The Billionaire, the Billboards and the Star of the Worst Ad in Sports History (PTFO Vault)

The viral commercial has a mysteriously simple message: sportsmanship. The child actor has gotten dunked on by NBA Twitter for more than a decade. Correspondent Zach Schwartz untangles a web from Madison Avenue to the Supreme Court to Damian Lillard, in search of a boy named Alex — and the meaning of perseverance. (This episode originally aired January 7, 2025.) • Subscribe to PTFO on YouTube for breaking news, greatest hits and live premieres with Pablo https://www.youtube.com/@PabloTorreFindsOut/ • Subscribe to Pablo's Substack for exclusive access, documents and invites https://pablo.show/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre and today we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  I touched it.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  I touched the ball before it went out, Coach.

• 0:11Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 0:15Speaker 02

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• 1:18Pablo Torre?

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• 1:59Pablo Torre?

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• 2:25Pablo Torre?

  I have this issue when I like go out and I talk to people in real life and they're like, "So what do you do?" And I have to explain what my show is. And I've settled upon Zach a summary, which is basically, "I use journalism to solve mysteries that are technically about sports."

• 2:44Speaker 04

  It's a good way to put it. It's a very good way to put it. I know, I only just recently started calling myself a like journalist, cause like, like produce some stuff and then I like did social media and made memes for people for a long time.

• 2:55Pablo Torre?

  But the real like lead of your, of your bio now is Zach Schwartz, guy who is truly unparalleled in a very specific obsession about the worst commercial in the history of sports.

• 3:12Speaker 04

  My wife said, "That's when I found out you're a real sports pervert, is when you were like trying to find this guy and how obsessed you were with it." Cause it was very early on in our relationship and I had to find him.

• 3:27Pablo Torre?

  I want to explain what this commercial is because it's not really selling a product, I guess.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  It stuck with me, the ad. Like I remember seeing it in the wild, like on television, obviously before it started going viral. It ran all the time, especially during March Madness.

• 3:47Pablo Torre?

  If you Google the term "worst commercial ever" in quotes on YouTube, this is right there in the first couple of results. It has over a million views on that video alone. There are many, many more. It goes viral seemingly all of the time. I feel like we should just play it.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:05Pablo Torre?

  Because this is what this, again, viral commercial sounds like.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  Any high school gym in America sort of looks like this. We see the scoreboard to start the game. It says 63, 65, nine seconds left.

• 4:26Pablo Torre?

  Oh, God.

• 4:27Speaker 04

  We see the team in the white jerseys on a fast break, uncontested. Easy dunk.

• 4:33Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 4:33Speaker 04

  Here comes the trap. They're bringing a fresh trap, quick. Ball goes to the sideline, which is not really where you're supposed to throw it in that situation.

• 4:41Pablo Torre?

  No.

• 4:42Speaker 04

  We see a player white tip the ball out of bounds. The important part is, the ref didn't see the ball go off the kid in a white jersey.

• 4:52Speaker 04

  Coach calls his timeout. I got the perfect sideline out of bounds for this. I'm gonna cook here. They all go to the huddle to get the play.

• 4:59Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  Player who we think tipped the ball out, but they didn't call it on him, has this very guilty look on his face.

• 5:05Pablo Torre?

  He has a, truly, this is like the dictionary definition of a hangdog look. His eyes are as big as saucers. His lip is basically quivering. He is looking up apologetic, seemingly, for what he's about to reveal.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  I touched it.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  I touched the ball before it went out, Coach. Come on, Alex. The ref did not call that. You gotta be kidding me, Alex? It's a championship game. Talk to him, Coach. I touched it. It's their ball.

• 5:31Speaker 04

  His teammates are furious, quite upset. A kid with acne is as mad at Alex as a person can be. That's that Accutane rage. How's it going, Alex?

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Sorry, Coach.

• 5:46Speaker 04

  And the coach gives Alex the like, "You know what? You do what you think is right."

• 5:52Speaker 05

  Good call. Sportsmanship. Pass it on.

• 5:56Speaker 04

  And we see Alex prong over to the ref to snitch on himself. And the commercial ends with a sportsmanship pass it on message.

• 6:05Pablo Torre?

  Yeah. Values.com, the foundation for a better life. It feels like a commercial about sports made by people who have never seen sports before.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 6:16Pablo Torre?

  It's like, "This is what you should do," as if this is a plausible thing that anybody in that very specific circumstance would ever actually do.

• 6:25Speaker 04

  Totally. And like, there are so many other ways to do this ad that would be plausible. Like, someone sets a really hard ball screen and you run over and help the guy out. That's sportsmanship. But no one's snitching at this level. I mean, if anything, the player's like turning to the other guy, like, "I totally tipped that to the opponent," and walking off. Like, you're not telling the ref that.

• 6:46Pablo Torre?

  And just to give a sense of like the level of obsession that people have had with this specific scenario played out this way, I heard Ron Ruscillo and Bill Simmons talk about this at one point a couple of years back.

• 6:56Speaker 06

  And then the player looks at Coach. He's like, "Coach, it was off me." And Coach is like, looking at him being like, "There's a real lesson, lesson here. There's a teaching moment." And the whole team's looking at the kid. And then the kid goes up to the ref for the first time in the history of [bleep] anything, where he goes to the ref, it's like, "Hey, it was off me." And the ref's like, "All right, ball's the other way." And then it's like, "That's the lesson." And I think it had to have been a religious thing.

