Ep. - 1701 - UNTOLD: THE TESTIMONY OF VINCE YOUNG

The Amazing Kate Casey.

Welcome back for another episode of Reality Life with Kate Casey.

Netflix's Untold series has one mission: tell the sports stories that we thought we already knew.

A new season just premiered, and the first episode is about a name that every college football fan from the 2000s remembers instantly, Vince Young.

Now, if you were watching on January 4th, 2006, you probably remember exactly where you were.

Fourth quarter, Rose Bowl, Texas down to USC, the two-time defending national champions.

19 seconds left, Vince Young takes off, cuts to the right pylon, and scores the touchdown that wins Texas its first national championship in 35 years.

467 yards of total offense by himself on the biggest stage that the sport has.

Now, it's still argued as the single greatest individual performance in college football history.

But the Rose Bowl was never really the story.

The director who made this film, Jon Henyan, told me directly, "The Rose Bowl's the hook, but the real question is always the why." And the why, in Vince Young's case, starts long before college.

He grew up in Houston's Hiram Clarke neighborhood, raised by his mother and grandmother because his father was in and out of prison for most of his childhood.

And in fact, on the exact night that his son became a national champion, Vincent Young Sr. was locked up.

He and his sisters were bullied in the neighborhood, and he never got the tools that the rest of us took for granted, or take for granted.

Someone showing you how to sit with conflict, how to trust, how to lose without it becoming a wound.

But what he did have was a string of surrogates.

Coach Reese Seals in high school, who would believe in him as quarterback when programs like Florida State wanted to recruit him as an athlete, not a passer, and who taught him to handle the media before he ever really needed to.

Steve McNair, who once called him mid-breakdown, driving back to Houston, ready to quit on Texas altogether, and then talked him into turning the car around.

And Mack Brown, the father figure who finally stuck, and whose relationship with Vince has lasted 20 years.

They still golf together.

They still record a podcast together.

Then came the pros, and the surrogates disappeared.

A leaked Wonderlic score turned into a national storyline about his intelligence.

A relationship with his head coach in Tennessee that never found its footing because college football, whatever its flaws, still functions like a family.

And the NFL, as Jeff Fisher told him almost word for word, does not paint a Longhorn on the side of the team bus.

There was a benching, a night in 2008 when he left home without his phone and police were called to find him, while the country speculated about his mental health in real time.

A walkout, a release, a bankruptcy filing that turned $26 million into a headline.

For most of two decades, the story of Vince Young was told by everybody except Vince Young, and that changes today.

And here's where I wanna land before we even get into the documentary, because I think it's the actual headline of this whole story.

Generational trauma has a habit of repeating itself unless somebody makes the conscious decision to stop it.

Vince Young grew up without a father in the house, and today, by every account, and from what Jon Henyan witnessed firsthand, spending a full day just driving around Houston with him, he is the opposite of that for his own children.

He's present, he's in the stands, he's in the car, throwing a football in parking lots between meetings.

And he's still married to the woman he met when he was young, still building piece by piece the family that he never had a blueprint for.

I loved learning about s- Vince Young's personal story.

I know that you will too.

This is one you've gotta definitely watch.

And here is my interview with the director of Untold: The Testimony of Vince Young, Jon Henyan.