On this episode of Our American Stories, this is a story about one of the biggest scandals in college basketball history—along with one of its biggest turnarounds. Here to tell the story is former Baylor Basketball player Matt Sayman, author of The Leftovers: Baylor, Betrayal, and Beyond.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
To subscribe to our podcasts, go to the iHeartRadio app
or wherever you get your podcasts. Up next to story
about one of the biggest scandals in college basketball history,
(00:30):
along with one of its biggest turnarounds. Let's take a listen.
My name's Matt Salmon, and I'm the head boys basketball
coach at Grapevine Faith Christian School right outside of DFW
Dallas Fort Worth. And then that's what I do full time.
But what I get to tell my players about is
(00:50):
a story that a lot of them haven't heard before,
but their parents are probably familiar with, or I've remember
at some point hearing about what happened with Baylor basketball,
you know, in the early two thousands. And one of
my dreams growing up was to be a Division one
basketball player, but I never dreamt of being part of
one of the largest scandals or tragedies in college basketball history.
(01:16):
And going into my senior year down in Waco, that's
exactly where I found myself. But before that, you kind
of have to start back at how did basketball become
so important to me. So I grew up in eastern
Pennsylvania in a small little town called Berwick, PA. And
(01:36):
my family and I were very active in church. And
I would say that we did church really well. Every Sunday,
Sunday night, Wednesdays we were up there. And at a
young age, I prayed a prayer when I was about
five and accepted Christ into my heart. But just grew
up with that type of head knowledge. But it was
really when I was nine years old is when I
(01:58):
fell in love. I fell in love with basketball. One
thing that was really big that separated me from my
teammates was my ability to practice for long periods of
time and not get bored. And I realized quickly when
I was about nine or ten that I had three goals.
(02:18):
One was to make my freshman a team, one was
to make varsity as a sophomore, and one was to
get at a Vision one scholarship for basketball. And so
I dedicated my time to that. One example that of
me thinking or viewing the game differently was in seventh
grade going to the Berwick Middle School dance, you know,
(02:41):
and I'm dressed up in my half green, half purple
silk shirt with black jeans no belt of course, shirt
tucked in and I'm ready to just to dance it
up while I go in and I'm walking past the
gym and the light is on. I jiggled the door.
The doors open. I go in side and there's a
basketball waiting. My silk shirt off and I worked on
(03:04):
my game for about two and a half hours in
the gym by myself. Came out after the dance and
my mom said, Hey, how is the dance? I said,
I don't know. I was working on my game the
whole time, and I didn't feel bad about it. I
didn't feel like I was missing out on anything. One
really important moment for me came. I was a camp junkie.
I would go to camps all summer long from fifth
(03:27):
grade on and going into my freshman year, I flew
down to Texas and I met the head coach at
the Colony Texas, Tommy Thomas, legendary coach around these parts.
I was about five seven five eight, flat top size
thirteen shoe, nothing special to look at. But I had
(03:48):
these big dreams and these big goals. And I talked
to coach Thomas about these goals and he said, Matt,
that can happen for you down here in Texas well.
As a fourteen year old, I flew to Pennsylvania, where
all of our family is from, and I told my
mom on the way home from the airport, I need
to move to Texas so I can be a college
(04:08):
basketball player. They asked my little sister, Becky, if she's
three years younger than me, if that was okay, and
she said, yeah, let's go. Within two weeks, our entire
family had changed their lives dramatically for the dreams of
a fourteen year old boy. I mean, you talk about
parents being invested. You move across the country to a
(04:29):
place where we know nobody, we have no family, they're
all in. So I had those three goals, and I
made my freshman a team at the Colony Texas where
it's a Big five, a public school with a lot
of diversity. I had to learn real quick how to
play against athletic players, and how to get tough, and
how to not just use my physical skill but my
(04:52):
mental ability to play with these guys. I had a
great growth spur going into my sophomore year, where I
went from a about five eight to six one or
six two, really skinny, but now I was tall and skilled,
and I made varsity as a sophomore. Well, going into
my senior year at the Colony were really good on
(05:12):
ranked seventh in the country. And I get to go
down to Waco, Texas to Bailey University to go on
my college visit with a guy named Dave Bliss. Coach Bliss,
who had already a legendary coach, met me and my
mom at the gas station in Waco, and he had
a Bible in the back seat of his car. And
(05:34):
I think I'm not saying that it was planned, but
he was a master salesman. He knew what I stood
for and knew what my mom was all about. And
my mom made the comment to me when she saw
the Bible, she felt like this was the right thing.
So it was pretty wise to have that in the back.
But Coach Bliss did a great job of taking us
(05:58):
around the whole campus. Everybody that he introduced me to,
he introduced me like I was already one of his players,
and that like me, coming to Baylor was going to
be the best thing for our university. And I'll never
forget he said this. He said, Matt, I want you
to be one of the pillars of our program, and man,
(06:18):
any eighteen year old that hears that from a Big
twelve school Division one, and you're the kind of kid
I am that has these goals. I would have signed
there if I could. On the way home, I looked
at my mom and I said, that's where I want
to go, and with tears in her eyes, she was like, oh,
I was so glad. So freshman's sophomore junior year, I
played every game at Baylor, meaningful minutes at times, less
(06:42):
minutes at times, but I realized how to bring value.
By the end of my junior year, I had solidified
a starting role, and man, we were about to be really,
really good. We had future NBA players that were sophomores,
we had some role players like myself that were juniors
that were going to be seniors. And going into my
senior year, we were picked to be in the top
(07:04):
four of the Big twelve, which that means that you're
probably top twenty five, and that means you're going to
march madness to the Big Dance when we come back.
More of Matt Salmon's story Arise a Fall, Arise again
here on our American stories Lei Habibi here the host
(07:33):
of our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're
bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from
our big cities and small towns. But we truly can't
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(07:55):
a lot. Go to our American Stories dot com and give,
and we continue with our American Stories and Matt Simon's story.
Let's pick up where we last left off. There's the
(08:19):
past till Latener, what's it up? I grew up watching
Duke make its amazing runs in the early nineties with Lightner,
you know, hitting that turnaround shot against Kentucky. Like I
practiced that shot in the dream, not just playing college basketball,
(08:41):
was getting to that stage and man like it really
felt like it was about to happen. I can remember
it was a Friday afternoon in June of two thousand
and three. I had just come in from playing sand volleyball.
I stayed on the Baylor campus every summer to be
with our strength coach, to get extra classes in. But
(09:04):
I just loved the university and I loved being on
campus and being a basketball player of Baylor. And one
of my professors that I was friends with called and said, Matt,
what's up with your team? What's going on? I said,
what do you? What do you? What do you mean?
What are they doing now? And he said no, like
you need to turn on the news right now. They're
saying that there's been a homicide and that basketball players
(09:26):
might be involved. So that summer of two thousand and
three was the longest summer of my life. We had
just finished weights and we were told that we were
having a team meeting in the locker room, which that's
not odd to have team meetings, but in the locker room,
our coaches were there. But the strange part was there's
policemen in there. That was the different part. And so
(09:48):
they go around and they're asking, hey, we haven't seen Patrick.