• 7:19Pablo Torre?

  For Bounty towels?

• 7:21Speaker 06

  Or it was for towels. Yeah. It was one of those. One of the two things. And people have been fascinated with this ad for years. You've never seen this ad.

• 7:28Speaker 04

  I remember it, but it was, it was what, 10, 15 years ago?

• 7:32Speaker 06

  Who's to say?

• 7:32Speaker 04

  Wow, yeah.

• 7:33Speaker 06

  Scholars have argued it's timeless.

• 7:36Pablo Torre?

  TikTok captions, because it's obviously made its way over there. They include things like, quote, "They definitely jumped Alex in the locker room."

• 7:42Speaker 04

  A lot of those.

• 7:43Pablo Torre?

  And the cultural spectrum on this extends obviously to like Barstool Sports, which has labeled this with a headline, quote, "March Madness commercial about sportsmanship features the biggest nerd ever." And the write-up says, "F*** Alex. Alex deserves to have all of his clothes thrown in the shower," end quote. It just recirculates because everybody is cringing and then choosing to dunk on this incredibly implausible morality play.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  And, uh, God, yeah, Alex kind of became the lightning rod for all of it.

• 8:14Pablo Torre?

  And so for you, when did you begin to wonder, okay, everybody keeps talking about Alex?

• 8:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:20Pablo Torre?

  Who is he? When does that question first enter your mind?

• 8:25Speaker 04

  So I used to host this podcast for Wave called Out of Pocket. And it was Jazai Johnson and Jethro Jenkins, two guys who are very good at NBA Twitter. And the whole sort of center of all this is NBA Twitter. Anyone that's spent any time on NBA Twitter knows this ad. It basically goes viral every six months. So we were doing our show, Wave had just brought in Paul George. Paul George's show is blowing ours out of the water. And I'm like, I gotta find a guest for our show that Paul George could never get for his. So I was like, "What's the most viral basketball thing that people would be like, 'Oh my God, you found that guy.'" And it was Alex.

• 9:07Pablo Torre?

  It became pretty clear, as soon as I started looking into this myself, that Alex was not eager to be discovered.

• 9:15Speaker 04

  That's where the journey sort of started. I was like, "I'm gonna do it for our season finale episode." I think I had three weeks. Like, "I'll find him. That's so much time." It took a lot longer than three weeks. It took, I think, like two and a half years basically to find him.

• 9:47Pablo Torre?

  How did you start your quest to find Alex?

• 9:51Speaker 04

  So first, it was reverse image searching his face and seeing if I could find anything off of that. So it's like that, hey, like, maybe the reason no one's done this video or found him is because they weren't using the modern tools that we have today. Didn't work. So then, for those that don't know, IMDb is a database where you can look up actors for movies. They have something similar for actors in commercials. So I was like, okay, I'll use that. Nothing. Couldn't find anything there. I started reaching out to friends of mine that directed commercials in LA, like, hey, is there a database or a casting director you could put me in touch with? And they kind of were like, from an ad that long ago, no one I know would work on it. And so, okay, let's see if the charity can help.

• 10:35Pablo Torre?

  So this charity, this foundation, which again, in the commercial, it's flashed on screen to the very end, the Foundation for a Better Life at values.com.

• 10:43Speaker 04

  Values.com, yeah.

• 10:45Pablo Torre?

  When you start to look into, into this website, what do you begin to see?

• 10:51Speaker 04

  There's just not enough information out there about the foundation. There's no interviews or articles. And it kind of triggered this sort of siren in my head, like, something weird is happening here because no one talks.

• 11:07Speaker 04

  No one's ever written a profile about the foundation or what they do. The website, for the most part, looks like it was designed in 2011 and just left.

• 11:21Pablo Torre?

  The text on the website, Zach, it's so anodyne. I'll read it off of the site right now. They say, quote, "We choose values we hope most individuals would find encouraging and relevant. Then we provide an uplifting message based on each value in an effort to encourage people to bring out the best in themselves." And they go on, "As a nonpartisan, nonsectarian organization, we carefully design our public service messages to have general, universal appeal." And then they say, "The foundation's small staff works with a network of writers, art directors, and production professionals." And none of that is very helpful.

• 11:58Speaker 04

  No.

• 11:59Pablo Torre?

  None of that is like giving us an actual detail. It's like, so what do you guys do here?

• 12:03Speaker 04

  And so, you know, I called them.

• 12:07Speaker 04

  It's one of those calls where you put on like the nicest voice.

• 12:15Speaker 04

  "Hi, my name's Zach, and I have an obsession with this really famous ad that you guys made from a long, long time ago."

• 12:24Pablo Torre?

  This ad that I definitely haven't made fun of online with millions upon millions of people exactly like me.

• 12:30Speaker 04

  And I was like, can you please just help me locate the actor? The secretary was very kind. "I would love to help you and like, what a neat project." You know, unfortunately, I can't release any names. You basically have to write the CEO and get his consent, and he'll release the information to you. So then I emailed the CEO, and he was really dismissive. I read his message. He's very like, "I'm not releasing the name to you. Sorry, go away." And that made me more mad.

