One year later: Down went the Dublin Dad

One year ago I bombed Urban Meyer in his own restaurant and did not escape personal consequences myself.

One year ago tonight, then-Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Urban Meyer went on a content bender for the ages.

Fresh off a last-second loss to the Cincinnati Bengals on Thursday Night Football, Meyer became perhaps the first visiting head coach in NFL history not to travel home with his team.

Meyer instead traveled to Columbus, where a birthday party for his business partner, local restauranteur Chris Corso, eventually made its way to their newest joint venture, Urban Meyer’s Chop House, in the vibrant Short North neighborhood.

We know what happened next: Meyer got caught enjoying a lap dance from a woman who was not his wife. Meyer, who had a previous relationship with the dancing woman, lied about her attempting to draw him, the unsuspecting married father of three, onto the dance floor.

The Rooster promptly released a second video clearly showing Meyer trying to impale the poor lady through her asshole with his index and middle fingers.

The Jaguars eventually fired Meyer for cause, costing him roughly $20 million. The Chop House has since been re-branded without the head ball coach, though his Pint House in Dublin still stands.

The original article, “Dublin Dad Could Be Headed to Divorce Court,” is still the most trafficked article in the history of The Rooster. (However, it generated pennies on the dollar compared to “Columbus’ Ice Cream Queen Got Rich by Treating Her Workers Like Shit.”) The story made international tabloids.

I did an interview in The Wall Street Journal, which ran an article entitled, “The Electrician Who Shocked the NFL with Videos of Urban Meyer.”

I’m sure it was the first time the paper ever printed the phrase “shit cocktail.” WSJ commenters called me many mean things like “parasite” and “lowlife” as if I were the one stepping out on my wife in my own restaurant in the busiest neighborhood of a major metropolitan area.

At the time, I didn’t know that my employer, an electrical contractor known as the Superior Group, had a business relationship with Urban Meyer’s Foundation. As you might imagine, the bosses didn’t find my actions as funny as I did.

Two weeks later, October 14th to be exact, I was working my regular shift at the Hollywood casino when my supervisor led me out to the parking lot where two company slugs fired me like a dog. Though they attempted to take my Klein hardhat as if I didn’t buy it myself, they cut me a check for 40 hours on the week when I had worked 38.5. Fair enough.

My former foreman, a company man in his own right, later explained that the bosses fired me at Meyer’s behest. They couldn’t do it outright due to the union contract, so they officially got me for taking a picture from the parking lot of a job site I had posted to Instagram Stories a week earlier.

I had signed a non-disclosure agreement to work as a peon for this multimillion-dollar project, and the parking lot still qualified as company property. In retrospect, I should have just denied ever taking it. Their only proof was a printed picture on a piece of paper that could’ve been easily forged. But whatever.

Because I had been fired on the job and was still an interim member, the electrical school gave me the boot, too.

Though it has since worked out for me in the long run, it’s not as if I skipped out of the office that day. Though I wish I had heard the saying, “If you set off a bomb, don’t be shocked if you’re burned, too.” I forget where I heard that after getting canned, but I remember thinking, “I wish I had heard that before agreeing to The Wall Street Journal interview.”

If you’re a union electrician in Columbus, there’s an 80% chance you work for “TSG.” I wasn’t had to find, and I gave them the rope to hang myself though my old foreman said they would have rubbed me out one way or another after the Wall Street Journal piece.

“You can’t be a journalist and an electrician,” my brother said when I told him the saga. He was right, which is why I don’t regret releasing the videos to the public. Meyer may have cost me a job, but I cost him $25 million and a restaurant he could’ve greased for the rest of his life.

Because at the end of the day, serving shit cocktails to the rich and powerful is The Rooster guarantee.

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