Nobody's seen Patrick in about a week, as parents haven't
heard from you guys know anything. The interesting thing was,
so Patrick was a red shirt, and Patrick was a
different guy. He'd be there for a week, he'd be
gone for two weeks, and we would never have explanations.
He was in and out all summer long, So for
(10:09):
me not to see him for an extended period of
time wasn't strange at all. So I dismissed that whole thing.
Patrick will show up with like a new tattoo or
a new earring. He was in Vegas, who knows. And
then that Friday was when that came out in the
news and this story started to unfold, and then these
allegations start, they start to dig into Coach Bliss a
(10:31):
little bit. This was a hard moment where I hadn't
seen him in a few weeks and we still didn't
know where Patrick was. And I was walking in the
bottom of the Ferrell Center and I was crossing paths
with him, and he looked older to me, you know,
it looked really beat down. And I was such a
good follower, you know, as a player and a coach,
(10:55):
not a coach's pet, but man, I just believed in
them and they I knew they loved me. And I
saw him, I said, Coach, I just want to let
you know that I'm sorry for what you're going through
and what people are saying about you. And I told him,
I was like, I don't think you deserve any of that,
And being around him so much. I'd once watched him
do a four hour coaching video in one take with
(11:18):
no ums or us. He was incredibly accomplished speaker and
a good salesman. But standing in front of this guy,
I felt like something's off. He is not looking me
in the eye. He's very kind of frantic with what
he's saying and doing. But he said, Matt, you know
what we found was when we went into Patrick's apartment,
(11:42):
we found drugs and money, and Matt, that's how he
was paying for school. And I said, wow, like yes, sir,
like that makes sense because it had come out that
Patrick wasn't on a scholarship. Patrick was a six to
eight freak of an athlete that could shoot, and he
(12:03):
was going to be an NBA player, Like he was
one of the reasons why we were going to be
really good the next year. For us to ever think
that he wasn't on scholarship, it never came up like
I would look more like a walk on then he did.
And so when but that came out that how is
(12:23):
Patrick Denny paying for school? And then Coach Bliss told
me this story as a truth and as the good
soldier that I was, I just went along rite with it.
Fast forward. They find Patrick's body. After about a month
and a half, found out that Carlton Dotson, one of
our teammates, had shot and killed him. Dottie had fled
(12:45):
and was pleading insanity up in Maryland, and Coach Bliss
resigned before all the truth came out. And my mom
tells the story that she looked out at the window
of me and I was crying, and she was crying,
and it was like hard to see her son kind
(13:05):
of lose that innocence that I had had and to
be hurt like that. I went to the press conference
and they asked some of us older players to talk.
So I stood up in front of our my teammates
and their families and defended Coach Bliss, thanked him for
all the time that he had had with us, and
(13:27):
told them that I would be staying and that I
hope they did too. And I had this feeling kind
of in my heart at that point of I'm lying
right now. I was the spokesman for a program that
I did not believe in, did not appreciate, didn't really
even want to be a part of anymore. I had
(13:49):
to get out of not just wakeco but I felt
like Dallas Fort Worth. So I flew back to Pennsylvania
to stay with that coach that I had come down
to Texas to go to camp with that guy that
I had known. I went back to he moved back
to Pennsylvania, and so I'm staying with him just to
get away. Our media guy called me late late one
(14:10):
night and he said, Matt, have your phone on you
tomorrow morning. I said, why, Like, what do you need
me for. He said, it's about to get really bad.
I said, how can it be worse than it is?
Players did, coaches, coaching staff's gone. He's like, just have
your phone ready. My coach came up and woke me
(14:31):
up and said, Matt, you need to look at the newspaper.
And in that newspaper was a recording written out of
one of the assistant coaches that was new that I
didn't know that well. Was in the office with coach
Bliss and other players, not me, but other players, and
it was him constructing this lie of how they needed
(14:56):
to blame Patrick, paint him as a drug dealer and
somebody that was that's how he was paying for school
and Bliss. Stephen went on to say, Patrick can't say
anything about it. He's dead. And the thing that really
hit me, I would think, more than anybody else in
the country besides Patrick's family, that read that he had
(15:20):
told me that story almost word for word, but not
as a lie. He told me as a truth. He
didn't ask me to lie to people like he was
telling these players and these coaches to do. And that
was like a last straw moment of any type of
belief in people or goodness that I had. Oh, I
(15:41):
was so angry and mad, and we found out that yeah,
he knew that Patrick had threats, and he had been
paying for players and other players too. But that summer
it was full of a lot of hope and to
spare that. You know, the question I never asked was God,
(16:02):
how can I be a light in this situation? How
can I bring good or and lead people the right way?
Instead of what I did is I think I actually
I let people, not think I did. I know I did.
I led people the wrong way because when you say
that you stand for something and you believe something and
(16:24):
then when it gets hard you completely throw it away,
people will see that and they'll get confused. I think
I led people farther away from having a faith in
God because I was known for something and then completely
was doing the opposite when things get hard, So regret,
I mean faith, pain of discipline is far less than
(16:46):
the pain of regret. And that that's one thing I regret.
And you've been listening to Matt Simon tell a heck
of a story about how his world unraveled in the
summer of two thousand and three. And I'll never forget
it myself. As these news stories and news accounts rolled
out from ESPN and all across sports pages and the
(17:09):
news pages of America, a murder in college basketball, drugs
and then ultimately the corruption at the cores of the
coach and the program. But interestingly, Matt Simon put himself
in the middle of it, even though he didn't do
anything wrong. He failed himself as a leader and the
people around him as a leader, and failed himself and
(17:32):
his walk with his own God. And by the way
to get the book The Leftovers, bail Or, Betrayal and
Beyond by Matt Simon, go to Amazon of the Usual
Suspects more of this remarkable story about basketball, about life,
and so much more. Matt Simon's story continues here on
our American stories, and we continue with our American stories
(18:10):
in the howering tale told by Matt Simon about the
college basketball program he was a part of and by
a senior year he would be a starter on a
team that would more than likely end up in the
Big Dance and be a top ten or top twenty
college program. Let's pick up where Matt last left off.
(18:32):
And so I was going into my senior year with
no coaching staff. I lost ten teammates that summer, two
to the tragedy, Carlton and Patrick, and then eight others
that decided not to come back or they graduated. And
that's a lot of turnover at that level. You'll have
three or four or five, and even now with the
transfer portal, but rarely, as they're an overhaul like that,
(18:55):
and rarely do you lose your best players. Where those
NBA guys that we had all left, and I found
myself in a very unfamiliar place where Okay, basketball since
I was nine years old has been the thing that
I've focused on and I've just had as my passion. Well,
(19:15):
now it's the problem and I have no passion for it.
I'm upset with it. So the next thing is I
turned Okay, what I got to go back to my source,
which I thought was my relationship with God. And I
realized at that point the foundation that I thought I
had really wasn't there. It was basketball. Basketball is the problem.
