Episode 204: 70s Soft Rock Saved My Sanity, 90s Chat Rooms & Instant Messaging, Live Aid Turns 40, 'Could Have Been' Athletes(7-16-2025)

Relive the glory days of 1990s chat rooms and instant messaging. How 70s soft rock helped soothe my soul. Some of the biggest 'what ifs' in the world of athletics.

Episode 204 finds a shady spot filled with Gen-X nostalgia during the heat of summer.

The show begins with a story that is part music retrospective and part reflection on my own life. During a particularly bad period of mental health struggles, I found solace in an unexpected place. Soft rock, particularly that from the 1970s, became a major part of everyday life for me. In this segment, I explain how 70s soft rock saved my sanity.

We go back to the glory days of early internet as we take a deep dive into 1990s chat rooms and instant messaging. Were you a user of AIM, ICQ, MSN, or something else? The good, the bad, the weird, and the dangerous, it's all a part of this segment

Not all who are hyped reach their potential. In this week's Top 5 we look as some of the biggest 'could have been' athletes ever. Whether bad luck, laziness, or other circumstances, these people are up there when it comes to 'what ifs' in sports.

There is a brand new This Week In History and Time Capsule looking back at the 40th anniversary of the iconic Live Aid concert.

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Helpful Links from this Episode

• Purchase My New Book Cape Cod Beyond the Beach!
• In My Footsteps: A Cape Cod Travel Guide(2nd Edition)
• Hooked By Kiwi - Etsy.com
• DJ Williams Music
• KeeKee's Cape Cod Kitchen
• Christopher Setterlund.com
• Cape Cod Living - Zazzle Store
• Subscribe on YouTube!
• Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog
• Webcam Weekly Wrapup Podcast
• CJSetterlundPhotos on Etsy
• 70s/80s Soft Rock - Spotify Playlist

Listen to Episode 203 here

Transcript

Speaker: 0:02

Hello world! And welcome to the In My Footsteps Podcast! I am Christopher Setterlund, coming to you from the vacation destination known as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and this is episode 204. It's gonna be an action-packed episode filled with me talking, just like always, all about Gen X nostalgia. We're gonna kick it off with a look back at how 70 Soft Rock saved my sanity. There's a lot of S's in there. We're gonna go way, way back in the day and look at internet chatrooms and instant messaging back in the 1990s. There's gonna be a brand new top five as we look back at the top five could have been athletes of all time. Ones with all of the hype that didn't quite pan out. And there'll be a brand new this week in history and time capsule, looking back 40 years at the iconic Live Aid Benefit concert. All of that is coming up right now on episode 204 of the In My Footsteps podcast. So what are we gonna talk about this week? But I start off the show by saying I haven't broken anything new. For those of you that have been listening to the last several episodes, my severely sprained ankle, once it healed, I managed to nearly break my hand. And now that that's healed, I'm just waiting. It's like a countdown. What's going to break next? I have to knock on wood to make sure nothing bad happens. I'll be recording this show and my AC will just fly out of the window and knock me out. So if there's 20 minutes of silence, you know that I've been KO'd by my AC. Thank you for tuning in wherever you're from, whatever the weather is, if it's hot and steamy and