neighborhood. Right, and so here comes Reggie. He's got
this swagger, he's super cool, he seems like a really
deep guy in so many interesting ways. Like I just
wanted to get to know him, and I was just
hoping that we would really become really good friends.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
I'll tell you I don't talk about this that much,
but the town I come from. I memt being a
kid and I had two black kids in my grade,
Larry Glover and Jonathan Powell, in a grade of about
three hundred and thirty people. And I remember being a
little kid and there would be this thing. People would
say one of my best friends was John Powell. They'd
be like, yeah, there are good blacks, and then theirs,
(05:19):
and they'd use the N word and they would say
to him as a compliment, you know, you're one of
the good blacks, Like you're one of the good blacks.
But like that's where I came from. So being in
Nashville and having sexy sweat as my roommate was jarring
is the wrong word, because I was pretty psyched too
as my roommate. And I don't want it to sound negative,
but it really was. And he wasn't there to educate me.
(05:41):
It wasn't his job. But I think being exposed to
people from totally totally, totally different worlds, not just a
black kid, but a black wrapper from Oakland, from the
inner city, like it kind of blew my mind. And
that's where I remember about Reggie for showing up.
Speaker 4 (05:53):
You know, It's funny because I grew up in very
different surroundings from you. But South Florida was also very
sort of segregated, right, Like the white people lived in
one neighborhood, black people lived in another neighborhood, Cubans lived
in their own neighborhood, and there wasn't a ton of mixing.
I'm first generation Cuban American, grew up in a Spanish
speaking household, a lot of Cuban food and culture and
(06:16):
music around me. So really, like the only black people
that I knew were black Cubans who happened to go
to my school. They spoke Spanish, they were more familiar
to us. So black Cubans stood apart from African Americans
and the neighborhoods around Miami, which happened to be predominantly black,
(06:36):
like Carol City, over Town, some of those neighborhoods that
also was, unfortunately where a lot of crime took place.
And in those neighborhoods in nineteen eighty, that's where the
McDuffie riots happened.
Speaker 5 (06:51):
When us of the McDuffie decision reached Miami, black leaders
called for a silent protest. That's the justice building here,
that those who came were in no mood to be quiet.
Speaker 6 (07:00):
That we are now and.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Well, people had a deep president of the road.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
I get that riots happened after a black man, Arthur McDuffie,
got beat up and killed by Mammy police officers.
Speaker 5 (07:14):
The large crowd began to move through the city. At
a police building, they broke windows and overturned cars, setting
them on fire. The County Hospital's emergency room looked like
a combat zone.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
And those riots, they were extremely violent. People were killed.
And that's really all I knew about those neighborhoods back then.
As I watched the actual McDuffie riots on TV, I
was kind of blown away by all the aftermath of that. Obviously,
back then, as a nine year old kid like I
didn't have any of the context. I didn't know of
(07:46):
the social economic forces that led to the riots. All
I saw was fires and police and riot gear. So
fast forward to twenty twenty and the riots following the
George incident. Obviously those are along the same lines. It's
like police brutality. But back then I just didn't see
(08:07):
it the same way.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
I will say one thing that's kind of weird. I
was actually just thinking when you were talking about that
is for me, none of this existed, Like it barely existed.
I was starting to listen to hip hop, so you
would hear whatever Public Enemy or NWA talk about this stuff.
But I never heard of the MacDuffie riots. And if
you think about it, if not for social media and
(08:29):
for all the awfulness of social media, like it has
spread the word about things going on that people in
little sheltered towns like I was growing up in the
eighties would never know about.
Speaker 4 (08:38):
Yeah, it was a really big deal for us back then.
