Pod and basketball

After 14 months off the air, Craig Tucker, ’14, revitalized his sports podcast with a new topic: racism. 

325 Sports Pod began back in 2016, and ran for almost 50 episodes with talk between Tucker and fellow alumnus Derek Maloney, ’15, about Fantasy Football, the NFL, the World Cup, Wimbledon, and pro baseball and golf. Mostly though, they talked about basketball. 

Both alumni played on EOU’s championship basketball team in 2012-13. Tucker’s jersey number at EOU was 3 and Maloney was 25, so when they decided to make their sports-centric phone calls public, they called it 325 Sports. The podcast became fairly popular on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, but moves and marriages meant they stopped recording for a while. 

When protests erupted across the globe last June in the wake of George Floyd’s death, Tucker decided to end the podcast’s hiatus. 

“The big gist of it is that some of my closest friends are Black, and I didn’t feel like I could just sit back—I had to do something,” he said. “I wanted to talk to my friends about these concepts and these tough things to see what I could do better, and also to raise awareness.”

Tucker held six conversations with former EOU teammates who identify as Black or people of color. During these hour-long episodes, EOU alumni shared stories they’d never told before. The one with Maya Ah You Dias, ’19, was downloaded over 500 times. 

“To hear some of their stories of being disrespected, it hits more home when it’s your friend,” Tucker said. “It can be hard to connect with news stories that happen far away, but seeing what my friends go through it finally hits home. All of them told me a story that I’d never heard before. I was blown away that my friends were being disrespected as humans because of the color of their skin.”

Tucker said the “War on Racism” series got an overall positive response. His goal was to raise awareness, but in the process he also strengthened the relationships with his friends and teammates. 

“They know now that I’m willing to step up for them,” Tucker said. “It’s going to take the white majority to take care of this issue, to make sure people in the minority feel safe.”

He said he’s learned about the importance of having an open mind, making the effort to responsibly self-educate, and being kind to others in every circumstance. 

“With social media and instant gratification, we can say mean things without consequences. The majority of things people type, they wouldn’t say in person. Take a step back, try to educate yourself, understand and then respond,” he said. “Conversations are important, but when you don’t take the time to understand someone’s perspective first, it just spirals down. Just treat people like you would want to be treated.”

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325 Sports Pod

Excerpt from “War on Racism: Maya Ah You-Dias” (June 7, 2020)

“My dad was another young Black male that was murdered. My mom went back to the detective and couldn’t get a full investigation….We still don’t know all of what happened. That was the first real racial discrimination that my mom really talked to me about, ‘Sometimes officers just don’t really care about people because of the color of their skin.’… I still feel like if he was a white male that there would’ve been a full investigation, it wouldn’t have been quiet or been let go. I’m still trying to process that whole situation. I still struggle with feelings of guilt.… This is something that’s really close to my heart that’s really personal. 

“That was when I was 7…. We moved to Middleton, Idaho when I was 11, and that was a bit of a culture shock coming from Buffalo, New York where 36% of the population is African American. My elementary school was one of the most diverse schools in the nation … then I came to Idaho and it was 0.6% Black people in Middleton. That’s when I realized that I was different and there were stereotypes about Black people … Everyone was like, ‘Your hair is so different. Your skin is so dark. You jump so high. You play basketball so well.’ All this because I was Black, and I never even knew those were stereotypes of African Americans before I came to Idaho.”

Excerpt from “War on Racism: Tony Eackles Jr.” (June 4, 2020)

“I was really debating if I should share this cuz I don’t know if I ever really dealt with it all the way. I moved to Washington in 2017, and one day I’m in the mall shopping in January 2018. I’m shopping in the mall and two policemen come up to me and just grab me. I’m on the phone and my phone drops. I’m confused, I don’t know what’s going on. And they’re saying, ‘What else you got in here? You’re not gonna get away with this.’ I’m confused. I’m lost. I’m thinking Ashton Kutcher is gonna jump out and I’m punked. They’re going through my jacket. Basically they’re trying to find clothes, they think that I’m stealing from the store. So they put me in handcuffs. I get put in handcuffs and I go to the back. And they said, ‘This looks like the guy who’s been stealing from all the stores in the mall.’ … I was just like, ‘What?’ I was in so much shock because I’d never been arrested before, I’d never had any run-ins with the police before. I was just in so much shock, but all they identified me as was just, he was a tall, Black male.…

“I’ll never forget how the officer was talking to me. He was like, ‘You probably stole before haven’t you? You’re probably a petty larceny thief.’ I’m still processing it to this day. 

“I was really skeptical about sharing this story because it bothered me a lot. They took me to jail. You never had a shame walk ’til you left the mall in handcuffs. You’re thrown, like really thrown, in the back of a police car, they don’t put a seatbelt on you. You’re treated like less than a person…. I ended up being in there like four hours. I felt like they played me. I felt like I really got taken advantage of because they were like, ‘Your bail is $500.’ When it just happened to be that I had $500 in my wallet.… I bail myself out, I go home. I didn’t even really know how to deal with it. It was real tough for me because I didn’t know what to do.… I ended up having to get a lawyer that I had to pay for … it took me a year to get the case dismissed. I had to keep going back to the hearing. The judge read the charges and everybody laughed, like, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna dismiss the charges for what looks to be a normal Saturday out shopping.’ I’m sitting in there with people who do drugs, DUIs. I just got back from London, I just won a championship. … I still think about that, so many things. I was racially profiled and I never got a chance to stand up for it. I never got a chance to see that officer again … You would have thought that I was throwing things in my bag and about to run out the store. They put me in a submissive hold for shopping, shopping! I just couldn’t believe that something like that had happened to me.”