We Finally Found the Star of the Worst (and Most Mysterious) Commercial in Sports History
Pablo Torre Finds Out
Pablo Torre
4.7 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It is an infamous basketball ad that keeps going viral as much for its cringe-worthiness as the mystery of its simple message: "sportsmanship." But correspondent Zach Schwartz embarked on a two-and-a-half-year quest to meet the anonymous actor who's gotten dunked on by Twitter for more than a decade. Now, he helps us untangle a web of links from March Madness to Madison Avenue; a Supreme Court justice to a secretive billionaire; and the Dalai Lama to Damian Lillard (who agreed to go on the record). And we learn the true meaning of "perseverance" in the process.
For more Zach Schwartz, you can visit his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@zach_schwartz
And special thanks to Goodnight, Texas for blessing this episode with their hit song, "The Railroad": https://youtu.be/1sp33WgVWMA
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. |
| 0:02.1 | I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. |
| 0:06.7 | I touched it. |
| 0:09.8 | I touched the ball before it went out, coach. |
| 0:11.9 | Right after this ad. |
| 0:14.6 | You're listening to Draft King's Network. |
| 0:29.4 | Yeah. to Draft Kings Network. I have this issue when I, like, go out and I talk to people in real life, and they're |
| 0:34.2 | like, so what do you do? |
| 0:35.7 | And I have to explain what my show is. |
| 0:38.5 | And I've settled upon Zach a summary, which is basically I use journalism to solve |
| 0:45.1 | mysteries that are technically about sports. It's a good way to put it. It's a very good way |
| 0:50.3 | to put it. I know I only just recently started calling myself a like journalist because like, |
| 0:59.3 | like produce some stuff and then I, like, did social media and made memes for people for a long time. But the real, like, lead of your, of your bio now is Zach Schwartz, guy who is |
| 1:06.4 | truly unparalleled in a very specific obsession about the worst commercial in the history of sports. |
| 1:16.3 | My wife said, that's when I found that you're a real sports pervert |
| 1:20.4 | is when you were like trying to find this guy |
| 1:22.6 | and how obsessed you were with it. |
| 1:25.1 | It was very early on in our relationship, and I had to find him. |
| 1:31.5 | I want to explain what this commercial is because it's not really selling a product, I guess. |
| 1:39.1 | It stuck with me, the ad. |
| 1:41.0 | Like, I remember seeing it in the wild, like on television, obviously before it started |
| 1:45.3 | going viral. It ran all the time, especially during March Madness. |
... |
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