you're at the beach or hiding inside a cool, air-conditioned room. Or maybe you're somewhere where it's wintertime now. I know I have a lot of international listeners, so I don't want to just assume where you are it's sunny and 90 and humid. Maybe it's snowing right now, and you're looking outside wondering what in the world is wrong with me. You wouldn't be the only one to say that. We've got a lot of fun stuff to get into this week, but before we get into that, naturally I have to start by shouting out my Patreon subscribers, Laurie, Mary Lou, Ashley, Kevin, Leo, Neglectoid, Marguerite, Crystal, Matt. Thank you for being the ones who put your money where your mouth is, being my biggest backers. If you want to get shouted out on the podcast, or if you just want to support me as a content creator, slash author, slash up and coming actor, director, slash whatever else is going to be coming up in my life, you can do so for five dollars a month on Patreon.com. You get access to bonus podcast episodes, you get access to the remastered without a map live streams, one of which is going up within a few days of when this podcast goes live. I try to put them in the halfway point of the month. Of course, I've got an ever-growing free tier on Patreon as well, so you can go just become a member. We'll have plenty of time for housekeeping, as I call it. I always say that it should be like Tommy Boy with Chris Farley and David Spade, where Chris Farley's sleeping in the hotel room, and David Spade is just like housekeeping. And Chris Farley's like, please go away for the love of God. Now I'm gonna have to do that every time I say there's housekeeping at the end. Just alright. Anyway, we'll get into that stuff at the end of the podcast. Let's get into the actual meat of this Gen X nostalgia sandwich. I've got lots and lots of S's to describe this first segment. How 70 Soft Rock saved my sanity. It's one part retrospective on music. It's also one part pulling back the curtain on my own dealings with mental health. So let me get on the therapist's couch here and lay down and get ready to bear my soul on episode 204 of the In My Footsteps podcast. Soft rock, in and of itself, it can kind of get a bad rap. It's it can sometimes be known as yacht rock, sometimes be known as wuss rock. This type of music tended to be 1970s, into the early to mid-80s. There were no screeching electric guitars. There was typically no singer shredding their vocal cords as they hit certain notes. For the most part, soft rock is very soothing, which to many people can be construed as boring. And I will tell you, for the first twenty odd years of my life, that's how I saw it. As many of you know who have been listening to the podcast for a long time, I grew up listening to heavy metal when I was little, like seven, eight years old, and then became a grunge kid in the early 90s. Grunge, alternative. If someone had told 15, 16-year-old me that within a few years I'd be seeking out and enjoying soft rock, I'd think you had somebody else with the same name, but I know that can't be true. There's like really no one else with my actual name. I'm not Jim Smith. So before I dive into this story of how 70 Soft Rock kinda helped me through a rough time, there's a few things I need to do. First, in order to bear my soul, I've gotta crack open a cold one. Ah, energy drink, sweetness. And second of all, I've gotta lie down here on this leather therapist couch, get comfortable, and have my therapist ask me the first question.