• 13:01Pablo Torre?

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:01Speaker 04

  So then I'm like, what is this foundation? Why are you being secretive? Why are you trying to hide who this person is? So I did the next logical thing, and I pulled like 13 years' worth of their tax records.

• 13:23Pablo Torre?

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• 13:59Pablo Torre?

  So the limited research that I have done compared to your mountain of, of deep diving, Zach, the first thing you realize when you research the Foundation for a Better Life on YouTube is that Alex is not alone. Because apparently, there is a whole catalog of commercials beyond simply the story of Alex and sportsmanship that are about stuff like not shoplifting CDs. This one's titled "Do the Right Thing."

• 14:26Speaker 04

  Come on, man.

• 14:29Speaker 07

  Just do it quick. No one's watching.

• 14:38Speaker 04

  The other one, too.

• 14:45Speaker 07

  Good job.

• 14:47Speaker 07

  Do the right thing. Pass it on.

• 14:51Speaker 07

  A message from the Foundation for a Better Life.

• 14:54Pablo Torre?

  And then there's also this one that I wanted to play for everybody, because it's called "Umpire."

• 15:01Speaker 06

  My father was a great hitter, but he knew that life was about more than just one game.

• 15:07Pablo Torre?

  It's like a sepia-toned, almost old-timey baseball kind of aspect here.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  He was so safe.

• 15:30Pablo Torre?

  The umpire has called a man out who was safe by a zillion miles.

• 15:35Speaker 06

  So when that umpire made a bad call that ended the game for Dad, and then needed help with his car, my father made the right call. Helping others, the right choice. Pass it on. A message from the Foundation for a Better Life.

• 15:52Pablo Torre?

  And so who is the person behind these ads, Zach? Who is the person that the secretary and the CEO, unhelpfully, in the end, would not connect you to?

• 16:02Speaker 04

  His name's Philip Anshus.

• 16:07Speaker 04

  He is a billionaire, and he's been a billionaire for a very long time.

• 16:13Speaker 05

  Forbes Magazine has their list of the wealthiest Americans, and four of a Coloradans make the top 400. They got money. Number one isn't a surprise. Philip Anshus, the wealthiest person in our state with a net worth of $16.9 billion. That makes him 45th for the USA. Only? Only.

• 16:36Speaker 04

  CNN called him the richest American you've never heard of. Fortune also called him the greediest executive. He started running his dad's oil business at the age of 20. Made his money drilling, fracking, also ran Union Pacific Railroad. As an adult, I've spent my business career working on companies and in industries that have always been firmly rooted in the West. Often companies that are quite historic in nature.

• 17:13Speaker 04

  And then, you know, things that maybe are more in our lives than oil and railroads is that he owns AEG, Anshus Entertainment Group, who does Coachella. They own crypto.com Arena. And he's also managed to kind of scoop up a few different sports teams.

• 17:30Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 17:31Speaker 04

  LA Kings, LA Galaxy. And then he's financed movies, Chronicles of Narnia. He did the movie Array. Like, he's kind of everywhere, but you have no idea that he's there because he is truly one of the most like behind-the-scenes billionaires ever.

• 17:48Pablo Torre?

  He has his name on the championship trophy in Major League Soccer. And yet, I have never, until talking to you for this episode, thought, who the [bleep] is that guy?

• 17:59Speaker 04

  I found it very interesting that this person who has Coachella,

• 18:06Speaker 04

  which is about as godless of a place as you can go legally, also pushes these very conservative, God-forward, church-forward messages.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  And so that was very interesting, kind of as I dove deeper and deeper and found out about the different groups that he was kind of financing and funding and some of the initiatives that they were behind.

• 18:37Pablo Torre?

  Yes, so just to tick off some of them here, the Federalist Society, which is a very famous, historic at this point, conservative and libertarian legal organization, he's a big donor to them, it turns out, the Heritage Foundation, the right wing think tank, Anschutz is also a big donor to them. He also appears in New York Times headlines such as, quote, Neil Gorsuch has web of ties to secretive billionaire. The billionaire being Philip Anschutz, Neil Gorsuch aforementioned being the Supreme Court Justice now. This goes back to the 2000s, I guess, when Anschutz and his companies hired said future Supreme Court Justice as their outside counsel. He is simply, Zach, one of the most conservative owners in all of sports. He's given to Republican candidates.

• 19:18Speaker 04

  Anschutz has reportedly, you know, funded anti-gay ballot measures, anti-union, anti-weed, anti-science. I mean, there's a lot of things that he's done over these years and you're kind of like, okay, so the Foundation for a Better Life is sort of just like the diet version of those messages, if you will. Like, he's sort of like stripped off all the nasty parts that he's doing over on the side there.

• 19:42Pablo Torre?

  The part that I do need to say, I guess for legal reasons, is that Philip Anschutz is the type of guy also who does not grant interviews. The New Yorker, by the way, has reported previously that he does not even use a cellphone or email, but he also declared that reports about his donations to homophobic political organizations were, quote, fake news and garbage. And he indicated that he stopped funding said groups, which, to his apparent surprise, did support such causes. But as much as he is trying to not actually be heard in public, we did find a bit of rare video of this man. This is at the 84th Annual U.S. Conference of Mayors. It was 2016 and it's a translator who is translating

• 20:22Pablo Torre?

  for the Dalai Lama and next to them is Lady Gaga. Here is Philip Anschutz actually speaking out loud.

