Dave Raymond

It's about perseverance and the role that faith can play along the journey.

Joining us now is Dave Raymond, co-founder of Sweet Baby Ray's Yes That Dave.

Say hello and welcome to the Barbecue Radio Network, sir.

Glad to have you on.

That's what floated my boat then, and that's what floats my boat now.

That's incredible.

Everybody, we're talking with Dave Raymond.

Now, I'm still trying to put the pieces together, David, of Sweet Baby Ray and your nickname and the name of the sauce.

... funny little, funny little expert from that, excerpt from that.

Um, so I'm sitting next to Dave Raymond, who was inducted with me from Sweet Baby Ray's Barbecue, and they had told us, when you're sitting up in front of this crowd at the Royal, right, uh, they wanna keep these Hall of Fame speeches, like, to a minimum.

They want like two minutes.

'Cause the crowd, it's, they're doing it before awards.

Anyway, they do it, and people just wanna get this done.

They don't give a shit about the Hall of Fame, they just wanna get it done.

And so I'm sitting next to Dave Raymond and they're like, "Hey, have your comments ready to go," whatever.

And Dave Raymond has like four pages of notes he's gonna read off.

Today's guest spent the first several decades of his life in what he calls blissful ignorance, and honestly, not a bad thing.

Dave Raymond grew up as the son of a legendary college football coach, stumbled into becoming the original Philly fanatic, and spent 16 years making hundreds of thousands of people fall in love with a character that he always knew, deep down, he was born to play.

Life felt pretty close to perfect, and then, in the span of just a few weeks, it wasn't.

His mother's terminal diagnosis, the end of his marriage, a newborn son, it all arrived at once, and Dave found himself in the darkest place he'd ever been.

I wasn't sharing it with anybody, Matt.

As you know, it's not something, whether you're a high performer or just somebody that doesn't like to share this vulnerability, I wasn't about to do that.

And When I went to that final appearance, I, I recognized a couple of things that I kind of knew was going on then, but I-- In that time, I was so ingrained in the Fanatic's personality that when I put my super suit on and snapped the last few snaps, I became the Fanatic, and Dave Raymond was gone except for a, a, a bystander.

Mm-hmm.