Speaker 1: 6:15

Hello, Chris. My name is Dr. Spaitso. I am here to help you. Say whatever is in your mind freely. Our conversation will be kept in strict confidence. So tell me about your problems.

Speaker: 6:30

Ugh, Dr. Spaitso. I should have known it was you. This couch is ripped with stuffing coming out of it and mold on the walls. Dang it, alright. I told you I'm gonna try to keep this segment a mixture of serious and light. I am not ashamed to admit that in my life I have dealt with several severe bouts of depression. There's a lot of guys that have dealt with it that won't be able to admit that or don't want to be seen as weak. I don't care. That's stupid. This particular bout that I'm talking about, it has to do with when I returned to Cape Cod from living in Las Vegas. This was 2001, it began. In the archives of the podcast, I have done a few segments about my time in Las Vegas. Episode six, I talked about what it was like for me to move out there and live out there in 2000, 2001. And then in episode nine, I talked about my departure from Vegas, which consisted of me taking a bus from Las Vegas to Cape Cod. Three and a half days, almost 3,000 miles. So if you want to get the full backstory, you can go into the archives and check out those segments. When I returned to Cape Cod, it was really not what I wanted to do. I wanted, when I moved to Vegas, to live out there. My gambling issues kind of caused that plan to go up and smoke. I can kind of laugh now, but when I got back to Cape Cod, I saw myself as a failure. I had to squeeze myself back into my old life that I had packed away and put in storage. I then also had to pack myself back into the restaurant job that I had left. These were the things that I moved to Vegas to get away from. And here I was having to basically crawl back to them. That's how I saw it. I saw myself as a failure. Nobody else saw me as that. I gotta admit that. I don't want to make it sound like there were others in my life that looked at me like, uh, you failed going to Vegas. My mother, stepfather, my immediate family, my friends, none of them saw me as a failure. They saw me as a kid in their early twenties trying to find themselves, and Vegas wasn't for me. I didn't see it that way. After several weeks of kind of getting re-acclimated to living on Cape Cod, that's when it hit me. It was sort of like in Married with Children. Every now and then Al Bundy would look around where he was at his life, and he would just put his head in his hands and just, oh God, oh that was kind of how I felt. I don't know when the depression set in. It was sort of something that accumulated over time, and before I knew it, I was just swimming in this pool of molasses. That's how I felt. I couldn't move fast, I couldn't think fast. I was feeling at times like my body was there, but me myself was this little tiny silhouette stuck inside my head. I would have times when I was cooking in the restaurant and I would fall behind on orders. People there would get frustrated. Because you can't see depression. It's not like my skin changed color, I didn't gain weight. So to a lot of people, I looked normal and I was just slacking off in their mind. I would be told to snap out of it. Which any of you that have dealt with mental health struggles, having someone tell you to snap out of it is such a disrespectful, ignorant thing to say. Like we choose to be depressed, like it's something we want. If you want more of my dealings with mental health struggles over the years, I did a bonus segment, episode 22, that coincided with the anniversary of the death of Soundgarden lead singer Chris Cornell, and I talk about him and my own struggles. Because I did tell you this segment is about 70 soft rock as well. I'm kind of setting the stage here. One thing that was interesting about this particular dealing with depression was my aversion to noise. Loud noises bothered me, which meant that basically all the music that I enjoyed was loud and grating and it hurt. I don't know if any of you have ever dealt with that before. There were plenty of times, especially when I was cooking and in a loud kitchen, that I wish I had earmuffs. So I'd be driving in my car. I'd a lot of the times I would have the radio off. I think back at this time I had a Saturn SL1. It was cranberry colored, but it had a pretty sweet stereo in there. CD player with a CD changer. Due to this aversion to loud noise when dealing with this bout of depression, I'd have a lot of the times that it was just quiet in the car. At this point, we're into probably early 2002. I wish I could remember what exactly was the song that broke me into 70s soft rock. If I had to guess, I would think it was probably Give Me Love by George Harrison. This was off of his 1973 album, Living in the Material World. It is very soft, soothing. It's got electric guitar, his slide guitar, but it's not overpowering. I had always liked the Beatles. I didn't really get into George Harrison's solo work. I was more of a John Lennon guy. So I was pleasantly surprised with Harrison's musical style that was very melodic. It had deep introspective lyrics, and it was soothing for my fragile mind that seemed to not be able to handle anything more than the basics of anything in life at that point. There was a time, probably late 2002, I think it was, that I was on three separate antidepressants all at once. It was like the doctor said, one might not be enough. Here, have all of these and we'll see what it does to