Deland McCullough
speaker
90 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Deland McCullough’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And it's just really heartwarming how much joy she felt in not only finding out he was okay and successful, but now she has a son and grandkids and this extended family.
Yeah. He says, it doesn't list a father on my birth certificate. And he asks her, do you know who my father is?
Right. He's nervous about it and isn't sure what to say, but he asks his birth mom, Carol, if he can be the one to tell him.
45 years later, he's going to get a phone call from someone who says, I'm your son, that he knows.
He's spent his entire life wondering about his birth parents. But for Sherman, it's zero to 45-year-old son with no warning. He hasn't been looking for that. He has a happy wife and family and kids. But he almost doesn't want to imagine that he could be the kind of person who made a choice that resulted in other people having to be responsible.
He had always told his players, there's no such thing as irresponsibility. When you're irresponsible, someone else becomes responsible for what you didn't do. He has led a life leading young men and telling them how to be. And then he recognizes that he might not have been the guy he always thought he was. And so at first, he's not overjoyed the way Dylan would hope. He needs some time.
And then he starts thinking about how the story isn't his, it's Dillon's. How Dillon has spent his whole life looking for this piece of himself and how he needed to stop centering himself and consider what it meant to Dillon to find him and really consider that it could be true. They get a paternity test. It's 99.9999999%.
And as he's waiting for those results, he realizes that he will in fact be very sad if he is not his father. By this point, he's come around to the idea that they've had this connection, that this story is almost faded.
It isn't crystallized until they see each other in person for the first time after knowing their connection as father-son. Dillon's actually got recruiting trips that allow him to get near Tennessee and where Sherman lives in retirement and goes there for the very first time to see his dad as his dad. There's this just incredible moment, and I cry every time I think about it. I cried writing it.
I cried the first time Dylan said it. But Dylan goes to see him for the first time in person after they know of their connection as father-son. And he's nervous and sitting in the car, and Sherman looks out the window and sees him sitting, and he's like, oh, this cat's nervous. Like, he's just sitting out in his car, not coming up, even though we've known each other for years.
His adoptive dad left when he's two. He hasn't had a dad since. And he didn't realize how much he was carrying feelings of, am I enough? Am I worthy? Does someone want to claim me? And for this man, this ideal of a person to embrace him and call him his son, he just sort of let his inner child release and cry and be embraced by this man.
It's been joyful, mostly, and also complicated. And for me, doing the story the first time, we did a lot of work on it, but nothing like writing a book. So the hours and hours of interviews, all the people I talk to, all the detail I unravel. And I mean, there's a twist with his brother that I didn't know the first time I reported it.
that I think is day one stuff if I was talking to someone and his brother didn't think it was day one stuff. So I didn't find out till I start writing the book that there's a whole nother parental twist that goes on in his family, even before what happens with his dad. And so you have to read the book for that. There's a tease that we're not giving away in this interview.
But yeah, as I'm doing more of these interviews and I'm talking to everyone in the family, I am working so hard to understand each perspective. You've got an adoptive mom in Adele who sacrificed so much to raise these two boys as a single mom, thinking that she was going to have this partner in AC, the radio DJ, and instead she's alone, post-industrial collapse, not a lot of money.
And they turn out so well. They become these successful young men. And then here come these birth parents who have a lot of judgment at first about what he went through as a kid. They wanted the best for him. Both Sherman as someone who cared about him and had met him as a young man, and then Carol who gave him away with the expectation he would end up in a two-family home.
everything would be this idyllic setting you imagine, an adoptive family that really wants a baby and can't have one of their own. And instead, he has this really tough childhood. And so it's almost a role reversal of a lot of adoption stories you hear, right? Where the birth parents are struggling or fighting something, they give up a baby and here come the saviors to fix everything.
And instead, you've got these two incredible, well-adjusted, successful adults looking at this woman who did her very best, but still struggled at times. And so to really understand like what he got from Adele, his adoptive mom, and then what almost certainly came to him through DNA, how similar he is to Sherman, even though they didn't meet until he was 17 years old.
And even though he was in his life as a mentor, but not all the time, like how he became, I mean, the same exact life.
won a Super Bowl, lost a Super Bowl, both of them to Tom Brady, had sons, son goes to Miami of Ohio, plays defensive back, is a teacher. It's just, it's remarkable.
Yeah, I mean, he just took a job with the Raiders, and he is now coaching under the boy wonder who I guess never ages and retires, Pete Carroll, who could be both the head coach of his dad as a running backs coach and now the head coach of Dylan with the Raiders.
Showing 61–80 of 90 · page 4 of 5
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