Obviously I'd see it as a lost opportunity for my
family or teachers or somebody to kind of sit down
with me and maybe like explain some of the broader
contexts behind it. But nobody did, and so all I
got out of it was fear, you know, fear of
if something similar happened today, and like they did during
(08:58):
the George Floyd riots, I sat down with both my
daughters and kind of explained to them some of the
forces behind it, some of the context and had to
understand it. And I wish that would have happened to
me back then, but it did.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
It. Yeah, it's kind of weird, actually, I mean I
always think about the civil rights era. My parents were
in their twenties, they were in Brooklyn, New York. They
knew this was going on, and how can we didn't
get involved? Right? And then my kids can look at
me and look at things that happened when I was
a kid in New York. There were all different situations
going on in the city, civil rights abuses by New
(09:32):
York City police officers, and I didn't get involved. When
you kind of look back and you think, what the
hell was I doing? You listen to hip hop, but
you're not are you learning the lessons of it? It's
kind of embarrassing.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
Remember being told by my family over and over again
never to go into those neighborhoods. That's where shootings happened,
that's where drugs happened. So in nineteen ninety three, all
of that changes because I finally get some one to
one FaceTime with one of the more impressionable black people
that I ever meet.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
It's kind of funny. I thought about this throughout this podcast,
in this experience, and it shouldn't be incumbent on Reggie
to educate me on how difficult it is to be
a black kid growing up in America and what it's
like to be a black kid coming out of Oakland.
Like I understand there were things I didn't know, but
I think it's almost a little insulting when in hindsight
(10:20):
we're like and then I really learned from Reggie blah
blah blah, like he wasn't saying. And then I really
learned from Jeff how to be a white guy from
the sticks. I don't know, it's just kind of weird.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
Do you remember Jeff going on the We took a
weekend trip to Memphis and went to the National Civil
Rights Museum there?
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Oh yeah, do you remember that? Of course?
Speaker 4 (10:38):
And I mean that, more than anything else, left this
huge lasting impression on me too. I learned a lot obviously,
but I remember, like the actual museum ends on like
Mahalia Jackson singing take my hand, Precious Lord in the
room of the actual Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King
Junior was shot. And I remember walking out of there
(10:58):
just like with my heart just shattered and just feeling
like the weight of it all, you know, everything kind
of crystallized for me then that there are these huge
racial forces which I didn't understand, which I was beginning
to grasp. So all of that together kind of plays
a role in forming your outlook.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Maybe you're a better person than I am, at least
back then. Maybe there's no maybe about it, Like there's
a part of me that thinks, like did I learn
that stuff from Reggie or did I just find a
novel at the time, like he's this guy and he
goes by sexy Sweat, And I know I went back
to Delaware to my you know, pretty white, safe cocoon
of higher education, and I was telling them about this
(11:41):
guy and he was this rapper from Oakland. I look
back now and I think, wow, I really gained a
lot out of that, and that was really an exposure
I needed. But I wonder at the time. Was I
more educated or was I more like entertained by just
who Reggie was and the character he was? And I
doubt I had the depth at that time, honest to God,
to understand fully what his path was.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
I don't know. I feel like it could be both. Obviously,
like we basically walked away with chunks of Reggie like
in our lives for a long times while we're doing
this podcast. So even if we didn't feel like it
was a learning lesson, then there are parts of Reggie
that lived on with us that we definitely learned from.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
There were a lot of entertaining characters in Nashville in
the newsroom of the Tennessee, and we haven't had conversations
and got any of them over thirty years correct. In
a way, I feel like our sort of ignorance and
lack of exposure explains why a place like Grambling would
appeal to Reggie. You know, like it must have meant
(12:46):
something to be surrounded by people who understand you, who
you don't have to educate, who you don't have to
walk through his blackness stage by stage. You know. He
graduated from Casmon High School and he traveled two thousand
miles across the country to Louisiana. You know, looking back,
most college brochures back then featured white faces learning white
lessons about white professors. I went to the University of Delaware.
(13:09):
I guarantee you if you look back at the brochures,
there was probably one black face in the background of
a photo. And he goes to this place where he's
just surrounded by in a way, a celebration of blackness.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
The university left a lasting impression on him, even the
school motto of Brimsworth promise where everybody is somebody.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Reggy had two uncles who attended Grambling State, so in
a way he was carrying on a family tradition. In
his memoir The Harassment of Reginald D. Pain, he wrote
that quote, Grambling takes no back seats to anyone. I'd
recommend the school to anybody of any culture or race.
This is what he said in a chapter he titled
Graham Days Days is spelled da Ze.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Going to college was the best experience in time of
my life. I decided to attend Grambling State because they
were the first to accept me. I could have gone
to other schools, but GSU was my heart. I had
two other uncles who attended the school. But I was
the first in my immediate family to go to college.