(19:39):
And I feel this hole in my life for the
first time, Well what do you fill that hole with?
I ran. I ran to things that I had never
drank before in my life until and really until I
turned twenty one. Was the first time I ever had
a sip of alcohol. But even to that point, it
wasn't anything that I enjoyed or did it that much,
(20:01):
but I ran to it. I never been a party guy.
In fact, I can remember going to a party early
on in my college career. I wasn't a drinker and
I was known as a believer. And when I walked in,
I saw some of my friends hide their drinks, put
them away because they didn't want me to see them
(20:22):
like that. They didn't want because that's what I stood for. Well,
in the span of two months, I completely destroyed that.
In fact, my place became the place to go and
that competitive nature that got me to become the player
that I was because I always felt like as a
D one player at Baylor in the Big twelve, I
(20:44):
really didn't belong physically. They were too big and too
fast and too strong, and my skill wasn't good enough.
So what did I rely on? I had to do more, work,
harder and push myself farther than any other of my
teammates were willing to do. That type of competitiveness, when
you throw it into the party scene, is dangerous, and
(21:07):
so I became really good at that. I became a
very angry person and resentful, and I stopped trusting anyone.
And so with that in mind, I realized I couldn't
go anywhere else to play as a senior, because what
am I gonna do? Call up Kentucky and say, hey,
coach CALPARI my name is Matt Samon. I'm a senior.
(21:28):
I'm six two and a half. I can't jump that well,
but I did average four and a half points last year.
Can I come like? It's just I knew. I made
a few calls, but I knew that I was I
was stuck at Baylor. So I started to just stay
in my apartment and have those destructive habits or I'd
get out of town. So I'm driving up to Dallas
(21:51):
and I get a call from somebody says, hey, you
got a new coach. I'm like, what, Who in the
world would take this job? Like you have no players,
Baylor's and the NCAA are about to bring sanctions on
your team for years to come. Who would take this?
A guy named Scott Drew, and I said, never heard
of him. A few weeks later, Scott Drew comes in
(22:15):
and we had to meet in the baseball locker room.
And I'm sitting in there, and this is where the
title of the Leftovers comes from. I'm sitting in this
locker room with myself and five other scholarship players. The
problem is as none of us are stars like we
are role players at best, and some even younger players
that weren't even role players the year before they were
(22:36):
bench dudes. And then we've got four or five walk ons.
We were leftovers. We were leftover from everything that had happened,
and for whatever reason, we were still at this school.
Coach Drew walks in at thirty two years old with
the same energy and relentless joy that he has now.
(22:59):
He's the exact same person he came in with, this
bouncing his step with his huge smile, and he kept
talking about guys, guys, listen, there's there's joy in the future.
There's joy in the foundation that you were going to set.
The problem is is, for the first time in my life,
I sat back as a very arrogant, jaded, frustrated twenty
(23:22):
one year old, and I looked around and for the
first time in my life, I completely disagreed with what
my coach was saying. I could not see any joy,
any positivity that could possibly come out, because see, here's
the thing. I knew what we were up against, and
in my mind I didn't think he did. He was
coming from Valpo. Valpo's a great school, they played great competition.
(23:46):
In my mind, I thought, that's not Big twelve. That's
not Texas, Ou, Kansas, Oklam Estate and m at the time,
Missouri Colorado. Like, it's just not these teams that have
of fame coaches and McDonald's all Americans that I've battled
against the last three years. You don't understand and look
(24:07):
at our supporting cast, like we're going to get killed.
And that's what happened at the beginning, and we were
losing the teams that we used to beat really bad.
And there's one game where it's the first time in
I believe, in Division one basketball, high level basketball history
that a coach subbed out five scholarship players and put
five walk Ons in. And it was in Waco at home,
(24:32):
and our crowd went nuts. They were cheering so loud.
And the reason he took he put them in is
because we weren't playing very hard. We were giving, especially myself,
we were giving false effort. Our walk Ons played really hard, man,
and they were they were bringing energy and the crowd
was appreciating it. But scholarship players beat walk ons. There's
(24:52):
just a difference between them, and so that started to happen.
Coach Drew looked down at the bench at us and said,
you better play hard when you go back in. When
I walked on the floor at the Farrell Center, I
heard something that I'd never heard before. They were booing
the walk on's going out of the game and booing
the scholarship players going back in. I wanted to let
(25:16):
them know, maybe with a hand gesture, how I felt
in that moment about being booed. But it was. It
was really hard, and we lost that game by twenty
and after the game in the locker room, taking a shower,
just sitting there crying. I was ready to quit that night.
And my parents had never allowed me to quit anything,
even eighth grade swim when I midway through the swimming season.
(25:41):
I hated the speedo, I hated swimming, I hated the
I wanted to play basketball. My mom would have let
me quit. I was ready to quit that night, and
I didn't think anybody would have really judged me for
quitting that night. And assistant coach came in and he said, Matt,
show up tomorrow. Just show up tomorrow. And then at
(26:02):
some point it happened where we started to believe in
each other, we started to believe in our coaching staff,
and we started to become competitive. Every night was our championship.
And that's a dangerous team when you're not. Because but
here's what I think I forgot to say. Before our
season even started, we were told that we weren't allowed
(26:23):
to play in postseason. That's like you and me being told, Hey,
you're going to come and work hard every single day,
but I'm not paying you. Well, I'm not coming to
work then, buddy, And you've been listening to Matt Simon
tell a remarkable tale of redemption, but it didn't come easy.
Going into a senior year having lost ten teammates, he
(26:45):
ran to alcohol, the very thing he'd stayed away from
his entire young life. Indeed, he became a competitive drinker,
a competitive partier, and excelled. He was also growing increasingly
angry and resentful an income Scott Drew talking about the
joy there was in the future. When we come back,
(27:07):
more of this remarkable story, and please pick up Matt's book,
The Leftovers, Bailor, Betrayal and Beyond. It's a real page turner.
Pick it up at Amazon or the usual Suspect. More
with Matt Salmon's story when we return here on our
American story, and we continue with the story of Matt
(27:39):
Salmon here on our American Stories. Let's pick up where
we last left off with Coach Scott Drew coming in
and slowly shaping and changing and forging the character of
this new Bailor team. And that's kind of the feeling
we had all year long, was why are we actually
(27:59):
doing this? It's not worth it. But once you start
to look at every situation or goals to be one
and oh every night play hard for each other and
let's just go out and do something that nobody thinks
we can do. There's power in that. As a team.
We weren't supposed to win any Big Twelve games that year.
(28:21):
We're supposed to go oh in sixteen, and we ended
up we beat Iowa State at our place for our
first Big Twelve win. We ended up being A and
M twice. Nothing better than being A and M twice.
And their coach actually got fired the day after we
beat them the second time, because apparently the worst thing
(28:41):
that you can do is lose to a bunch of leftovers.
