The life of Rex Chapman, from Rex himself

This is the Best of the Adam Gold Show Podcast, brought to you by Coach Pete at Capital Financial Advisory Group.

Visit us at CapitalFinancialUSA.com. And we did it! Gosh, this is a miracle and a half. I'm going to start this with a story as we say hi to Rex Chapman.

And the book, by the way, is It's Hard for Me to Live with Me, co-written with Seth Davis. First of all, Rex, thank you very much for doing this. I appreciate your time. Thanks for having me, man. Sorry it's taking so long. I know.

Pleasure's mine. Look, I've seen you on TV like six times since we didn't hook up a couple of weeks ago. I want to start this with a story because I was a senior budding broadcaster at the University of Maryland in 1988. Wow. Yep. And I was... Y'all got the business in. Y'all got the business in of the Kentucky Wildcats. So, Maryland's playing Kentucky in the second round of the tournament in Cincinnati, and Maryland had a very good first half. And so we're doing our setup, and I swear this is true. I say to my partner, who, by the way, is doing TV in Washington, D.C. now, Chick Hernandez.

I say to my partner, as long as they can contain Rex Chapman in the second half, I think we'll be okay. And I swear you came off a down screen, hit a turnaround jumper from the top of the key, probably five feet behind the three-point line, and that was it. You were one of the best players I ever saw with my own eyes. Oh, man. That's really nice.

I saw Len Bias play as well, by the way. So, how are you doing? How are you feeling?

I'm good. This is all kind of weird with the book. I assumed people would dislike it and dislike me even more.

So, it's all very strange. I told a friend, you know, it's an odd feeling sort of being celebrated when part of that has to do with you completely screwing your life up and failing at life. And a buddy of mine said, dude, that's not failing.

What you're doing is not failing. So, you know, I have to try to keep it in perspective. You know, this book, too, you know, my folks are still living, my ex-wife is amazing and great, and our kids are all amazing, but this brings up a lot of, you know, old painful memories for them and publicly. Right. So, it's a really, you know, it's just a kind of an emotional time, but I'm doing all right.

Thank you. I've read enough about you and seen you talk about this already. I know this is sort of your personality. You don't have the same opinion of you that others have of you. And that's, I mean, can be self-deprecating. However, we tend to look at it.

I know I make jokes about me as well. It's just sort of our way of dealing with whether it's success or failure. So, I'm curious this. I mean, there's a financial cost, obviously, to everything, but what did it cost you? And again, if you go the monetary route, that's fine, but what did your path cost you?

Oh, man. Well, I don't know that it really cost me in the whole scheme of things. I'm still living. I guess I paid some sort of a price to learn some life lessons that may become easiest to others. So, you know, yeah, I lost money and all that. But, you know, I think it taught me honestly probably just to be more responsible with my daily routine, not fill my time with stuff that's just trying to distract me from my emotions and my bad feelings, which is what I did for years with gambling, women, basketball, golf.

It just couldn't sit still in my own head for very long. But so from that standpoint, you know, I'm bottomed out and, you know, it's just been a steady progress of learning how to live life. You know, almost starting at age 45, find out other things that I like other than drugs and basketball.

And there are a lot of other things. You haven't given up golf, have you? I have not, but I don't play as much as I should, you know. And so I'm like, what are you doing, man?

You played more golf when you were a basketball player than you did now. Well, what do you do? How do you spend most of your time today? This is the third interview, I think.

And they've been staggered throughout the day. Normally I go swim. I make sure I get to the pool and swim for 45 minutes. I was a swimmer as a kid and it's the one thing that I can do physically that doesn't feel like I'm just... Adam Gold here with my man coach Pete DeRuta, Capital Financial Advisory Group. Are most of your clients hands-on or they just give you their money and let it work for them?

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Adam Gold was at Pete's books and investment advisory services offered by Capital Financial Advisory Group, a North Carolina registered investment advisor. Grinding it out and, you know, dreading every second of it. So, and it's 45 minutes, a hundred laps. I can, you know, and it's 45 minutes away from the phone. I can kind of organize my thoughts. Today, not able to get there, but I'm just finishing up a walk in between interviews. I've been gone for an hour trying to just occupy my mind, occupy my time, listen to some music and, you know, I'm obviously still involved in basketball with the Phoenix Suns. We play tonight on the road and yeah, just kind of killing time for the game time.

