Yesterday, we told you about the time Bill Cosby acted like a dickbag and made a Notre Dame All-American football player named Dean Brown cry at his graduation in 1989. This morning, we received an email from a guy named Jerry Barca, who wrote a book about the 1988 Notre Dame season and saw firsthand just how deep and lasting Cosby's humiliation of Brown was.
Here's what Barca sent us:
Saw your piece on Cosby and Dean Brown. Just wanted to send you a little more detail on Dean and the impact of Cosby words on him. It stayed with him for years.
You're right that Dean was a good guy. His nickname on campus was "Big Happy." He also had some serious difficulties growing up. He watched his mother coughing up blood as she had a stroke in front of him when he was 4. His dad had already left by then. She couldn't work for years and was left with a permanent limp. He had no money. He hustled food stamps at 10. He'd collect the food stamps from people in the neighborhood, buy 25 cents of candy, give the food stamp recipient back 75 cents of change, that money was then spent at the liquor store. Dean would resell the candy at school at a marked up price… And his favorite show growing up? Fat Albert. That isn't some nice revisionist detail. He actually wrote that on a media guide questionnaire before his junior year. He was also very candid in saying he benefitted the most of any of his teammates by being at Notre Dame. So he starts on a national title team and then he's set to graduate a year later, a pretty monumental deal for him and Cosby berates him. When I spoke to Dean in 2012 for my book he said this: "I went a lot of years feeling like I was a failure, one because I didn't think I played long enough in the pros," Brown said. "And, there were times that anytime I heard Bill Cosby's name — it wasn't a cringe, but it was a heavy uneasiness about what had transpired."
Here we see the result of Bill Cosby's self-promotional politics. A guy who at the age of 21 had already accomplished and overcome more than Bill Cosby could have ever known gets made to feel like a failure for years and years because a rotten old college dropout whose insights on life boil down to "these black kids need to pull their damn pants up" decided to berate him. Fuck Bill Cosby.