(14:15):
Black college, like Grambling, takes no back seats to anyone.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Tom Calling, Reggie's friend from high school, said there was
never a doubt where Reggie were to attend college.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
He told me, I'm going to Grammling. It was no
other colleges he wanted to go to.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
Reggie going to college felt like a triumph for his
community in East Oakland, in the sixty nine village projects
where he grew up, A few kids moved on to
higher education. Most of Reggie's classmates wound up staying in
East Ookland.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
What was it about him that he was the one
who's like, I am going to college.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
He was the determined one.
Speaker 7 (14:55):
He was just determined. If I say I'm going to
do something, I'm going to do that.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Ready arrived on campus in the fall of nineteen eighty nine,
and for him it was paradise. He was an ambitious,
intellectually curious teen thrown to an academic oasis. He was
surrounded by encouraging black professors, black classmates, black friends. He
lived in Drew Hall, a dormitory located on the South
part of campus named after a famous black surgeon. Not
(15:26):
far from Harriet Tubman Hall and Sojourner Truth Hall. He
ent up onto fellow Californian transplants, would sneak into a
nearby high school gym and run pickup basketball games. This
is Julius Irving. No, not doctor j This Julius Irving
was a fellow Grambling freshman.
Speaker 6 (15:43):
It's late, it's bout about one twelve in the morning,
and we would go over.
Speaker 8 (15:46):
To the high school, which is right next to the
domach Lord, and we would find a way to get
into the high school gym and we would run basketball
every Friday for like three hots, like four in the morning.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
I can't emphasize this. The positive power feeling, accepted, a
sense of belonging. The struggles of East Oakland faded, and
suddenly Reggie was immersed in a world of basketball games
and parties. Alex Harris was a friend from Grambling.
Speaker 8 (16:13):
Reggie had natural careism. You know, it was something that
you want your dearware. It was something to where, yeah,
every time you see Ridge, it was you know, what's up?
By God?
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Everything good?
Speaker 8 (16:24):
And it was just a lively conversation, especially when we
were at the parties. He was one of the hobbies,
and it was like a bob was born.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Up until moving to Grambling, Reggie's world consisted of squat
brick public housing, drug slingers, and money that never seemed
to stretch far enough. Now he had entered a world
of ideas, new friends, and limitless promise.
Speaker 4 (16:48):
And Grambling would change his life in ways he never imagined.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
All Right, So, Rick, when was the first time you
knew you really want to be a journalist? So?
Speaker 4 (17:04):
I was in Missus Black's tenth grade English class, and
I was not a very good student. I was always
talking in the back of the class. I was not
really paying attention. But she would assign us these essays
and I would go home and write these essays, and
she loved them. And she would make me stand up
in front of the class after every single essay that
(17:25):
I wrote and read it. And I think I was
the only one doing this. And after a while, I'm like,
Missus Black, why are you making me read these essays?
She told me, because they're really good essays. They're beautifully written,
and I think that you should write for the school newspaper.
Like after class that day, she walked me down to
the journalism class and introduced me to the journalism teacher
(17:48):
there and said, this is Rick and he's going to
be writing for you. And that's what really launched it.
And I just got into it then, and that was
my introduction to journalism and to newspaper and then I
loved it. And then I started going to college and
wrote for a college newspapers there. But I think it
was in college. I might have been a freshman in
(18:09):
college that I sat down and read All the President's
Men by Woodwind and Bernstein, the sort of Bible of journalism.
That's one of two books that I've ever finished, picked
up and read again, and that book really made me
want to be a journalist.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
How about you, I'll tell you I was okay. I
was a freshman at the University of Delaware, and I
had been the sports editor of my high school newspaper,
the Mailback High School Chieftain, and then i'd interned that
summer my local weekly newspaper, the Putnam Trader. And I
got to Delaware and I was this really, really cocky
and sufferable kid, and I begged the editors at the
(18:47):
student newspaper, the Delaware Review, to let me write, and
I begged, and I begged and I begged, and they
started letting me write. And I was just a jackass,
and I would argue about edits and all this stuff,
and they ended up telling me you can't write for
the paper anymore. And I was devastated. Devastated thought I
was going to have to transfer, and I begged them
to let me write and eventually they'll let me come back.
(19:09):
And I decided I really want to prove myself. And
at the time, the University of Delaware and Delaware State
University the two major schools in the state of Delaware,
the tiny state of Delaware, even though they both had
Division ONEWA football programs, they never played in any sports.