All right, let's talk a little hoops if we can. What does this time of year do, you know, mean to you when you're at the end? I know you're more involved in the pro game now, but what does this time of year mean to you?

Exactly what you said in the open. Talking about University of Maryland. I only played in college for two years at Kentucky and, you know, it was just an amazing experience. And it was for me, it was hard in many ways off the court, but on the court, it was fantastic.

And this time of year, I think about that. I think about playing it and I was terrible in that game in the first half. I got chewed out at halftime and came out and felt the responsibility to really be aggressive and turn the game around. But I played really badly for three fourths of that game. We ended up winning. It's just there's no tournament like it. You guys had Brian Williams and Tion McCoy and David Wood. I think it's just a great coaching staff. This time of year, you, you and I start thinking about those memories.

There's nothing's changed. There's nothing like March Madness and really and truly this is, you know, most of the kids that are playing in this tournament will never one second step on an NBA floor. So this is their, this is their time, man.

This is their NBA championship. Rex Chapman is joining us here on the Adam Gold Show. The book is called It's Hard for Me to Live with Me. Just quickly about the book. And I will tell people, if you want to get moved right away, sometimes it's hard to get into a book.

Man, the prologue, the prologue is a two by four. That's just an incredible story. Yeah, a lot of a lot of help that Davis, you know, co-authored the book and did most of the heavy lifting for the book. He was somehow able to organize my very erratic and emotional thought. And it took the better part of four years.

Right. We started right at right at the beginning of the pandemic. And, you know, really just finished it up several months ago. So it's been and it was, you know, it was good reliving some of the basketball stuff, but it was really painful to relive some of the stuff and some stuff that I had completely forgotten until we started talking about this that I hadn't even, you know, I've been in therapy for years now that I had just completely forgotten. And so, you know, it would be we'd hit a tough patch where I couldn't just emotionally talk about it for a week at a time sometimes. And he was couldn't have been more patient.

Simon and Schuster couldn't have been more patient. It was just, you know, I felt like a kind of a prima donna at a certain point, like, you know, oh, you know, get over yourself, talk about what you need to talk about and go to work. But I was a baby for some of it, for sure. My impression of you, though, as as even as an athlete, was that you were not you were not a prima donna as an athlete, that you were a hard worker as an athlete.

You couldn't get to where you were. I was a hard worker. But there was there was certainly sometimes I was, you know, in college.

I didn't. My college coach, Eddie Sutton, who a really good man and a Hall of Fame coach. And I have great respect for he and his family. I played with his son, Sean, at the University of Kentucky. But Eddie, Eddie is well documented. Eddie was an alcoholic. And so I lost some trust with him right away when I got to school and realized that.

But then also he he was being told by. Boosters and higher ups that my girlfriend, I'd had a high school girlfriend in my hometown named Sean Higgs, and we're still very good friends, but we were high school sweethearts, her brother, Mark and older brother, Kenny. Kenny Higgs played basketball with the University of LSU or LSU and then played an NBA. Mark Higgs is my age or a year ahead of Sean and I.

Mark played in the NFL and he played a Kentucky when I was in Kentucky. We're high school sweethearts. I'm white and she's black. And you didn't really like that where we were from.

Kind of hit it. But then when we got to college, you know, we thought, well, you know, this is dumb. We would go to class together. And shortly after I went to class with her, one day I was called in the office and Eddie had been told, look, you know, you can do whatever you want, but people are talking about you and showing and you need to you need to hide that or be very secretive about it.

And I thought it was a joke and wasn't a joke. So I had over the next couple years, I kind of had I had that same conversation several times with Eddie and different people at the university. So I had lost a lot of trust with Eddie and on the court, there were times as a sophomore that I I was what, lack of a better term, where I played on strike. You know, I knew that I was good and so good that he couldn't afford to take me out of the game. And so I would be obstinate, never, never.

I'll all young people do this, I think, to have a lot of talent and are very, you know, headstrong. But I would do that from time to time as a player. And, you know, I didn't do it for other coaches later on. But for Eddie, I think they're probably we had some valid reasons that I may have been a predoc. All right.

Well, that that seems like it was a pretty valid reason to be a pre Madonna. I'll just if if I'm going to give you a pass on that, I'll give for that reason. I will get it.