• 20:33Speaker 05

  The leader of one of the world's great religions, you have a world-class entertainer, and then you have this obscure business guy. And it's unlikely that we're discussing kindness, of all things. Not a very precise term.

• 20:55Pablo Torre?

  So if you're wondering how rich Philip Anschutz is, he has the kind of money where Lady Gaga and the Dalai Lama are just chilling on stage, listening to him talk about sportsmanship or whatever.

• 21:06Speaker 05

  Things like fairness, trust, learning, perseverance, love, patience, optimism, humility, confidence, civility. These are universal values that transcends race and religion and politics.

• 21:26Speaker 04

  I like that he had to go into his coat to take out the values that he wanted to specifically name. Like, brother, you can't just name like loyalty, sportsmanship, honesty, respect off the top. Like, you had to go to the note? Yeah.

• 21:41Pablo Torre?

  But all of it is to say that, yeah, like, the diet religiosity of this, meant for broad appeal, it feels like a motivational college dorm room poster. Like, that's what this whole thing is.

• 21:53Speaker 04

  All the ads read very much like the poster where the cat is like hanging from the tree and it's like hanging in there. All of the ads kind of read like that.

• 22:01Pablo Torre?

  This whole operation that Anschutz has funded, it seems like their mission, if nothing else, is to be as omnipresent as they can be.

• 22:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's billboards, radio ads, TV ads. The billboards were really mocking me and seeing them everywhere, seeing them on Santa Monica Boulevard near the 405. It sort of led me on my spiral where I felt like Gyllenhaal in Zodiac, where it's just like, this thing is sort of taking over my life to a degree that it really shouldn't. There's this wonderful one that Shaq is a part of.

• 22:34Pablo Torre?

  He's holding a basketball, wearing a cap and gown, and it looks like he loves civility.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  I mean, it says perseverance. He's holding a basketball like he got his doctorate's degree in basketball, which he did do.

• 22:45Pablo Torre?

  But in your defense, just psychologically speaking, the Foundation did release the following statistic. The campaign has apparently aired in more than 200 countries. Nielsen says that the ads at one point had more than 10 million impressions each day on U.S. network television. And then Current Affairs Magazine estimated that there were once as many as 10,000 billboards, Zach, across the United States. Apparently, according to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, it is the most widespread and successful PSA billboard campaign in United States history.

• 23:19Speaker 04

  They're everywhere and their reach for these campaigns is so impressive. And I reached out to a friend of mine that worked in advertising, actually for Viacom for a long time. He did, you know, TV ad sales. The way he kind of broke it down for me is that, like, you know, we talk about the Alex ad running during March Madness. Well, those spots for March Madness could be hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so he kind of gave me a wide range of what they could be. Like, you know, it's something like, late at night could be in the tens of thousands of dollars to, you know, a March Madness spot that could be hundreds of thousands of dollars. So these spots are obviously very valuable. They're running all the time. Because the Foundation doesn't have some

• 24:04Speaker 04

  huge operating budget to go out and buy ad times, I was trying to figure out how they're getting these ads on billboards or on TV. And the way it works is if you, as a network, have ad inventory, you could take that and donate it to them and write off on your taxes and basically say, hey, that inventory that I gave away was worth a million dollars, a hundred thousand dollars, a couple million dollars. Good on me, pat on the back, I did my thing. I'm writing that off on my taxes as a network saying, I made this wonderful charitable donation. And so that's sort of what this Foundation has become, is that it's sort of a way for people to write off, hey, I did this wonderful deed without having to do research or find charities to actually go approach.

• 24:48Pablo Torre?

  Somehow, tax write-offs on a big poster underneath a kitten, not as inspirational.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  And I think part of it that frustrated me was that while I understand the messages and it's important to teach people about perseverance or honesty or being truthful or whatever.

• 25:07Pablo Torre?

  We are a pro perseverance podcast, for the record.

• 25:10Speaker 04

  It's important, and I'm not saying it isn't, but isn't, shouldn't that be going to like a foundation that's trying to help get people clean water? Or, like, there are just so many things out there that are bigger issues in my mind than, you know, hey, I'm really happy Shaq got his degree in perseverance. But I need more.

• 25:37Pablo Torre?

  So this is where I should jump in to say that Philip Anschutz's company, the Anschutz Corporation, did decline our request, here at Publutor, I find out, for an interview with the 45th richest man in the world himself. And that the executive director of the Anschutz Foundation also didn't respond to messages that we left at a phone number and also an email address that were provided by the Anschutz Corporation. Also, for the record, neither the Foundation for a Better Life, nor its president, the guy who runs the nonprofit behind all of those Passadon ads for sportsmanship and love and learning and so forth, responded to our multiple requests for comment, which also included a detailed list of our questions.

• 26:20Pablo Torre?