They didn't play basketball, they didn't play in football, they
never played And I said to someone of the paper,
(19:30):
I want to write a story about why Delaware and
Delaware State never play. And they were basically like, yeah, okay,
go ahead, do it, like get rid of the annoying freshman.
And I just started calling people and calling people and
calling people, and I got the athletic director of Delaware
to tell me on the record quote, I just think
it would serve as a divisive in the state, and
(19:51):
you had this Delaware State was a small black college,
a HBCU, and Delaware was a big white university. And
I wrote this article Delaware versus Delaware State, and I
remember handing it in and the editors are like whoa,
And they ran on the front page above the fold
of the newspaper. And a couple of weeks later, Delaware
(20:12):
announced that they would start playing Delaware State in sports,
and the local newspaper, the Wilmington News Journal, had a
column this with named Kevin Noonan, who credited my work
with making it happen. And now is the moment when
Delaware and Delaware State agreed to play in sports. I
even get shows telling that story when I was like,
holy crap, you can actually do something with this business,
(20:33):
and that really gave me the buzz.
Speaker 4 (20:36):
In some ways. Reggie's path was very similar to ours.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
He joined the Grambling Knight as a freshman, and it
definitely felt like an instant calling. If you go to
a journalistic powerhouse like a Syracuse or a Northwestern you
might have to wait one or two or even three
years to cover football and basketball. There's just a lot
of competition. But at Grambling Reggie was able to jump
right in.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
He covered football games as a freshman, wrote columns too.
The newspaper's tiny office was located on the north side
of campus. Reggie loved it. He loved hanging out with
the other staffers, talking sports, talking journalism, debating politics, feeling
a deep sense of belonging. By his junior year, he
(21:21):
was named sports editor.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
One day after Grammling State lost a game against Alabama
State at the Pontiac Silver Dome in Michigan, Reggie got
to sit on the bus next to Eddie Robinson, the
team's larger than life coach. It's a memory that burned
in him for years. He writes about it in his memoir.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
I was so nervous being that close to the legend,
not to mention his wife. Imagine that me, a little
boy from Oakland sitting next to college football's most winningest
and successful coach, a man who has sent dozens of
his boys to the NFL and others to the NFL
Hall of Fame. I was so nervous. But that, for instance,
(22:04):
is Grambling, a place where everybody is somebody.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Reggie was good too, Who's provocative, fact driven well read.
In one column where he griped about Grambling not appearing
on a division wonder boy pole. He quotes a nineteenth
century English poet, William Wordsworth, we wear a face of
joy because we have been glad of your in another
right before the holiday break, he implored readers to consider
(22:29):
the racism simmering in the NFL.
Speaker 3 (22:32):
As you leave school this semester and prepare for the
onslaught of bowl games and NFL playoffs this holiday season.
Take them with a grain of salt. There still exists
racism on your television screen and inside your radio, even
if you refuse to recognize it.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
I have to say Reggie was ahead of his time,
not that it took a psychic. This is years and
years before players trying to stand up and owners suppressing them,
Before you had Colin Kaepernick being literally blackball by the
NFL and never playing again for the crime of kneeling
on the sideline to protest police brutality. Reggie was seeing
things a lot of people weren't seeing at that point,
(23:10):
and he had a vantage point that allowed him to
see it where someone like myself probably wouldn't have.
Speaker 4 (23:16):
Reggie took the newspaper very seriously. I spoke with Omar Ali,
who worked with Reggie at the grambl and I. He
said Reggie was fun, talented, principled. Omar says he brought
a lot of passion to the job.
Speaker 9 (23:29):
My college roommate who was off on the paper, and
then Reggie almost came to blow in the newsroom over.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
Who can write a better lead.
Speaker 9 (23:41):
That's how passionate we were. Back John was going back
and forth and to turn to cussing, and then somebody said,
and you can't write a lead. And next thing, you know,
deaths start to scrape and everybody turned around and had
to separate them. And I mean it wasn't a long
you know, the next week everybody forgot it happened, but
(24:03):
it was hilarious, like we're at a college scraper. Nobody's
getting paid, but they was raither scrap over who's gonna
put whose story where.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
That totally totally resonates with me back when I was
at the student newspaper at the University of Delaware. Number One,
we all thought it was the most important thing in
the world and that we were changing the universe. And
number two, there were actual outbursts of violence. I remember
someone throwing a chair at me in the newsroom. I
remember someone coming up and threatening to beat me up
because of a crappy headline. Like we were young and
(24:36):
filled with pists and vinegar and just almost like this energy,
this untapped. We are the most important people in the
world because we are journalists, and this is journalism.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
I remember writing for the student newspaper back on Mimmi
Day Community College, and it was similar, like everybody was
really passionate about what they were doing. I don't remember
anybody throwing chairs or getting into fisticus or anything like that,
but there were really heated, sort of like editorial meetings
where like you had this point of view which you
(25:06):
would convince was the best point of view of the
entire paper possibly of like the entire country, and so
you basically really wanted that in the paper. And I
kind of remember having these passionate arguments back and forth.
