Rick Carlisle once thought my name was Pete. He had gone to an SMU men’s basketball game, seen a blond-haired walk-on student play several garbage time minutes and decided he looked like me. He asked a PR staffer for my phone number, except his request was for “Pete” from “Mavericks Moneyball or whatever,” which was almost the name of the blog I ran in college. Eventually, the staffer and I figured it out. I later got a text from him that read something like: “Nice hustle off the bench for SMU last night. Two rebounds and a steal,” with a photo he had taken of the walk-on player attached. It was a passing resemblance at best.
That must have happened six or seven years ago. When I joined The Athletic, he congratulated me when I first saw him months later and then complained about login issues he was having.