  But what we found out, thanks to the years of tax returns that Zach Schwartz had pulled, is that these organizations are all, in fact, intertwined, and saving seven figures via tax deductions in the process. In 2021, for instance, the Anschutz Foundation gave a $2.4 million grant for general operating support to the Foundation for a Better Life, whose tax returns that same year listed nearly $2 million in production costs for TV commercials and billboards and other ads, under the heading of direct charitable activities. And even more specifically, the promotion of, quote, "quality values for all individuals regardless

• 27:03Pablo Torre?

  of their race or religion." It's a line which may now sound familiar.

• 27:11Speaker 05

  These are universal values that transcends race and religion and politics.

• 27:20Pablo Torre?

  All of which is to say that the other thing being passed on here beyond these values is tax benefits. Because yes, also, the networks and the billboard companies that broadcast these ads, they also get to deduct the, quote, "fair market value" of that ad slot from their taxes. But what all of this paperwork and uncovering all of this accounting really did for us was something even more important for the purposes of this episode. Remember, months earlier, Zach had started this whole quest by calling up an ultimately unhelpful secretary. And now, he had these documents, documents with all

• 28:01Pablo Torre?

  of these details that wound up pushing Zach in what felt like a new direction in his search for the whole reason he was here in the first place.

• 28:11Pablo Torre?

  Alex.

• 28:13Speaker 04

  So I've got their tax returns in front of me and it's, there are production company names on some of these tax returns that they've filed. And my process was, take the name on the tax return, put it into LinkedIn, take the name on the tax return, put it into Instagram. And in doing that, I found two former employees and just DM'd both of them and was like, hey, guys, very odd question here, but I'm trying to find this person. Can you help me? And one of them got back to me. He said, I'd love to help. I wasn't working on that ad campaign or I wasn't there at that time, but I know someone who can help. They've been there for forever. I'd love to connect you. You know, give me your email. So I get in an email thread with them and they sent me right back to the original

• 28:57Speaker 04

  secretary. So, and at that point, I was sort of embarrassed because I was like, the secretary definitely thinks I'm a weirdo. So it was very much back to square one. Huge bummer. Like, really thought I was moving in the right direction. At that particular moment, I was like, I have to go to Twitter and ask them for help for this because I need some sort of closure on this. And part of me not wanting to tweet it was because I was worried someone else would beat me to the story.

• 29:25Pablo Torre?

  To be very fair to you, it is absolutely a journalist's last resort when they are beating their head against the wall and are like, fine, what does the internet have for me?

• 29:36Speaker 04

  It, yeah, it killed me because I was like, all right, I'll wave the white flag.

• 29:40Pablo Torre?

  You remember getting that message and being like, [bleep], how did I not have this story idea already?

• 29:47Speaker 04

  So I put out there, okay, this is an odd request, but can anyone on here help me find this actor from the famous sportsmanship basketball ad? And 29 minutes later, a motion graphic designer for the Las Vegas Golden Knights replied and said, might be former player, now current assistant coach at the University of Denver, named BJ Porter.

• 30:10Speaker 04

  And I mean, like, like, my hands were shaking when I got that one. I go to the Denver page and I'm looking and I'm like, looks a lot like him, you know, 15, 20 years older. And I'm like, that might be him. And then I go and I click on his Twitter and he was following me already. He'd been following me the entire time.

• 30:29Pablo Torre?

  The answer was actually following you while you were searching for him.

• 30:35Speaker 04

  And the best part, I, you know, I reached out and he, he agreed to meet up.

• 30:39Pablo Torre?

  By the way, that is perseverance.

• 30:56Pablo Torre?

  This was a thrill, Zach. I don't know. It was kind of like the opposite of an episode of Catfish, I guess, on MTV. Um, where it's actually like, hey, this person is who they say they were. But the genuine thrill I felt from putting you and BJ Porter, AKA, former assistant men's basketball coach at the University of Denver, and current athletic director at a private school in Orange County, California, putting you and BJ Porter slash Alex in the same room at a podcast studio in LA, where you guys finally got to meet each other in person. What was the moment like when he, uh, walked in the door?

• 31:31Speaker 04

  I was so happy to finally get to meet him.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  And levels are all good on our.

• 31:37Speaker 04

  Great. He's 35 now. He's got a bit of scruff, you know, maybe, you may not necessarily recognize him initially as Alex, but like, got a big, bright smile, like truly the not, one of the nicest people you will ever meet.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Oh, I want people to know about me. Um, I'm a chill, simple guy.

• 31:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  You know?

• 31:58Speaker 04

  His best friend and best man in his wedding was a guy that I worked with at Arizona State.

• 32:04Pablo Torre?

  Wait, why, why, there's a, this is, this is, this is now a little creepy, Zach. Did he know you? Had you ever actually met him before in real life?

• 32:13Speaker 04

  We hadn't met, but we had been in the same room a couple of times. So he played basketball at Portland with my friend Luke Sigma.

• 32:21Pablo Torre?

  This is of the basketball playing Sikmas.

• 32:24Speaker 04

  Yes, Jack Sigma's son. Amazing. So when Portland would come to LA and play Pepperdine or LMU in their, you know, set schedule, my whole family would go to the game. So I was in the stands, BJ was on this team and I had no idea.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  While he throws down the hoop to BJ Porter. Thanks, man. This is, you know, this is in January of 09. So like, memory is a little foggy. This is before I went to Arizona State, which Lord knows did some damage to my brain.

• 32:56Pablo Torre?