So yeah, I could totally see that as well.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Also. The funny thing is a lot of times it
was about the most ridiculous stuff in hindsight, Like it'd
be like, how can the University of Delaware take seasoned
French fries out of the dining hall? That is ridiculous.
I am going to write a scathing editorial about this
and looking back, the prizeword even that could. In short,
Reggie's love for journalism blossomed at the Grahamlin night covering
(25:44):
Eddie Robinson and the Tigers traveling on the road, writing
game stories and profiles. It's freaking addictive. You're young, and
you're talented, and you're optimistic, and you're rolling with your
school sports superstars. Reggie was riding high.
Speaker 4 (26:00):
Gets hit with the surprise of a lifetime.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Okay, number one, how did you meet Reggie?
Speaker 10 (26:07):
H a Grambling Only cats that stay Grambling. I don't know.
If we were just hanging out at under the Tree
of Knowledge in Metal, I'm not sure. I was probably
looking for someone else and he came up.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
What is the Tree of Knowledge? I don't even know
what that is.
Speaker 4 (26:27):
Oh, that's a.
Speaker 10 (26:27):
Tree that's in front of our student union there and
Grambling or people kind of just go up under it,
especially in the summer time for a little shade.
Speaker 4 (26:36):
That's Tia Nicholas in nineteen eighty nine. She was a
Grambling State freshman, like Reggie, a California transplant, although she
was raised near Los Angeles. The two met that first
year on campus, and Tia, who was pretty quiet and reserved,
was instantly enamored.
Speaker 10 (26:55):
He can stick on anything from politics to sports to
it's just about anything. I always think it's gonna be
pretty smart. No said great debtas always debating with people,
not so much with me because I didn't speak much.
I just remember an outgoing young man.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Everyone liked Reggie. In the early days of workout this podcast,
Reggie's family members implied to Rick and I that they
weren't super big Tia fans. It wasn't anything nasty or mean.
You could just kind of feel a sense of hesitancy.
And I think, honestly, it's not about Tias so much
as about the circumstance. Tea and Reggie never married, and
(27:36):
as a result, she was never particularly close with his family.
But I talked to her for this podcast, and I
have to say I genuinely liked her. She was forthright
and she was no nonsense, and her basic stance was
asked me anything. She and Reggie dated throughout the first
three years of Grambling. Tia says she wanted a committed relationship,
(27:56):
but that Reggie had a wandering eye. Tia put up
with Reggie straying because, as she emphasized to me, she
generally loved him. She said, he was a good guy
who was just young and immature. I mean, Rick, were
you at your best when you were twenty?
Speaker 4 (28:11):
No, not my best? Maybe my funnest though exactly so.
Things between them were going pretty well.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Then around fall September of nineteen ninety two, when they
were juniors, Tia got a surprise that shook her world.
She was pregnant. Immediately, she thought of her folks and
her college career and her life.
Speaker 10 (28:38):
I mean, like, oh, man, what are my parents gonna say?
That's like fift off?
Speaker 1 (28:42):
That's it.
Speaker 10 (28:44):
Oh I gotta make it along.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
But Tia thought back to her home in south central LA.
She knew of other people who had babies in high school,
and others who got pregnant at Grambling who are doing
just fine. When it came time to tell Reggie, she
was a little bit apprehensive. Howard he take the news?
Would he stick by her side or would he bolt?
There was only one way to find out.
Speaker 4 (29:10):
Reggie was shocked, stunned, but genuinely happy. He offered to
be there throughout her pregnancy. Tia said he should put
his studies first and assured him she had family to
help see her through.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
On May twenty seventh, nineteen ninety three, Tia gave birth
to Reginald Raith Nicholas Paine.