And then one of the big personalities in the Big
Twelve at that point was Bobby Knight. He was at
Texas Tech. I had grown up being a Bobby Knight
fan at Indiana and well my first couple of years
because he was there my sophomore, junior, and senior year.
He was at Tech, and he would come out or
(29:03):
he would shake the head coach's hand, turn around and
just bolt not go through shake assistance hands or players hands,
and I was always like, God, I want to shake
his hand. And you know, just because I had some
Roy Williams was a Kansas and I had some cool
moments with him the years before. And so senior year,
we're at Texas Tech. We're actually up four going into
(29:24):
the second half, playing really well, but we just ran
out of gas. And that's what happened to us. I mean,
I was averaging thirty eight thirty nine minutes a game,
and but we had played really hard. But we lost
that game. And I had told myself before, when this
game's over, I'm going up to him. I don't know
what's going to happen. He may walk right through me,
(29:44):
passed me, not even shake, but I'm gonna do it.
And so he was walking to half court and I
took a straight line towards him. I left the line,
I didn't even shake anybill. I went right to him
and I said, Coach Night, I said, I just want
to let you know, it's just been a pleasure getting
to play against you the last few years. He put
his arm, He's a big dude, put his arm around me.
(30:07):
He said, Matt, I'm telling you right now that if
I would have been at Tech when you came out
of high school, I would would have recruited you really hard.
And oh man, like that year, all the stuff that
happened like that to me was a win, a person
win like we lost. But I think my dad even
(30:28):
captured a picture of me standing at half court smiling.
Those those were really cool moments when basketball came back.
Here's the interesting thing. I thought that those destructive habits
that I had thrown myself into, I thought it was
just temporary. I thought I was just coping. You know,
(30:48):
I don't laugh a lot anymore. Just let me laugh
for a couple hours and forget where I am. But
Coach Mills, who was an assistant at Baylor, we used
to have team chapels at my apartment. He would come
in and there's one time where he just said, you know, guys,
don't think that you can do what you want whenever
you want right now without consequences. But then when you
(31:10):
get out in the real world, that that these temptations
will go away, that you can just get back to
what you'd call right living. And I remember being such
a cocky, arrogant kid, going, you know what, in my head,
you're wrong, That's exactly what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna
live the way I want right now. I'm going to
(31:31):
be in control of my happiness. Well, fast forward nine
years of living an extremely in moral life. It was
my thirtieth birthday and I was alone in my apartment
in McKinney, Texas, with a six pack, and I thought,
(31:56):
is this really? This is it? I'm years old by
myself celebrating my birthday, just completely alone and frustrated, and
that same anger and resentment and pour me why me
mentality that I adopted as a twenty one year old,
I still had it. After that night, I went to
(32:19):
a random church in Plano, Texas that I had never
gone to before. I just went. I sat in the
back and I heard a message that I felt like
I had heard hundreds of times. They passed around a card,
the visitor card, and growing up in church, you never
fill out the visitor card because you're never a visitor,
(32:39):
and so I but this card goes by. I filled
it out. I put my name in information. I said,
I'm angry and I have questions, and I put that
card in, and honestly, I never thought i'd hear back
from anybody. A few days, maybe a week goes by,
and I get a response from a lady at that
church saying, Hey, we love to have you come in
(33:00):
and talk to our pastor, and I emailed back and
forth with her, trying to figure out a spot a time,
and it just worked out. About two weeks later, I
went in, she opened the door for me. I sat
with her, talked with her for a little bit. She's
really kind. And then I went back and I got
to talk with the pastor and I laid out my
story just kind of the same way that I've done
right here, and and I told him the story. He said,
(33:23):
and he said, Matt, and I was really, you know,
I love pistol Pete. Part of pistol Pete's story is
he was after his NBA career has gone and he
was lost, and he's in his bed and he hears
this voice and it's Jesus. He hears Jesus's voice out loud,
and pistol Pete said it was like it was like
he was in the room with him, and his life
(33:47):
changed instantly. And I told this pastor, I was like,
I'm waiting for that voice, if God will talk to me,
if Jesus will speak to me like that. And he said, Matt,
you can't be waiting around for that like that doesn't
happen all the time. He said, you need to give
(34:07):
up control. So what are you What are you talking
about control? It's like you were a good kid basketball,
was really in control of your life. When it went bad,
you took control of your life. And it's kind of
like this lightbulb moment. And I gave up control that day.
(34:29):
You know. I was saved that day, a few weeks
after my thirtieth birthday, and the change was pretty drastic.
The things that I had been running to for peace
and for comfort and had become really bad habits. The
(34:50):
desire just wasn't there. The cool thing is is that
day that I went into that church, I was just
angry and looking for answers. But I think one thing
I've learned is like my plan, my goals as a
little kid, was just to be a college basketball player.
Like I really didn't have anything past the age of
twenty one. I had no other goals. And I realized
(35:11):
that his plans are just so much bigger and greater
than our little plans are. His plan was for me
to meet Janna that day. She was the lady that
emailed me back, that opened the door to that church,
and we got married about eleven months after that day,
(35:34):
and we've been married now almost ten years. And then
when Baylor wins the national championship this last year, may
we finally really have our ending to the leftovers. It
took us eighteen years, from six scholarship players and a
bunch of walk ons and a thirty two year old
coach to win the national championship and to be the best,
(35:55):
And I'm humble to get to be a part of
a small part of that. When people ask me first
eight to ten years after playing college basketball, which normally
I mean normally, it's a cool thing to be able
to say that you did like less than three percent
of high school players playing college at any level, less
than one percent of our Division one. And so that's
(36:16):
an extreme game of musical chairs that if you're able
to figure it out and make it, it's it's special.
When people ask would ask me did you play, I'd say, yeah,
I played. Where'd you play? I played at Baylor? And
I can see their eyes when were you there? I
was there from two thousand and two thousand and four.
Oh were you there when all that stuff went down?
(36:39):
And it's no longer about you know that achievement, It's
about what did ginho? What can you tell us how
crazy was it? Well now, especially them winning it all,
I get to puff out my chest a little bit.
You know, where'd you play? I played at Baylor? Oh wow,
(36:59):
nash Old champions. Yeah we were, but you can't imagine
where we came from. You know. It's that kind of
story now. And a great job as always on the
production by Greg Hengler, And a special thanks to Matt
Salmon for sharing his story the good, the bad, and
the ugly parts. And by the way, make sure to
get the leftovers Matt Simon's book and It's avail at
(37:23):
Amazon and the usual Suspect and my goodness, there was
some good. The team was starting to turn it around.
They beat A and M twice. He had that encounter
with Bobby Knight when Knight told him I would have
recruited you hard. But those bad habits he'd adopted, well,
they weren't temporary. And by the age of thirty, he
found himself alone in an apartment on his birthday in McKinney, Texas,
(37:45):
and he went to a local random church in Plano,
Texas and filled out a visitor card. I'm angry, I
have questions, and my goodness, everything from their turn he
returned to his faith, returned to his God, and found
a future of hope and redemption. The story of Matt
Simon's redemption. Barer Universities redemption their basketball program. Here on
(38:10):
our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
To subscribe to our podcasts, go to the iHeartRadio app
or wherever you get your podcasts. Up next to story
about one of the biggest scandals in college basketball history,
(00:30):
along with one of its biggest turnarounds. Let's take a listen.