  But as for the question of how this basketball player becomes the basketball player that we became obsessed with, how he becomes Alex, how did BJ Porter get the worst role in the history of sports commercials?

• 33:10Speaker 04

  He was a child actor.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  So I actually started, I used to act.

• 33:15Speaker 04

  You did?

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Yes. So just basically, um, from the age of around 12, when we moved out to Utah.

• 33:21Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Um.

• 33:22Speaker 04

  You know, he, he talked a bit about kind of having to prioritize hoops over acting, but he has some serious acting credits to his name as a kid.

• 33:31Pablo Torre?

  The acting credits, uh, that child actor BJ Porter has to his name include?

• 33:38Speaker 01

  I actually was involved in another kind of like bad basketball scene, uh, double team, you know?

• 33:44Speaker 04

  No kidding?

• 33:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it was an extra.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  There was that. There was an episode of Touched by an Angel with Scott Baio.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  I actually was a child named Jamal and during that time it was kind of like with, um, police brutality.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  So what basically what wound up happening was is my mother was at work. Um, I got spooked and I called the, um, police department. They come in and they accidentally shoot me.

• 34:33Speaker 05

  Oh God, I shot a kid. Paul, I shot a kid.

• 34:38Speaker 04

  Call an ambulance. Go!

• 34:47Speaker 04

  So he's got those roles. He's a senior in high school and it's pre basketball season, which is sort of important for eligibility and this is pre NIL. So you obviously can't be paid once you're in your senior season of the sport you're going to go play in college.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  My agent reached out, um, talked to my father and my mother and said, hey, we think this would be a good opportunity for BJ. We know this is the last one that he would be able to do.

• 35:10Pablo Torre?

  And how vivid is BJ's memory now of, of that day?

• 35:15Speaker 04

  His memories of the actual shoot were very clear.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  It was funny the whole entire time. If you watch it, I'm trying basically not to laugh.

• 35:23Speaker 04

  I was gonna say.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  I'm looking like I'm trying not to laugh because my cousin, who was actually my teammate at the time, he's the biggest like jokester ever. And he's like laughing the whole entire time. He's like, hey, Alex, Alex. The whole entire time, like behind the camera a little bit. So it was fun at the same time.

• 35:38Speaker 04

  It was this wild family affair where, you know, BJ becomes Alex. Uh, BJ's cousin is the teammate that kind of like shoulder checks him. How's it going, Alex? Sorry, coach. All the players in the huddle, basically that had speaking roles are BJ's teammates from high school basketball. So like the, the guy that's like, it's the championship game, like teammate.

• 35:59Pablo Torre?

  The guys who very plausibly hated this kid's [BLEEP] guts were actually his real life friends.

• 36:06Speaker 04

  Friends and teammates and some family.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  My dad, they wanted him to do the basketball scene.

• 36:13Speaker 04

  Oh, so he, they wanted your dad in it?

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes. My dad actually is the coach at the, on the other team who does that. So.

• 36:18Speaker 04

  And ironically, his dad sort of has this unique role in the whole shoot where apparently the original script was even worse than this.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  It was actually supposed to be something worse. I can't remember what it was, but my dad had to change it a little bit. Cause he was like, a basketball player would never do this.

• 36:33Speaker 04

  And his dad had to kind of go to the producers and be like, this is how I would try to fix this mess of a thing that you guys have come up with.

• 36:40Pablo Torre?

  Wait, it was worse before it became the version we came to know?

• 36:46Speaker 04

  It was worse and unfortunately that, that, that original is lost to time.

• 36:51Pablo Torre?

  So this pretty dramatically changes everything if you were to re-watch it now through the lens of what you've reported for us. The haunting decision that forced BJ Porter into hiding, the acting required when it came to him having to give his confession, that in fact, he committed the crime. It's him. It was him the entire time. The ball went out of bounds off of Alex. What does he recall?

• 37:15Speaker 04

  It's my favorite moment from sitting down with him where he, he, he kind of says, the best part is I didn't even touch the ball.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  I did not touch the ball.

• 37:25Speaker 04

  You did not touch the ball. So this whole thing is a lie.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:30Speaker 04

  Let that be a lesson about the magic of Hollywood. This is all a lie. There were multiple takes that take the hint of using, he didn't even touch the ball. And it's, it's funny because if you read the YouTube comments, there are people that actually point this out saying like, he didn't even touch the ball. Yes, he, he admits, he did not touch the ball.

• 37:50Pablo Torre?

  So just, just to be very clear about this, the whole point of his ad is that the ball went out of bounds off of Alex. In the commercial, we don't actually see it going off of the real life BJ Porter's hands in the scene. This is the story of this ad in a nutshell, is that of course it didn't actually happen the way that everybody thought it did.

• 38:11Speaker 04

  In the Foundation for a Better Life Cinematic Universe, it's pretty perfect.

• 38:17Pablo Torre?

  So how long did it take from production and filming to, to release? When did Alex actually get to see his work?