Speaker 4 (29:31):
And Reggie's sexy sweat wasn't there. Tia gave birth at
a hospital in Los Angeles while he was at orientation
for the Chips Quinn Scholarship program, just outside d C.
She says she wasn't upset. She told us she never
expected Reggie to neglect his studies for them.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
From the time he entered the world. The baby was
known as little reg.
Speaker 10 (29:54):
I just wanted a girl, so I had girl names,
but I don't even remember anymore. And I had a
boy who was like, oh, I guess I just name
After that.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Her folks wanted to keep their daughter and lower Reggie
in California, but Tia refused. She wanted to continue her
studies and she was bringing the baby with her. She
and Lil Regg left for Grambling.
Speaker 10 (30:17):
I could take them back, and they wanted to keep them,
and I think, no, I can do it. I can
take them back. I'm gonna show you what it's going
to be done. And I left.
Speaker 4 (30:24):
Tia says, Reggie was a present, stand up father. By now,
the family was living together in an off campus apartment.
Reggie helped bottle feed, changed diapers, and would wake up
in the middle of the night to swaddle his son.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
And this is when you and I first met Reggie,
because when the summer of ninety three began and we
all gathered in Nashville for our internship, his son was
only a month old. And I vividly remember Reggie moving
into our dorm room at Tennessee State University and taping
up a small photograph of Tia holding a baby. And
when I asked Reggie, and weirdly, I remember this vividly,
(31:00):
who are the two people in the picture? He said, proudly,
that's my girlfriend and that's low Rege, my son.
Speaker 4 (31:09):
So, Jeff, what's actually going through your mind when your
roommate shows up with a picture of his infant son
and hangs it on the wall.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
I was literally a virgin. I was a virgin. I
hadn't even kissed the girl. So I'm this virginal loser
who's never had game at all. And my new roommate
not only as cool as shit, but he's got a
freaking kid. It's just like so out of my depth
and out of my stratosphere that I was kind of
(31:40):
blown away and been dazzled. I don't even know what
about you.
Speaker 4 (31:46):
I kind of remember that being something which set him
apart from us, right, because he's our same age, He's
doing the same things we're doing. He and I had
just come out of the same scholarship program, so we
were we were contemporaries in every other way except for
this one, right, And I just remember thinking how it
(32:08):
made him so much more mature. I'm like, wow, this
is a guy who is starting his family already made
me admire him. Actually, So I have my first daughter, Ell,
when I was thirty nine years old, and even then
it was you know, obviously jarring, and you feel like
(32:30):
you're embarking on something which you have no clue of
how to do. And there's a lot of kind of
baby steps learning, there's a lot of growing up and
actually maturing even at that age. So I can't even
imagine what it's like as a twenty year old having
a son and trying to get your career going and
(32:51):
making that all work. It just had a feel overwhelming
at times.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Yeah, I don't know how you know what's up and
what's down, and how to change the diaper and what
the crying means and what this means and what that
means for both of them, for Tia and Reggie. Again,
at that age, I didn't know anything about anything. I
was very self absorbed and very sort of all about
me and my career and my rise and everything, my writing.
So tall of a sudden, I have this crazy responsibility
(33:15):
of parenthood. I mean, it's just I don't know how
you do it at that age. I actually think one
thing that shouldn't be overlooked. When we were in Nashville
and we were having a gay old time and we
were all going out and we were pursuing our dreams, well,
Tia was responsible for this infant child. And you know
it's easy to say, oh, blah blah blah. He was
(33:37):
great and he loved but she really was, Like, the
one changing diapers at that point was Tia. The one
waking up with a crying baby was Tia. The one
having to handle all that was Tia. And I don't
think that's not a damnation of Reggie, but I don't
think we should overlook all that she had to deal with.
I mean, it could not have been easy at all.
(33:59):
After a so I'm in Nashal wrapped, Reggie Payne drove
back to Gramley, but the pressures of school and fatherhood
were tightening around him, and Tia was noticing the darkening
persona around her baby's dad. Reggie was suddenly becoming intensely jealous.
If anyone looked at her while walking to class, Reggie
(34:20):
would become unreasonably animated and upset. The two argued constantly.