you. That time with the multiple different antidepressants, it did not go well. They ended up eating away at my stomach. I had a GI bleed. They had to take my door, my bedroom door off and put me on a stretcher and take me to the hospital. And I had to quit three antidepressants cold turkey. I sometimes have to remind myself that I once did that when I have trouble not getting an extra package of ribs from Shaw's when they're on sale. It's like, I can't resist these ribs. Yeah, well, you quit three antidepressants cold turkey, so give it up. With George Harrison opening the door to 70s soft rock, it was kind of off and running from there. It was like I thought to myself, oh, he's pretty good. Who else is like him? Luckily, there was a lot of cross-pollination with the big name stars in the 70s, where George Harrison, Elton John, James Taylor, they all seemed to be intertwined. It was at this point that I had this small portable CD holder. It was a zipper one, you just put the discs in the different flaps. And at this point in late 2002, early 2003, it was populated with Elton John's Greatest Hits. There was a double disc James Taylor Greatest Hits. I had Paul McCartney and Wings. I got into Fleetwood Mac. And I said 70 soft rock, there was no electric guitars or screeching guitars or things. It's kind of subjective. These songs with their introspective lyrics, like James Taylor, Fire and Rain, George Harrison's I'd Have You Anytime, Fleetwood Mac, Sara. These songs spoke to me as a writer as well, not only just to help me with depression, but it opened up my mind to be able to express what I was feeling. In 2002, 2003, I listened more to 70s, 80s soft rock, adult contemporary, than modern music. I was making mixed CDs with music like that, Hall and Oates, Steely Dan, Christopher Cross. I know at one point I went into probably Newbury Comics and I bought a kind of a sampler of 70s soft rock, a lot of one-hit wonders, which got me familiar with songs like Escape the Pina Calada song, Steal Away by Robbie Dupree, Sad Eyes by Robert John, I Love a Rainy Night by Eddie Rabbit. What I'm gonna have to do, and I've done it a few times on the podcast, I'm gonna have to make a Spotify playlist of a lot of the songs that kind of helped me through that time, so you can listen to them or go and look at it and say, Man, what's wrong with you? I would have been the same way if in 1999, 2000, if you had told me in a couple years this is the kind of music you're gonna listen to most of the time, I'd have thought maybe I got a head injury and had amnesia and forgot who I was. And I guess kind of in a way that's true. It was a couple of years that it was just depression in different intensities and different waves. I ended up leaving my cooking job again, going into landscaping for one season. And at that time I was into listening to that 70s soft rock, and a lot of the crew at the landscaping company I was at were these big, dumbass meathead guys, and I couldn't say to them, Hey, let's listen to Elton John's greatest hits. They'd have left me on the side of the road somewhere. So I had to hide that. Dealing with depression is bad enough, but feeling shame about your battle with it is even worse, because then you feel like there's no one you can talk to. Even through all of my dealings with depression and stupid people at the time, I had my 70 soft rock to kind of ease my mind at the end of a long day. When the Pandora Music app came out, I think I got it in 2009. One of the first two stations I created was a 70 soft rock station. It was based around the song Reminiscing by Little River Band. I still listen to that station to this day, 16 years later. And if you're wondering, the other first station I made on Pandora is one called Torn Jeans and Flannel. It's a grunge station, obviously. To this day, when there are times that I'm going through bouts of poor mental health, I still fall back on 70 soft rock. Now it's mixed with smooth jazz, something called down tempo music. If you look it up, you'll see what I'm talking about. I say it so much on this podcast at the end, I always say lean into the things that make you happy when things in the world aren't going great. Things that make you happy, they help you get through those days. 70 Soft Rocks saved my sanity. That's why I called the segment that. Although it saved my sanity, it did not pull me out of my depression. It just made it easier to cope. If you were wondering what pulled me out of that depression, it was actually meeting a girl. This was in the late spring of 2004. I met a girl named Wendy, who ended up being one of the most important people to ever grace my life. And she basically pulled me out of my depression by being who she was. And although I haven't seen her in so many years, I haven't spoken to her in so many years, it wasn't a bad falling out, it was just time and distance. I won't get too deep into it. All I'll say is her importance continues to this day with this podcast. Everything I've done in my life since then, with writing all my books, my YouTube videos, this podcast, it all stems from her. So I'll wrap this segment up by saying thank you, 70 Soft Rock, and thank you, Wendy. This week in history, we are going back 40 years to July 13th, 1985, and the iconic Live Aid Benefit Concerts. Here we go again. Another moment in time that I look back and can't believe it's now this old. LiveAid was a transatlantic concert held simultaneously in London and Philadelphia. It brought