• 38:27Speaker 04

  It, it took about a year and a half. So like, he went through his football season, his basketball season, he gets to Portland. The first time BJ actually saw the ad, he was watching Law and Order with his teammates on USA Network, as most college athletes do, try to pass the time and there it is.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  I'll never forget the first time I actually watched it was with my teammates. Then we're sitting there and it pops up and I was just like, I kind of was in shock. I was just like, oh. And I was like, yeah, like that's me. And like, they're like, wait a minute, that is you, right? And I was like, yeah. And it was just kind of one of those things where you just kind of like laugh. We just laughed it off. Like it wasn't as big of a deal during that time because it was just like, okay, this was just something that was just getting started.

• 39:07Pablo Torre?

  As somebody who watched a lot of Law and Order in college with his roommates, did he, the idea that you'd be watching an episode and be in a commercial that would then render you the victim in an internet murder mystery, basically where you have to go into hiding as a result, you truly cannot script [BLEEP] like this, Zach.

• 39:26Speaker 04

  No, no. And like, it would be so cool to get to be in an ad in college and be like, guys, that's me. But then it's like, the, the crux of this ad is so tough for him, you know? And like, that I can't imagine.

• 39:41Pablo Torre?

  Yes. In the sports criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate but equally important groups. Uh, the memes and the people who dunk on them.

• 39:58Pablo Torre?

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• 40:39Pablo Torre?

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• 41:22Pablo Torre?

  So just to set us in internet time in the history of our culture, Zach, this is '08, BJ Porter is trying to be a real-life, actual college basketball player, and this commercial comes on, and now we're beginning to see the spread, right?

• 41:39Speaker 04

  I think he probably got his first inkling of it, Portland goes to play at Gonzaga. BJ Porter into the game now for Portland, number 24, a guy who brings energy to the pilots. You know, I mentioned being a basketball sicko myself, there are plenty in the kennel at Gonzaga games, like those, in the best way, like those are diehard college basketball fans. Six from backdoor, and free throws coming for BJ Porter, sophomore out of Leighton, Utah. And one of the kids in the stands yells, "You look like the sportsmanship kid, dah, dah, dah." And if you know about Gonzaga, when you go there, especially during that time, it's like that's when kennel craziness, that's when they have the zombie nation right before you play, and like, we're right there warming up, and like, alright, really good at that

• 42:22Speaker 04

  time, too, and it's like, hey, you look like the sportsmanship kid.

• 42:26Pablo Torre?

  Did your heart sink?

• 42:27Speaker 04

  It kinda did, because me and my other teammate, Jason Hannibal, kinda like laughed, and Jason's kinda like, he would be like, "Yeah, that is..." But I was like, "You better not," you know? So it kinda...

• 42:37Pablo Torre?

  So as this is now being noticed in specific instances by these college kids who are also presumably watching Law & Order with their friends in their dorm, when did it feel like virality had come to pass?

• 42:50Speaker 04

  So he ended up transferring to Weber State, okay? You know, he gets there around 2010.

• 42:57Pablo Torre?

  Yes, the home of Damian Lillard.

• 42:59Speaker 04

  And they were teammates, like, right? They were teammates at Weber together, and this is sort of where it starts to, like, Twitter introduces this video, and that's kinda where the problems start to arise for our good friend BJ here. And I just never forget, I walked into the locker room one time with my teammate, and he's just dying laughing, and he was like, "Man, they're roasting you, they're going after you." And I was just like, "What's going after me?" And he showed me the video of it and all the comments, and I was like, "Wow, like, this really is kinda like, starting to take a turn a little bit." Yeah, they're dying at the comments on the video, and it's like, "Alex, the kid who reminds the teacher about the homework she forgot to give out. If this was real, he'd be benched for the season. This is why bullying exists."

• 43:42Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, I just looked up the comments today, and someone wrote, "Sounds like something Drake would do."

• 43:49Speaker 04

  Damn.

• 43:52Pablo Torre?

  Getting roasted unto eternity. Which is all to say, Zach, that you found BJ Porter, the guy who played Alex, who played at Weber State alongside Damian Lillard, and one of the people who remembers vividly this very true fact pattern, happens to be Dame Lillard, who we sent a correspondent to interview in Miami.

• 44:12Speaker 05

  One day we had class, and we was all sitting in the dorms, and I don't remember exactly how the conversation came up, but it came up, we was like, "You the, you the person that was in this, in this commercial, you know, where you said the ball went off you and it came up?" And we stopped calling him BJ, and we started calling him Bobby, because it was like, man, he was a snitch, you know, like, you in that commercial, and it was, it was a joke from there.

• 44:36Pablo Torre?

  We got the vibe while talking to Dame that he didn't cosign Alex's code of honor.

• 44:41Speaker 05

  I'd never been in that situation, but if it came down to it, I'm cheating, I'm not. That ain't gonna be a moment where I show sportsmanship, and I think that's why he, he got clowned a lot for it, even to this day, when the commercial come on, I'm telling like, my teammates here, like, man, I played with him in college, you know, so it's like, that's a forever joke. When we first started getting on him about it, he was like, "Man, I know," like, almost like he looked back at it like, "Man, if I would've known it would've turned into this, I probably wouldn't have did it," like that type of vibe.

• 45:09Speaker 04

  Oh my God, it's, and that's what's so fun about this ad, is that, like, we as people who consume basketball, like, know this ad, but the people that are like the greatest basketball players playing right now also know this ad. Like, that's how engrossed in the basketball culture it is.

• 45:31Pablo Torre?

