Clint Deas

Clint Deas played basketball at Appalachian State and then for a living in Europe, and he still calls it a child's game.

They met at a Super Bowl two years before this episode. Deas, who is around six foot nine, tapped Brad on the back and said he wanted the sweatshirt. Brad offered to get him one. Deas said he wanted the one Brad had on. Later Deas took him down into a NASCAR pit, where he knew the crews by name, and Brad calls it one of the best experiences he has had. They had been talking about sitting down for the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast for a year before they did it.

Deas is 41 with two boys, Boss at four and Chief at two. Boss is 48 inches and 67 pounds and tells him he is the best daddy in the world. Chief is the one who will hit you if you come too close. Deas parents them differently on purpose, giving Boss what he calls embedded challenges to build a rougher edge and going gentler on Chief. The confidence work traces back to his own youth basketball, where he would drive straight into a defender instead of the open space so he had a reason for the miss. The teaching goes both ways. After weeks of Chief hitting him, Deas told Boss to hit back once and promised it would end it. Boss said he did not want to, then walked over and hugged his brother. Chief stopped.

The year that produced this conversation was rough. A car accident early in it altered things. His mother had a stroke in September. His career was in transition. And he and the mother of his boys, together since May 2019 and never married, had separated. He calls that one life or death, meaning stay in something that had taken him out of himself, or leave and live for the boys. He stopped recognizing how he was showing up as a parent and as a partner, and went to a wellness retreat to reset. He called his mother first. It was his sister he finally broke down with, sobbing about four or five years of a life he had pictured and was not going to get. A friend, Mike Metcalf, had told him a healthy mind needs a healthy body, and Deas worked out that the walk or the workout he reached for was not the same thing as saying it out loud.

The week before this, Deas was in Home Goods buying knickknacks for a neighbor who had just retired, feeling sorry for himself about the year. A man asked him for help. The clippers were nine dollars and he had five. Deas bought them, and on the walk to the front of the store he figured the guy had an interview the next day and wanted to clean himself up. Part of him wanted to take him home, cut his hair, feed him, and put the playoff game on. What he says he got from going around the world playing a child's game is how much he values time with his mother, his sisters, and friends who never left Garner, North Carolina.