Definitely give you a pass. He would run. He would run plays for me and I would be open at the end of the play and I would just throw it back to who threw it to me. Stuff like that in the first half of games until he would cut me out and then I would do it right.

So, you know, just silly stuff like that. Hey, there were games where Kobe refused to shoot to prove a point, right? I did that in the game and I in college to against Notre Dame. I didn't shoot for almost the whole first half. And then the second I was guarding David Rivers and doing a really good job. Eddie had been on me about my shot collection publicly and I thought, OK, perfect national TV game. I'm not shooting. And and for the first half, I really didn't need a very close game. I only shot like wide open.

It would be obvious that, you know, I was farting around. So in the second half, Eddie started becoming really upset. I was I didn't care.

My teammates during a time out started testing me, right? Telling me, you got it. Come on, stop it. And that's when I stopped and I turned it on for a few minutes. But yeah, I was not my sophomore year. I'm sure I was ready to go.

Rex Chapman is joining us here on the Adam Gold show. It's hard for me to live with me is the book. I encourage all of you to go check it out. Is it is an absolutely powerful read. What would you have been like in the NIL era?

You certainly wouldn't have been around college for very long. What's your what's your read on that? Oh, man, I don't know. I'm so happy that these guys are being paid.

It's always been. And when I say that, I'm not talking about for myself. I was very fortunate. You know, they sold all kinds of I love Rex and all kinds of stuff when I was in school that I didn't.

We legally could not get a dime of somebody was making all that money for someone like myself. I was going to go on and make money playing professionally and know that it's time we didn't. But I what I always hated is remember. OK, you remember Jacques Vaughn? Yeah. Remember Aaron Graff? Yeah. Remember all these four year guys, Chris Corcianni, all these guys that were heroes, heroes for 45 years in those states.

It's just a crying shame to me that those guys couldn't knock out. Let's just call it a million dollars a year. Yeah, we're making so much money.

Everybody's watching, you know, big Monday. And and those guys are stars. They were stars. We had so many of them here that go to Kentucky guys that, you know, don't want to play. The NCAA and university have been paying guys like me under the table since the beginning of time.

I was paid to go to Kentucky. Right. And the boosters did it. Now the boosters can do it all legally.

It's called NIL. And until the until the universities and the I mean, they're on. Not on very good ground right now as it is, but at some point, the universities got to pay the players.

They got to get their hands dirty and decide if they're employees or if they're not, because we know what we are. We're here. We're at school.

I knew what I was. I was there to play basketball. They didn't get I missed the game.

There would be hell to play or practice. I missed the class. They didn't say a word. Right.

Well, that was more more of the privilege of being Rex Chapman, I guess at Rex Chapman on Twitter. All right. Final thing I'm going to ask you, I'm gonna let you go. And I appreciate your time. This was absolutely fascinating to me. And I think to all of our listeners.

How did blocker charge come about? Because that's how I became reacquainted with Rex Chapman on Twitter. You can follow him on Twitter at Rex Chapman. This is one of the funniest things ever. And just laugh out loud stuff. How did how did that come about? Very, very.

It was very unintentional. I was sitting around. I watch a lot of basketball. I was watching some basketball clips on my phone on Twitter one day, years ago. And I saw a dolphin jump up and hit a paddleboarder right in the chest and knocked him off his paddleboard. And my stupid brain, I just said to myself, that's an effing charge.

So I put out a blocker charge kind of a captain over that video. Thinking only basketball people would even get the reference. And, you know, people thought it was clever and whatever. So and then it just exploded from there.

Just silly, unintentional. Just incredibly funny stuff. Rex, I thank you very much. I would love to talk hoops with you again down the road. I appreciate your time. I hope the book is an absolute smash.

It should be. It's hard for me to live with me written with Seth Davis. We'll talk to you again.

Hey, thank you very much. Rex Chapman here on The Adam Gold Show. The story he tells about his high school sweetheart. So there's you.

You get to see, you know, kind of what Rex is about through all of the trouble. Again. He is. He has an opinion of himself that is below what.

He deserves. But some people have just kind of gone through it. Right.

Just it. It's a great read. It's a fast read. And again, if you want to get into a book right away, I've not read a book with a more powerful prologue than this one.