together the biggest names in music to raise funds and awareness for the ongoing Ethiopian famine, which had claimed nearly a million lives. The seeds of LiveAid, they were planted the year before, in 1984, when BBC aired a harrowing report by journalist Michael Bourke. I hope I pronounced that right. It exposed the depth of the famine crisis in Ethiopia. The footage shocked millions, including Bob Geldof, who was frontman of the Irish rock band The Boomtown Rats. I think their biggest song was I Don't Like Mondays, which is kind of a depressing song, but that's beside the point. From this video that was shared, Geldoff and fellow musician Midge Ure wrote the charity single Do They Know It's Christmas? That was recorded with a supergroup of British and Irish artists under the name of Band-Aid. And this was released around Christmas time, 1984. It inspired the counterpart We Are the World by USA for Africa. Bob Geldoff wasn't done with the Do They Know It's Christmas song. He had a bigger plan. He envisioned a global benefit concert held in multiple countries and broadcast around the world. In the brainstorming stages, it sounded like an ambitious idea, but it became reality. On July 13th, 1985, the concert took place at Wembley Stadium and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. Wembley Stadium in London had around 72,000 people in attendance. JFK Stadium in Philly had more than 89,000. In total, more than 1.5 billion people in 150 countries watched the concert. I will say I am one of those over 1.5 billion, but I was seven and a half years old, so my memories are a little bit hazy. So who played at LiveAid? In Wembley Stadium, you had a litany of the biggest stars in the world. Paul McCartney played Let It Be solo on piano. You too had a breakthrough performance. You had The Who, you had David Bowie, you had Elton John with a surprise appearance by George Michael, who was fresh out of the band Wham. I would think, though, anybody that thinks live aid immediately thinks of Queen's performance. I do remember this performance. I wasn't that familiar with Queen, with Freddie Mercury. I just knew that whoever this guy was singing, commanding this tens of thousands of people in the audience, seemed really cool. Now, looking back 40 years, that performance by Queen is probably one of the most memorable performances in the history of music. Over here in the States in Philly, you had Mick Jagger performing with Tina Turner, you had Eric Clapton, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, and you had the reunion of Led Zeppelin after about five years. The big thing with this was that Phil Collins was their drummer, and Phil Collins famously performed in both Philly and London. He took a Concord flight so he could perform in London, then fly to the U.S. and play in Philly. LiveAid was a resounding success. They raised more than $125 million for famine relief. That is equal to about $373 million when adjusted for inflation to 2025. In addition to the raising of the money, Live Aid also influenced how musicians and celebrities use their platforms for activism. It also paved the way for other benefit concerts like FarmAid, which has been going on since 1985, the Live 8 concert, which was from 2005. With the Live 8 show, I also watched that one. You'll have to let me know if you want me to do a kind of 20th anniversary look back at it, because it has now passed into what I consider nostalgia, 20 plus years. Live aid, the legacy of those concerts, it's huge. Like I said, it helped shape the role of celebrities in activism. It ushered in the idea of global live broadcasting for charitable causes. For many artists, it was their defining moment. Bob Geldoff was later knighted for his effort. In the end, LiveAid, it wasn't just a concert. It was a call to arms, a moment when millions came together through TVs, radios, and loudspeakers, not just to watch, but to make a difference. And Live Aid occurred 40 years ago, this week in history. Oh, and now it's time for a brand new time capsule. We're gonna stick to the same day, July 13th, 1985. The Live Aid concert is going on. What else was going on in the world of pop culture back then? Well, let's find out. The number one song was A View to a Kill by Duran Duran. This song was written for the James Bond film of the same name, A View to a Kill. It's the only James Bond theme song to reach number one on the charts. Duran Duran was a mammoth band, especially in the mid-1980s. Interestingly, though, despite how big Duran Duran was, they only had two number one songs, A View to a Kill and The Reflex. Which means songs like Hungry Like the Wolf, Girls on Film, Rio, none of them went to number one. The number one movie was Back to the Future, and you could get into the theater with a ticket costing $3.55. I just did a whole retrospective on Back to the Future in episode 202, but I won't just say go listen to that. Back to the Future is sci-fi comedy, a bit of drama about Marty McFly who gets transported from 1985 to 1955 in the time machine created out of a DeLorean by crazy wild-eyed scientist Dr. Emmett Brown. The movie made $389 million on a $19 million budget. That's equal to more than $1.1 billion when adjusted for inflation to 2025. It's also 93% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, which I actually think is low, but I'm probably partial to it. What I'm trying to say is go watch Back to the Future when this podcast is done. The number one TV show was the premiere