  Doing better promotion than Philip Anshutz could ever have dreamed of. And it's, but, but the whole thing, I mean, truly, like, as BJ Porter is making his way through college and his basketball journey, as again, he's trying to be a real player, how did he deal with this? How did he deal with the attention that was already obvious to him?

• 45:51Speaker 04

  He's a very good basketball player, and I think that's the part that's like, that's what's funny with all this, is these people like, "I'd give Alex buckets, I'd cook Alex." And BJ's sitting there like...

• 46:03Pablo Torre?

  What would you say to any of those people?

• 46:06Speaker 04

  Please come try. He was a very good shooter, very good player, you know, plays at Azusa Pacific after his time with Dame at Weber, can even while there, you know, the coach in film would put his, you know, picture up on the, on the projector and say, you know, "Nice going, Alex," and things like that. The ad hung with him. He told me a story when we sat down, that he gets engaged, and he's at Disneyland, and at some point, they were at ESPN Zone with his family, and they look up, and there's the ad, all these years later, playing on the TV at ESPN Zone.

• 46:43Pablo Torre?

  Right, he's trying to start a family, and meanwhile, Alex is still watching him.

• 46:49Speaker 04

  Even that day, the ride operator sneaks up to him and whispers, "Hey, I touched it." I was like, "What do you mean?" And I kinda like looked at him, and he goes, "I touched the ball, coach." Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, and I was just like, "Alright, dude, you're a funny guy."

• 47:05Pablo Torre?

  At a certain point, it must be the case that his own kids, now that he's like a grown man, also are pointing this out to him.

• 47:12Speaker 04

  His, his kids have seen the ad, the friend that I know that's their godfather, who's a coach in college, actually, right now, showed them the ad, took out his phone and said, "Hey, you gotta see what your dad did. Let me show you this thing, your dad was a star," and played it for him. So my daughter, the whole entire time, is like, "Daddy, you're in a commercial, daddy, you touched the ball, daddy." And my son's like, "Daddy, why did they call you Alex?"

• 47:37Speaker 05

  Just like so.

• 47:39Pablo Torre?

  All it wishes to say that he could not escape this at home, at the happiest place on earth, in any locker rooms, on the internet, is enough to make someone become a recluse, truly.

• 47:52Speaker 04

  He deactivated his accounts on all social media at one point because he went into coaching. That's such a necessary tool for recruiting, that his coach at Denver was like, "Hey, you have to reactivate your social accounts to like, reach out to kids."

• 48:06Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 48:07Speaker 04

  So he kinda got forced back into this place where it's constantly being brought up.

• 48:14Pablo Torre?

  Right, which brings him back to you, following you, and just to complete the circle here, like, the beautiful part of this story to me, the symmetrical part of the story, is that BJ Porter became a real-life [BLEEP] basketball coach.

• 48:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:34Pablo Torre?

  He became the other person in the commercial that haunts him. And I guess my question near the end here is, how does Coach BJ Porter, how did he view Alex? How would he handle a kid who did what he himself did in this ad that he can never escape?

• 48:56Speaker 04

  He, you know, grinning, threw a grin, said to me, you know, "Thank you for your honesty."

• 49:01Speaker 05

  And there's a reason why they have refs, and refs are supposed to do their job, so whatever the refs...

• 49:06Pablo Torre?

  Let them decide.

• 49:07Speaker 05

  Let them decide.

• 49:08Speaker 04

  It's like such a perfect sort of summary on the whole ad and kind of his outlook on life in general.

• 49:13Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 49:14Speaker 04

  I asked him, like, "Hey, if you were going against Alex, what would the scouting report be?"

• 49:19Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, what's Alex's scouting report?

• 49:20Speaker 05

  Be physical, knock him around, he'll lose you the game.

• 49:26Pablo Torre?

  What I feel like I found out, Zach, what I found out thanks to your reporting today, is what actual sportsmanship in the age of the internet actually looks like, which is far more vivid now, thanks to BJ Porter, the embodiment of that principle online, than it was in the ad he started that literally had the word "sportsmanship" in big letters, trying to drill into us, you know, values.com.

• 49:51Speaker 04

  Totally. I mean, his whole outlook on it, even asking him, like, "Would you, do you regret doing it? Like, if you could go back in time, would you still do the ad?" And he was like, "Yeah."

• 50:01Speaker 05

  It's a part of who I am. Like, you know what I mean?

• 50:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:04Speaker 05

  I'm Alex, you know? It's like an alter, it's an alter ego, so it is.

• 50:07Speaker 04

  It's awesome.

• 50:08Speaker 05

  So that's what I'll say, too.

• 50:09Speaker 04

  It was very special to have him sitting across the table from me and leaning to the microphone and say, "I am Alex."

• 50:16Pablo Torre?

  It's so rare to have a story about a child star who gets eaten by Twitter and comes out on the other side being like, "I think I'm better for this."

• 50:27Speaker 04

  Totally. He's, he's a very profound and awesome dude. I was very glad to have gotten to know him and find him.

• 50:34Pablo Torre?

  Zach Schwartz, you're now free from a journalistic prison of your own devising, and all I can do now is shoulder check you off of my show and tell you earnestly, "Nice going, Zach, really nice going."

• 50:48Speaker 04

  It was an honor, thank you.

• 50:59Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

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