My name's Matt Salmon, and I'm the head boys basketball
coach at Grapevine Faith Christian School right outside of DFW
Dallas Fort Worth. And then that's what I do full time.
But what I get to tell my players about is
(00:50):
a story that a lot of them haven't heard before,
but their parents are probably familiar with, or I've remember
at some point hearing about what happened with Baylor basketball,
you know, in the early two thousands. And one of
my dreams growing up was to be a Division one
basketball player, but I never dreamt of being part of
one of the largest scandals or tragedies in college basketball history.
(01:16):
And going into my senior year down in Waco, that's
exactly where I found myself. But before that, you kind
of have to start back at how did basketball become
so important to me. So I grew up in eastern
Pennsylvania in a small little town called Berwick, PA. And
(01:36):
my family and I were very active in church. And
I would say that we did church really well. Every Sunday,
Sunday night, Wednesdays we were up there. And at a
young age, I prayed a prayer when I was about
five and accepted Christ into my heart. But just grew
up with that type of head knowledge. But it was
really when I was nine years old is when I
(01:58):
fell in love. I fell in love with basketball. One
thing that was really big that separated me from my
teammates was my ability to practice for long periods of
time and not get bored. And I realized quickly when
I was about nine or ten that I had three goals.
(02:18):
One was to make my freshman a team, one was
to make varsity as a sophomore, and one was to
get at a Vision one scholarship for basketball. And so
I dedicated my time to that. One example that of
me thinking or viewing the game differently was in seventh
grade going to the Berwick Middle School dance, you know,
(02:41):
and I'm dressed up in my half green, half purple
silk shirt with black jeans no belt of course, shirt
tucked in and I'm ready to just to dance it
up while I go in and I'm walking past the
gym and the light is on. I jiggled the door.
The doors open. I go in side and there's a
basketball waiting. My silk shirt off and I worked on
(03:04):
my game for about two and a half hours in
the gym by myself. Came out after the dance and
my mom said, Hey, how is the dance? I said,
I don't know. I was working on my game the
whole time, and I didn't feel bad about it. I
didn't feel like I was missing out on anything. One
really important moment for me came. I was a camp junkie.
I would go to camps all summer long from fifth
(03:27):
grade on and going into my freshman year, I flew
down to Texas and I met the head coach at
the Colony Texas, Tommy Thomas, legendary coach around these parts.
I was about five seven five eight, flat top size
thirteen shoe, nothing special to look at. But I had
(03:48):
these big dreams and these big goals. And I talked
to coach Thomas about these goals and he said, Matt,
that can happen for you down here in Texas well.
As a fourteen year old, I flew to Pennsylvania, where
all of our family is from, and I told my
mom on the way home from the airport, I need
to move to Texas so I can be a college
(04:08):
basketball player. They asked my little sister, Becky, if she's
three years younger than me, if that was okay, and
she said, yeah, let's go. Within two weeks, our entire
family had changed their lives dramatically for the dreams of
a fourteen year old boy. I mean, you talk about
parents being invested. You move across the country to a
(04:29):
place where we know nobody, we have no family, they're
all in. So I had those three goals, and I
made my freshman a team at the Colony Texas where
it's a Big five, a public school with a lot
of diversity. I had to learn real quick how to
play against athletic players, and how to get tough, and
how to not just use my physical skill but my
(04:52):
mental ability to play with these guys. I had a
great growth spur going into my sophomore year, where I
went from a about five eight to six one or
six two, really skinny, but now I was tall and skilled,
and I made varsity as a sophomore. Well, going into
my senior year at the Colony were really good on
(05:12):
ranked seventh in the country. And I get to go
down to Waco, Texas to Bailey University to go on
my college visit with a guy named Dave Bliss. Coach Bliss,
who had already a legendary coach, met me and my
mom at the gas station in Waco, and he had
a Bible in the back seat of his car. And
(05:34):
I think I'm not saying that it was planned, but
he was a master salesman. He knew what I stood
for and knew what my mom was all about. And
my mom made the comment to me when she saw
the Bible, she felt like this was the right thing.
So it was pretty wise to have that in the back.
But Coach Bliss did a great job of taking us
(05:58):
around the whole campus. Everybody that he introduced me to,
he introduced me like I was already one of his players,
and that like me, coming to Baylor was going to
be the best thing for our university. And I'll never
forget he said this. He said, Matt, I want you
to be one of the pillars of our program, and man,
(06:18):
any eighteen year old that hears that from a Big
twelve school Division one, and you're the kind of kid
I am that has these goals. I would have signed
there if I could. On the way home, I looked
at my mom and I said, that's where I want
to go, and with tears in her eyes, she was like, oh,
I was so glad. So freshman's sophomore junior year, I
played every game at Baylor, meaningful minutes at times, less
(06:42):
minutes at times, but I realized how to bring value.
By the end of my junior year, I had solidified
a starting role, and man, we were about to be really,
really good. We had future NBA players that were sophomores,
we had some role players like myself that were juniors
that were going to be seniors. And going into my
senior year, we were picked to be in the top
(07:04):
four of the Big twelve, which that means that you're
probably top twenty five, and that means you're going to
march madness to the Big Dance when we come back.
More of Matt Salmon's story Arise a Fall, Arise again
here on our American stories Lei Habibi here the host
(07:33):
of our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're
bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from
our big cities and small towns. But we truly can't
do the show without you. Our stories are free to
listen to, but they're not free to make. If you
love what you hear, go to our American Stories dot
com and click the donate button. Give a little, give
(07:55):
a lot. Go to our American Stories dot com and give,
and we continue with our American Stories and Matt Simon's story.
Let's pick up where we last left off. There's the
(08:19):
past till Latener, what's it up? I grew up watching
Duke make its amazing runs in the early nineties with Lightner,
you know, hitting that turnaround shot against Kentucky. Like I
practiced that shot in the dream, not just playing college basketball,
(08:41):
was getting to that stage and man like it really
felt like it was about to happen. I can remember
it was a Friday afternoon in June of two thousand
and three. I had just come in from playing sand volleyball.
I stayed on the Baylor campus every summer to be
with our strength coach, to get extra classes in. But
(09:04):
I just loved the university and I loved being on
campus and being a basketball player of Baylor. And one
of my professors that I was friends with called and said, Matt,
what's up with your team? What's going on? I said,
what do you? What do you? What do you mean?
What are they doing now? And he said no, like
you need to turn on the news right now. They're
saying that there's been a homicide and that basketball players
(09:26):
might be involved. So that summer of two thousand and
three was the longest summer of my life. We had
just finished weights and we were told that we were
having a team meeting in the locker room, which that's
not odd to have team meetings, but in the locker room,
our coaches were there. But the strange part was there's
policemen in there. That was the different part. And so
(09:48):
they go around and they're asking, hey, we haven't seen Patrick.