Speaker 4 (34:25):
Then one day the pressure got to Reggie. He got
in his car and left, driving all the way back
to California.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
I couldn't get along with my baby mama Tilla. So
I hopped in my Dodge V Larey and rode that
bad boy all the way back to.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Oakleand Reggie had surrendered the dream. He decided he was
done with it all to hell with journalism, to hell
with college life, to hell with Tia. He took a
job at FedEx.
Speaker 4 (35:02):
That must have been really hard on him. He loved Grambling.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Yeah, I think he quickly realized this wasn't the best
life decision. That's one of the problems with a young impulse.
You just lacked the wherewithal to see the results of
your rash decisions. It turns out Reggie hated being back
in Oakland and working at FedEx and facing the disapproval
and the disbelief from family and friends. He had won
(35:27):
the lottery ticket out of sixty nine village and now
he was back.
Speaker 4 (35:32):
A college dropout slogging through a minimum wage gig. That
sense of letting everyone down hit Reggie hard, but.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
The FedEx's job also motivated Reggie to snap out of
his demise. This was not the dream he had envisioned.
After a year and a half of dropping off packages,
Reggie returned to Grambling, determined to help a lower reg
earn his communications degree and ultimately land a job as
a sports journalist.
Speaker 4 (36:00):
Reggie's life seemed back on track. He was spending time
with his son and refocusing on his studies, but Tia
noticed the change. Reggie's mood would swing sharply between moments
of pure joy to dark depression. It happened repeatedly.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Then one night, he's invited to a party. The exact
location or host of the party is unknown, but Reggie goes.
He thinks he's going to hang out with his friends,
maybe throw back a few drinks. He's not the young,
brash freshman on campus anymore, but he has a few
years of campus smarts under his belt. Little does he
(36:38):
know the night will forever change the trajectory of his life.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
I sat down on the floor in the hallway in
a midsize campus literally as I began to play Jodasy
less than two minutes into the album. Still sitting on
the floor, the voice said to me, you disrespected my
sister in a country accident. The voice, I now know
belonged to someone I've seen on campus. The more shocking
(37:02):
aspect was a very tall and extremely bulky dude stood
directly across from me, making me paranoid for a split second. Now,
being on a small college campus, I knew most faces,
but these guys were the biggest dudes on campus. So yeah,
I'd seen them before. Who cares, I thought, So the
big guy stood across from me, immediately garnishing my attention
(37:26):
with his size. Next thing, I know, you disrespected my system. Now,
as I'm taking this beating, two things are happening in
my mind. Who did I disrespect today? And more importantly,
get up and fight back. My two friends who I
came with didn't come to my aid. They must have
been six or seven dudes jumping me. Lasted seemed like forever.
(37:50):
Next thing they ran off, the first thing on my
mind was revenge. But a guy said to me, don't
go back to the dorms because usually when a cat
gets jumped, they're going to be waiting to try to
punk you again. I was nervous, scared, bad all rolled
into one.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Later in the book, Reggie identifies his assailants as members
of the Grambling football team. He said he contacted the police,
but they didn't help. Reggie told friends he reached out
to Eddie Robinson, who he said, took no action. We
would have talked to coach Robinson, but he died in
two thousand and seven. When we memb with Reggie's family members,
(38:31):
they all knew about the fight. Here's Harriet, Reggie's mother,
and he.
Speaker 7 (38:35):
Said that the guys asked him to want to go
to the washhouse with us, brown radio, blah blah blah,
and then that turned into a bunch of them coming
over him, hitting him, punching him, jumping in. He was
trusting if I could see him, like they saying, come on, red.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Go down here with us the wash House.
Speaker 7 (38:56):
Yeah, you could sit there playing music, which he would
you know, I probably love to do.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
And he said before he knew what they were all on.
His sister Janine says no one was held accountable.
Speaker 7 (39:08):
Players could get away with anything that was probably wasn't
there only beat up other Knights.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
This is such a pivotal moment in Reggie's life, literally
the point on the graph where everything starts to unravel.
He was jumped by six or seven members of the
Grambling football team over some perceived slight done to someone's sister.
Speaker 4 (39:30):
He describes the event in such detail in his book
that we have to assume it happened.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Except we're not exactly sure it did. Here's Omar, his
close friend from Grambling, when we asked him about it,
that I do not remember.
Speaker 9 (39:48):
And there are a couple instances of fist or people
getting jumped I remember, and I do not remember one involving.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
And Julius, his other close college associate. I'm sad here
about that. I'm not sure when that happened. And Alan
Scott Gordon, another friend, getting ass chicked.
