Launch

You preach at Prestonwood every Sunday, but you’re also a motivational speaker.

I bet I’ve spoken in every high school in the Metroplex, to a football team or at a sports banquet. That kind of started 40 years ago when I was still at Baylor. I got started doing pre-game pep talks. I’m doing one just about every Friday night in the fall to inspire kids to play well, to make the game count. It just kind of evolved. Some dads or coaches heard me speak at a high school and said, ‘I got a business over here, and we’ve got salesmen. Why don’t you come fire them up a little bit like you did those athletes.’ I’ve done stuff all over America now. A big part of my story is my stuttering, which was a huge lid in my life that I thought was going to keep me down. Of course, everybody has a lid. Everyone has something. The question is, how are you going to respond to that? That’s kind of the message.

What was it like growing up with a stutter?

For most of my life I was ashamed. I tried to hide the fact that I stuttered. The only way to hide that is to never talk. So, I was pretty much in the background. In school, just saying ‘here’ [during roll call] was a struggle. Even to this day, though I preach, and our messages are on CD, it’s still hard for me to hear myself talk.