Nobody's seen Patrick in about a week, as parents haven't
heard from you guys know anything. The interesting thing was,
so Patrick was a red shirt, and Patrick was a
different guy. He'd be there for a week, he'd be
gone for two weeks, and we would never have explanations.
He was in and out all summer long, So for
(10:09):
me not to see him for an extended period of
time wasn't strange at all. So I dismissed that whole thing.
Patrick will show up with like a new tattoo or
a new earring. He was in Vegas, who knows. And
then that Friday was when that came out in the
news and this story started to unfold, and then these
allegations start, they start to dig into Coach Bliss a
(10:31):
little bit. This was a hard moment where I hadn't
seen him in a few weeks and we still didn't
know where Patrick was. And I was walking in the
bottom of the Ferrell Center and I was crossing paths
with him, and he looked older to me, you know,
it looked really beat down. And I was such a
good follower, you know, as a player and a coach,
(10:55):
not a coach's pet, but man, I just believed in
them and they I knew they loved me. And I
saw him, I said, Coach, I just want to let
you know that I'm sorry for what you're going through
and what people are saying about you. And I told him,
I was like, I don't think you deserve any of that,
And being around him so much. I'd once watched him
do a four hour coaching video in one take with
(11:18):
no ums or us. He was incredibly accomplished speaker and
a good salesman. But standing in front of this guy,
I felt like something's off. He is not looking me
in the eye. He's very kind of frantic with what
he's saying and doing. But he said, Matt, you know
what we found was when we went into Patrick's apartment,
(11:42):
we found drugs and money, and Matt, that's how he
was paying for school. And I said, wow, like yes, sir,
like that makes sense because it had come out that
Patrick wasn't on a scholarship. Patrick was a six to
eight freak of an athlete that could shoot, and he
(12:03):
was going to be an NBA player, Like he was
one of the reasons why we were going to be
really good the next year. For us to ever think
that he wasn't on scholarship, it never came up like
I would look more like a walk on then he did.
And so when but that came out that how is
(12:23):
Patrick Denny paying for school? And then Coach Bliss told
me this story as a truth and as the good
soldier that I was, I just went along rite with it.
Fast forward. They find Patrick's body. After about a month
and a half, found out that Carlton Dotson, one of
our teammates, had shot and killed him. Dottie had fled
(12:45):
and was pleading insanity up in Maryland, and Coach Bliss
resigned before all the truth came out. And my mom
tells the story that she looked out at the window
of me and I was crying, and she was crying,
and it was like hard to see her son kind
(13:05):
of lose that innocence that I had had and to
be hurt like that. I went to the press conference
and they asked some of us older players to talk.
So I stood up in front of our my teammates
and their families and defended Coach Bliss, thanked him for
all the time that he had had with us, and
(13:27):
told them that I would be staying and that I
hope they did too. And I had this feeling kind
of in my heart at that point of I'm lying
right now. I was the spokesman for a program that
I did not believe in, did not appreciate, didn't really
even want to be a part of anymore. I had
(13:49):
to get out of not just wakeco but I felt
like Dallas Fort Worth. So I flew back to Pennsylvania
to stay with that coach that I had come down
to Texas to go to camp with that guy that
I had known. I went back to he moved back
to Pennsylvania, and so I'm staying with him just to
get away. Our media guy called me late late one
(14:10):
night and he said, Matt, have your phone on you
tomorrow morning. I said, why, Like, what do you need
me for. He said, it's about to get really bad.
I said, how can it be worse than it is?
Players did, coaches, coaching staff's gone. He's like, just have
your phone ready. My coach came up and woke me
(14:31):
up and said, Matt, you need to look at the newspaper.
And in that newspaper was a recording written out of
one of the assistant coaches that was new that I
didn't know that well. Was in the office with coach
Bliss and other players, not me, but other players, and
it was him constructing this lie of how they needed
(14:56):
to blame Patrick, paint him as a drug dealer and
somebody that was that's how he was paying for school
and Bliss. Stephen went on to say, Patrick can't say
anything about it. He's dead. And the thing that really
hit me, I would think, more than anybody else in
the country besides Patrick's family, that read that he had
(15:20):
told me that story almost word for word, but not
as a lie. He told me as a truth. He
didn't ask me to lie to people like he was
telling these players and these coaches to do. And that
was like a last straw moment of any type of
belief in people or goodness that I had. Oh, I
(15:41):
was so angry and mad, and we found out that yeah,
he knew that Patrick had threats, and he had been
paying for players and other players too. But that summer
it was full of a lot of hope and to
spare that. You know, the question I never asked was God,
(16:02):
how can I be a light in this situation? How
can I bring good or and lead people the right way?
Instead of what I did is I think I actually
I let people, not think I did. I know I did.
I led people the wrong way because when you say
that you stand for something and you believe something and
(16:24):
then when it gets hard you completely throw it away,
people will see that and they'll get confused. I think
I led people farther away from having a faith in
God because I was known for something and then completely
was doing the opposite when things get hard, So regret,
I mean faith, pain of discipline is far less than
(16:46):
the pain of regret. And that that's one thing I regret.
And you've been listening to Matt Simon tell a heck
of a story about how his world unraveled in the
summer of two thousand and three. And I'll never forget
it myself. As these news stories and news accounts rolled
out from ESPN and all across sports pages and the
(17:09):
news pages of America, a murder in college basketball, drugs
and then ultimately the corruption at the cores of the
coach and the program. But interestingly, Matt Simon put himself
in the middle of it, even though he didn't do
anything wrong. He failed himself as a leader and the
people around him as a leader, and failed himself and
(17:32):
his walk with his own God. And by the way
to get the book The Leftovers, bail Or, Betrayal and
Beyond by Matt Simon, go to Amazon of the Usual
Suspects more of this remarkable story about basketball, about life,
and so much more. Matt Simon's story continues here on
our American stories, and we continue with our American stories
(18:10):
in the howering tale told by Matt Simon about the
college basketball program he was a part of and by
a senior year he would be a starter on a
team that would more than likely end up in the
Big Dance and be a top ten or top twenty
college program. Let's pick up where Matt last left off.
(18:32):
And so I was going into my senior year with
no coaching staff. I lost ten teammates that summer, two
to the tragedy, Carlton and Patrick, and then eight others
that decided not to come back or they graduated. And
that's a lot of turnover at that level. You'll have
three or four or five, and even now with the
transfer portal, but rarely, as they're an overhaul like that,
(18:55):
and rarely do you lose your best players. Where those
NBA guys that we had all left, and I found
myself in a very unfamiliar place where Okay, basketball since
I was nine years old has been the thing that
I've focused on and I've just had as my passion. Well,
(19:15):
now it's the problem and I have no passion for it.
I'm upset with it. So the next thing is I
turned Okay, what I got to go back to my source,
which I thought was my relationship with God. And I
realized at that point the foundation that I thought I
had really wasn't there. It was basketball. Basketball is the problem.