Speaker 4 (40:15):
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (40:18):
That might have been one of his adventures that didn't
happen around me.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Here's an extremely traumatic event that may have left Reggie
with lifetime emotional scars, and literally not one person from
Grambling remembers it. I also reached out to ten Grambling
football players who are on the roster that season. None
of them knew anything about a fight involving Reggie, and
I never got the sense that they were lying. They
(40:42):
simply didn't know what the hell I was talking about.
Speaker 4 (40:45):
The only ones who seemed sure that it happened are
his family members. But that's based entirely on Reggie's account.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
Another friend, Andrew Evans, said he saw Grambling football players
fight students all the time. One time, he helped drag
his cousin out from under a car after a number
of football players jumped him. We asked him about Reggie's story.
Speaker 6 (41:09):
Man, now thats you mentioned that that dad sound a
little familiar. But the football team is just, wow, a
bunch of you know, hyped up kids, you know, after
the higher tier of social life and schools.
Speaker 8 (41:24):
You know, that's how they were.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
All right, Rick. From early on in this project, we
sort of worked under the presumption that there was this
fight and Reggie got his ass kicked by the Grandbling
football players, and now we're kind of left here uncertain
about what happened.
Speaker 4 (41:42):
It's such a pivotal moment too. It's been shocking that
we haven't been able to find literally a single person
who even recalls this. Granted, like it's happened more than
twenty years ago, so people's memories fade, but to not
find a single person after speaking to the probably is
just shocking.
Speaker 1 (42:02):
Really, I have three hypotheticals to what happened, and I
think it's one of these three. I think number one,
it's certainly possible didn't happen, like it is certainly possible.
You read Reggie's book, you know, who knows where his
mind was, and maybe this is something he created or
you know, imagined. Number two, it happened, and these jocks,
(42:25):
these football players are just sort of embarrassed by it,
and collectively they've kind of decided we're just not going
to talk about it. And number three is it happened
a long time ago. To Reggie, it was this enormous moment,
this pivotal moment in his life. But maybe to the whoever, two, three,
four or five football players who were involved, it was
(42:46):
just a whatever drunk moment at a party with some
guy and they roughed him up a little bit, and
to them, maybe it just wasn't that big a deal.
And maybe to Reggie and meant everything. And if I
were guessing, I'm going number three, I do think it happened.
You've been around college athletes and the collective of youth
and testosterone and whatever beer or whatever drinks. Like there
(43:10):
are brawls and there are fights until a lot of
those guys are probably forgettable. But to the guy who's
getting his ass kicked is not forgettable. It sticks with you.
I mean, you just think about your memories from college
and just from that long ago, and like, you know,
like memory is weird. It's kind of the flaw of
this old professional a lot.
Speaker 4 (43:26):
Always it almost doesn't matter because regardless of all of that,
it had this really deep seated impression on him, and
it really is the point of his life where his
life just takes a bad turn.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Yeah, And so that happens, and he moves into a
trailer off campus where he's paying one hundred dollars a
month in rent. He slogs through two more semesters and
I feel like and I know you agree, like that
fight and the distancing from Tia and his worsening mental state.
They just beat him up and as far as we know,
he never saw up on campus for his condition, and
(44:01):
he just spiraled.
Speaker 4 (44:03):
Reggie was broke in May of nineteen ninety six, seven
months after the alleged encounter with football players and seven
years after first arriving on campus. He bought a one
way ticket on a Greyhound bus to northern California. He
was leaving grambling a few credits, shy of graduating.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Then as a bus rumbled along Northern Texas, Reggie had
what appear to be a psychotic episode.
Speaker 3 (44:30):
I must say this somewhere close to Dallas, Texas in
the Satin arrear the Greyhound. I filled my head.
Speaker 1 (44:37):
Snap Finding Sexy Sweat is a production of School of
Human's and iHeart Podcasts. This episode was reported, written and
hosted by Jeff Peerolman and Rick Jervis. It was produced
by Gabby Watts with production support from Eedily's Perez's Aaron
(44:59):
Burnett Is. Our story editor Jesse Niswanger scored and mixed
this episode. George Washington I read the excerpts from the
Harassment of Reginald DP. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Curley,
and Brandon Barr. Please leave the show a review and
you can follow along with the show on Instagram at
School of Humans.
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