Dave Fleming
speaker
69 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dave Fleming’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Oh, we went there. How did you guys even draft players, though? Or how do you... Is it all through the window? Mostly it was week to week.
I always thought that fishing thing was in movies.
It's real. It's real. And they're not using it for anything nefarious. They're using it to submit their fantasy football lineup.
Right. And just enjoying this conversation, one fantasy football player to another, and you sort of get lost in that. You forget where you are. And then there's this gut punch. What happened to your league?
The conversation kind of lured us into, oh, we're all the same. This is all the same. It's like, no, we're not. His has one very dreadful, awful difference.
You know, one of the things in our early emails that we exchanged was this memory he had of springing the game-winning touchdown with a great block when he was in eighth grade. And he mentioned that writing about that little detail of his football career still gave him chills 40 years later. The other detail that he added that I loved was he wore 79 in honor of Harvey Martin, the cowboy great.
It was a ritual. Go to church, come home, gather around the TV, root on the Cowboys.
That deep connection to the Cowboys, it sort of, it continued once Charles was put on death row.
It gets sadder because he's been there so long now. Both his parents, that ritual is gone now because both of his parents have passed away. And as you listen to Charles, you understand that with his parents gone, that's just made sports all the more important to Charles and his survival on death row.
The way I interpreted what he was saying was he lives in a way where 24 hours a day, seven days a week, someone's trying to kill him. That's the white noise of his life. He doesn't know when it's going to happen, but that's the stress that he lives under.
And so the line about how maybe the crazy ones are the ones who continue to live on death row and the sane ones are the ones who check out by committing suicide. I mean, if there's a better way to explain the insanity and the pressure that they live under, I haven't read it.
It's just amazing that one day two of these prisoners were talking and they were like, maybe we're the crazy ones because we've adapted to live like this.
Yeah, we can survive in this situation. It's stunning.
Yeah, that was the whole point of this exercise, right? Is to find out why someone would love sports that much. that they would include it in their last words. And before even leaving on this assignment, I shared this database with a anthropologist in Chicago. Her name is Dr. Shannon Lee Doughty. And she is an expert in death rituals. And I just wanted to get her opinion on it.
And I really, at this point, asked her in almost a flippant way about get a load of these death row inmates who are using their last words for sports shout-outs. she immediately connected it to this concept called social death.
I wanted to go get Charles' opinion and his thoughts on his own last words. Yes. But it turns out he and his attorney, you know, they don't want him to be seen as somebody who is contemplating being executed.
There's a saying, there's always next year.
But for you, the future's uncertain.
There isn't always next year, I guess.
So if you predict it every year, eventually you'll be right.
Showing 41–60 of 69 · page 3 of 4
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