(19:39):
And I feel this hole in my life for the
first time, Well what do you fill that hole with?
I ran. I ran to things that I had never
drank before in my life until and really until I
turned twenty one. Was the first time I ever had
a sip of alcohol. But even to that point, it
wasn't anything that I enjoyed or did it that much,
(20:01):
but I ran to it. I never been a party guy.
In fact, I can remember going to a party early
on in my college career. I wasn't a drinker and
I was known as a believer. And when I walked in,
I saw some of my friends hide their drinks, put
them away because they didn't want me to see them
(20:22):
like that. They didn't want because that's what I stood for. Well,
in the span of two months, I completely destroyed that.
In fact, my place became the place to go and
that competitive nature that got me to become the player
that I was because I always felt like as a
D one player at Baylor in the Big twelve, I
(20:44):
really didn't belong physically. They were too big and too
fast and too strong, and my skill wasn't good enough.
So what did I rely on? I had to do more, work,
harder and push myself farther than any other of my
teammates were willing to do. That type of competitiveness, when
you throw it into the party scene, is dangerous, and
(21:07):
so I became really good at that. I became a
very angry person and resentful, and I stopped trusting anyone.
And so with that in mind, I realized I couldn't
go anywhere else to play as a senior, because what
am I gonna do? Call up Kentucky and say, hey,
coach CALPARI my name is Matt Samon. I'm a senior.
(21:28):
I'm six two and a half. I can't jump that well,
but I did average four and a half points last year.
Can I come like? It's just I knew. I made
a few calls, but I knew that I was I
was stuck at Baylor. So I started to just stay
in my apartment and have those destructive habits or I'd
get out of town. So I'm driving up to Dallas
(21:51):
and I get a call from somebody says, hey, you
got a new coach. I'm like, what, Who in the
world would take this job? Like you have no players,
Baylor's and the NCAA are about to bring sanctions on
your team for years to come. Who would take this?
A guy named Scott Drew, and I said, never heard
of him. A few weeks later, Scott Drew comes in
(22:15):
and we had to meet in the baseball locker room.
And I'm sitting in there, and this is where the
title of the Leftovers comes from. I'm sitting in this
locker room with myself and five other scholarship players. The
problem is as none of us are stars like we
are role players at best, and some even younger players
that weren't even role players the year before they were
(22:36):
bench dudes. And then we've got four or five walk ons.
We were leftovers. We were leftover from everything that had happened,
and for whatever reason, we were still at this school.
Coach Drew walks in at thirty two years old with
the same energy and relentless joy that he has now.
(22:59):
He's the exact same person he came in with, this
bouncing his step with his huge smile, and he kept
talking about guys, guys, listen, there's there's joy in the future.
There's joy in the foundation that you were going to set.
The problem is is, for the first time in my life,
I sat back as a very arrogant, jaded, frustrated twenty
(23:22):
one year old, and I looked around and for the
first time in my life, I completely disagreed with what
my coach was saying. I could not see any joy,
any positivity that could possibly come out, because see, here's
the thing. I knew what we were up against, and
in my mind I didn't think he did. He was
coming from Valpo. Valpo's a great school, they played great competition.
(23:46):
In my mind, I thought, that's not Big twelve. That's
not Texas, Ou, Kansas, Oklam Estate and m at the time,
Missouri Colorado. Like, it's just not these teams that have
of fame coaches and McDonald's all Americans that I've battled
against the last three years. You don't understand and look
(24:07):
at our supporting cast, like we're going to get killed.
And that's what happened at the beginning, and we were
losing the teams that we used to beat really bad.
And there's one game where it's the first time in
I believe, in Division one basketball, high level basketball history
that a coach subbed out five scholarship players and put
five walk Ons in. And it was in Waco at home,
(24:32):
and our crowd went nuts. They were cheering so loud.
And the reason he took he put them in is
because we weren't playing very hard. We were giving, especially myself,
we were giving false effort. Our walk Ons played really hard, man,
and they were they were bringing energy and the crowd
was appreciating it. But scholarship players beat walk ons. There's
(24:52):
just a difference between them, and so that started to happen.
Coach Drew looked down at the bench at us and said,
you better play hard when you go back in. When
I walked on the floor at the Farrell Center, I
heard something that I'd never heard before. They were booing
the walk on's going out of the game and booing
the scholarship players going back in. I wanted to let
(25:16):
them know, maybe with a hand gesture, how I felt
in that moment about being booed. But it was. It
was really hard, and we lost that game by twenty
and after the game in the locker room, taking a shower,
just sitting there crying. I was ready to quit that night.
And my parents had never allowed me to quit anything,
even eighth grade swim when I midway through the swimming season.
(25:41):
I hated the speedo, I hated swimming, I hated the
I wanted to play basketball. My mom would have let
me quit. I was ready to quit that night, and
I didn't think anybody would have really judged me for
quitting that night. And assistant coach came in and he said, Matt,
show up tomorrow. Just show up tomorrow. And then at
(26:02):
some point it happened where we started to believe in
each other, we started to believe in our coaching staff,
and we started to become competitive. Every night was our championship.
And that's a dangerous team when you're not. Because but
here's what I think I forgot to say. Before our
season even started, we were told that we weren't allowed
(26:23):
to play in postseason. That's like you and me being told, Hey,
you're going to come and work hard every single day,
but I'm not paying you. Well, I'm not coming to
work then, buddy, And you've been listening to Matt Simon
tell a remarkable tale of redemption, but it didn't come easy.
Going into a senior year having lost ten teammates, he
(26:45):
ran to alcohol, the very thing he'd stayed away from
his entire young life. Indeed, he became a competitive drinker,
a competitive partier, and excelled. He was also growing increasingly
angry and resentful an income Scott Drew talking about the
joy there was in the future. When we come back,
(27:07):
more of this remarkable story, and please pick up Matt's book,
The Leftovers, Bailor, Betrayal and Beyond. It's a real page turner.
Pick it up at Amazon or the usual Suspect. More
with Matt Salmon's story when we return here on our
American story, and we continue with the story of Matt
(27:39):
Salmon here on our American Stories. Let's pick up where
we last left off with Coach Scott Drew coming in
and slowly shaping and changing and forging the character of
this new Bailor team. And that's kind of the feeling
we had all year long, was why are we actually
(27:59):
doing this? It's not worth it. But once you start
to look at every situation or goals to be one
and oh every night play hard for each other and
let's just go out and do something that nobody thinks
we can do. There's power in that. As a team.
We weren't supposed to win any Big Twelve games that year.
(28:21):
We're supposed to go oh in sixteen, and we ended
up we beat Iowa State at our place for our
first Big Twelve win. We ended up being A and
M twice. Nothing better than being A and M twice.
And their coach actually got fired the day after we
beat them the second time, because apparently the worst thing
(28:41):
that you can do is lose to a bunch of leftovers.
And then one of the big personalities in the Big
Twelve at that point was Bobby Knight. He was at
Texas Tech. I had grown up being a Bobby Knight
fan at Indiana and well my first couple of years
because he was there my sophomore, junior, and senior year.
