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Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I didn’t go to that church because of my family. My grandma kept attending her Pentecostal church. Mom’s church had become that chair in front of the television. I went to church by myself, mainly drawn to Mountain Pine Baptist because of its location (five blocks away from where we lived) and its youth director, Robert Parker, who was a great influence on me and many of my friends. He influenced us not by having one-on-one talks with us about anything deep but by taking us places. Whenever I was with him there were always a few other kids around at least, and we did all kinds of things from hunting to rodeos. I went to my first-ever concert with him when we went to see the Christian country band Diamond Rio.
    We also hung out at his house all the time. Robert and his wife, Missy, would gather a lot of us from the area and invite us to stay at their home Saturday nights, so they could make sure we were at church on Sunday morning. Those nights were filled with movies and board games until we passed out in the sleeping bags they had thrown on the floor for us. Sunday mornings meant a full breakfast and lots of laughs around the table. Through Robert and Missy, I got a taste of the kind of home life I had only dreamed about.
    Fans of my show are familiar with Vic Gandolph, who was my football coach from the eighth grade until I graduated high school. He still calls in to the show, and to be honest I’m not even sure I’d have a show without him. I know it seems hard to believe, but I was really dedicated to playing football, despite being a scrawny pip-squeak compared to most of the team. Coach Gandolph taught me to own up to your mistakes and that a lot of people have talent, but talent alone doesn’t win. “If you want to win,” he said, “you must outwork everyone else, every day, all the time.” It’s very much where my “Fight. Grind. Repeat.” mantra came from. He also taught me about adversity—that it’s not if we face it but how we react when we face it. “Tough times don’t last,” he said, “but tough people do.” I’m so grateful for my relationship with this man.
    Then there was my best friend Evan’s dad, Jerry McGrew. Evan and I had bonded over baseball; we were both on the team and Jerry was the coach. I admired Jerry, a veteran, because he had been injured in combat and still kept such a positive outlook on life. He also loved coaching Evan and me, even though Evan was his son and far more talented than I was. But I worked harder. And I think Jerry respected that. The McGrews also took me on my only childhood vacation. We went on a van trip to Colorado. I don’t know if I had ever even been out of Arkansas at that point, and for sure my family couldn’t afford any kind of vacation. But they took me to the mountains and paid for everything. I’m not kidding when I say that it is still one of the highlights of my life, and something I am still incredibly grateful for.
    But by far the most significant stand-in I had for a father was my stepdad, Keith. I got lucky as a teenager; my mom married a good guy.
    When I was about thirteen years old, we moved into his house and instantly made it very, very crowded. There were six of us at one time in his nine-hundred-square-foot place: my mom, stepdad, his two daughters, my sister, and me. So, again, I slept on the living room couch, cramming my bedding behind it and my clothes underneath.
    But for the next four years, until I left for college, Keith was a solid and consistent presence—meaning, he had a job. My stepdad worked at the mill, when there still was one. Although he worked a lot, he still found time to do those things that I had heard fathers were supposed to.
    He played catch with me in the backyard and even let me play on his adult softball team, which as a young kid was a blast. He was a decent athlete, but his real passion