He was at Tech, and he would come out or
(29:03):
he would shake the head coach's hand, turn around and
just bolt not go through shake assistance hands or players hands,
and I was always like, God, I want to shake
his hand. And you know, just because I had some
Roy Williams was a Kansas and I had some cool
moments with him the years before. And so senior year,
we're at Texas Tech. We're actually up four going into
(29:24):
the second half, playing really well, but we just ran
out of gas. And that's what happened to us. I mean,
I was averaging thirty eight thirty nine minutes a game,
and but we had played really hard. But we lost
that game. And I had told myself before, when this
game's over, I'm going up to him. I don't know
what's going to happen. He may walk right through me,
(29:44):
passed me, not even shake, but I'm gonna do it.
And so he was walking to half court and I
took a straight line towards him. I left the line,
I didn't even shake anybill. I went right to him
and I said, Coach Night, I said, I just want
to let you know, it's just been a pleasure getting
to play against you the last few years. He put
his arm, He's a big dude, put his arm around me.
(30:07):
He said, Matt, I'm telling you right now that if
I would have been at Tech when you came out
of high school, I would would have recruited you really hard.
And oh man, like that year, all the stuff that
happened like that to me was a win, a person
win like we lost. But I think my dad even
(30:28):
captured a picture of me standing at half court smiling.
Those those were really cool moments when basketball came back.
Here's the interesting thing. I thought that those destructive habits
that I had thrown myself into, I thought it was
just temporary. I thought I was just coping. You know,
(30:48):
I don't laugh a lot anymore. Just let me laugh
for a couple hours and forget where I am. But
Coach Mills, who was an assistant at Baylor, we used
to have team chapels at my apartment. He would come
in and there's one time where he just said, you know, guys,
don't think that you can do what you want whenever
you want right now without consequences. But then when you
(31:10):
get out in the real world, that that these temptations
will go away, that you can just get back to
what you'd call right living. And I remember being such
a cocky, arrogant kid, going, you know what, in my head,
you're wrong, That's exactly what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna
live the way I want right now. I'm going to
(31:31):
be in control of my happiness. Well, fast forward nine
years of living an extremely in moral life. It was
my thirtieth birthday and I was alone in my apartment
in McKinney, Texas, with a six pack, and I thought,
(31:56):
is this really? This is it? I'm years old by
myself celebrating my birthday, just completely alone and frustrated, and
that same anger and resentment and pour me why me
mentality that I adopted as a twenty one year old,
I still had it. After that night, I went to
(32:19):
a random church in Plano, Texas that I had never
gone to before. I just went. I sat in the
back and I heard a message that I felt like
I had heard hundreds of times. They passed around a card,
the visitor card, and growing up in church, you never
fill out the visitor card because you're never a visitor,
(32:39):
and so I but this card goes by. I filled
it out. I put my name in information. I said,
I'm angry and I have questions, and I put that
card in, and honestly, I never thought i'd hear back
from anybody. A few days, maybe a week goes by,
and I get a response from a lady at that
church saying, Hey, we love to have you come in
(33:00):
and talk to our pastor, and I emailed back and
forth with her, trying to figure out a spot a time,
and it just worked out. About two weeks later, I
went in, she opened the door for me. I sat
with her, talked with her for a little bit. She's
really kind. And then I went back and I got
to talk with the pastor and I laid out my
story just kind of the same way that I've done
right here, and and I told him the story. He said,
(33:23):
and he said, Matt, and I was really, you know,
I love pistol Pete. Part of pistol Pete's story is
he was after his NBA career has gone and he
was lost, and he's in his bed and he hears
this voice and it's Jesus. He hears Jesus's voice out loud,
and pistol Pete said it was like it was like
he was in the room with him, and his life
(33:47):
changed instantly. And I told this pastor, I was like,
I'm waiting for that voice, if God will talk to me,
if Jesus will speak to me like that. And he said, Matt,
you can't be waiting around for that like that doesn't
happen all the time. He said, you need to give
(34:07):
up control. So what are you What are you talking
about control? It's like you were a good kid basketball,
was really in control of your life. When it went bad,
you took control of your life. And it's kind of
like this lightbulb moment. And I gave up control that day.
(34:29):
You know. I was saved that day, a few weeks
after my thirtieth birthday, and the change was pretty drastic.
The things that I had been running to for peace
and for comfort and had become really bad habits. The
(34:50):
desire just wasn't there. The cool thing is is that
day that I went into that church, I was just
angry and looking for answers. But I think one thing
I've learned is like my plan, my goals as a
little kid, was just to be a college basketball player.
Like I really didn't have anything past the age of
twenty one. I had no other goals. And I realized
(35:11):
that his plans are just so much bigger and greater
than our little plans are. His plan was for me
to meet Janna that day. She was the lady that
emailed me back, that opened the door to that church,
and we got married about eleven months after that day,
(35:34):
and we've been married now almost ten years. And then
when Baylor wins the national championship this last year, may
we finally really have our ending to the leftovers. It
took us eighteen years, from six scholarship players and a
bunch of walk ons and a thirty two year old
coach to win the national championship and to be the best,
(35:55):
And I'm humble to get to be a part of
a small part of that. When people ask me first
eight to ten years after playing college basketball, which normally
I mean normally, it's a cool thing to be able
to say that you did like less than three percent
of high school players playing college at any level, less
than one percent of our Division one. And so that's
(36:16):
an extreme game of musical chairs that if you're able
to figure it out and make it, it's it's special.
When people ask would ask me did you play, I'd say, yeah,
I played. Where'd you play? I played at Baylor? And
I can see their eyes when were you there? I
was there from two thousand and two thousand and four.
Oh were you there when all that stuff went down?
(36:39):
And it's no longer about you know that achievement, It's
about what did ginho? What can you tell us how
crazy was it? Well now, especially them winning it all,
I get to puff out my chest a little bit.
You know, where'd you play? I played at Baylor? Oh wow,
(36:59):
nash Old champions. Yeah we were, but you can't imagine
where we came from. You know. It's that kind of
story now. And a great job as always on the
production by Greg Hengler, And a special thanks to Matt
Salmon for sharing his story the good, the bad, and
the ugly parts. And by the way, make sure to
get the leftovers Matt Simon's book and It's avail at
(37:23):
Amazon and the usual Suspect and my goodness, there was
some good. The team was starting to turn it around.
They beat A and M twice. He had that encounter
with Bobby Knight when Knight told him I would have
recruited you hard. But those bad habits he'd adopted, well,
they weren't temporary. And by the age of thirty, he
found himself alone in an apartment on his birthday in McKinney, Texas,
(37:45):
and he went to a local random church in Plano,
Texas and filled out a visitor card. I'm angry, I
have questions, and my goodness, everything from their turn he
returned to his faith, returned to his God, and found
a future of hope and redemption. The story of Matt
Simon's redemption. Barer Universities redemption their basketball program. Here on
(38:10):
our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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