episode of Stingray. This show starred Nick Mancuso as a mysterious character known only as Ray, who drove a Corvette Stingray. He helps people that are in trouble, quote unquote. Despite the pilot episode of the show being number one for the week, it only ran for 23 more episodes before getting canceled. So I guess it peaked at the beginning and then right down the tubes. And if you were around back then, July 13th, 1985, maybe you had to work and you couldn't watch LiveAid. Maybe you had to work and you wanted to tape Stingray to see what this great new show is gonna be. Well, you're in luck. There is a VCR sale going on at Curtis Mathis. Curtis Mathis is your home entertainment center. You can get their top-of-the-line model VCR on sale for $599 or about $1,790 when adjusted for inflation to 2025 for a VCR. But wait, it gets even better. They sweeten the pot with a lifetime video rental membership. To them, lifetime means 208. That's an odd number. 208 movie rentals. In parentheses, it says a $39.95 value. So yeah, you need to parcel out those video rentals. You get 208 free. So don't start renting three or four every weekend, Joel. Run out of lifetime pretty quick. But that wraps up another time capsule. That wraps up this week in history. We go from an iconic concert to athletes that were going to be iconic but ended up falling short for various reasons. So let's look at the top five could have been athletes. When I talk about could have been athletes, these are the athletes that were projected for big things or were on their way to these big things, but they didn't reach the heights at which the general public thought they were going to get to. There are so many different caveats when it comes to could have been athletes, as far as the reasons why they didn't reach the heights they could have gotten to. Some of these were self-inflicted, some were just poor timing, injuries. And I will say, with some of these could have been athletes, some of them are Hall of Famers and legends of sports, but they actually didn't get to the heights they probably could have gotten to. You longtime listeners know, but first timers, these top fives are typically in no particular Order, and we've got some honorable mentions to kind of start things off. And what I'll do here is I will kind of fly through the honorable mentions so we can spend a little more time in the actual top five. Honorable mentions for could have been athletes include Sandy Koufax. He's a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Brooklyn slash Los Angeles Dodgers. But due to severe arthritis in his pitching elbow, he had to retire at the age of 30. He was the youngest player ever elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame at only 36 years old. Another honorable mention is Derek Rose. He was a basketball player who was rookie of the year and then MVP in his third season, but a torn ACL in the 2012 playoffs began a spiral where he couldn't stay healthy. He is only 36 years old and he retired at the end of the 23-24 NBA season. Another honorable mention is Bill Walton. He is a Hall of Fame NBA center. He played a total of 10 seasons and 468 games, but he missed four full seasons due to foot and ankle issues. And two of his ten seasons, he played 14 games and 10 games. He also won an MVP, was sixth man of the year, and won two NBA titles in his career. Another honorable mention is Josh Gordon. He was a wide receiver in the NFL. He played eight seasons in the NFL, but his substance abuse issues were what caused him continuous suspensions, including missing two full NFL seasons in his prime. He played only 77 total games in his career and was out of the league after the 2022 season at the age of 31. And the final honorable mention is Reggie Lewis. Reggie Lewis was a shooting guard, small forward for the Boston Celtics. He played for the Celtics from 1987 to 93 and was coming into his own, including becoming an all-star and the team captain. But he famously collapsed during a playoff game in 1993 and would die only a few months later from cardiac arrest while playing pickup basketball at the age of 27. So those are the honorable mentions. And you can see just based on those, it's kind of a mix of people that just had injury issues, health issues, substance abuse issues. But all of them, even if they were great, weren't as great as they could have been. But now let's get into the actual top five could have been athletes of all time, starting with number one, Len Bias. When coming up with names for this list, Len Bias was the first one I thought of, partially because he was drafted by the Boston Celtics, so it's kind of close to home. He was an all-American basketball player for the University of Maryland. And with one of those lucky deals that Red Auerbach, the GM president of the Celtics, made, the Celtics, despite being the best team in the NBA, were able to draft Len Baez number two. Adding Len Bias to a team that included Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, and Robert Parish in their primes was almost unfair. Not as a Boston fan, but the rest of the NBA saw it that way. Bias was a 6'8, small forward that could move, could jump, could shoot. There's no telling what his ceiling could have been because he never played an NBA game. Celtic scouts compared him favorably to Michael Jordan, which is high praise, but obviously there's no way to know. He was drafted, he was discussing endorsement deals with Reebok, and then when celebrating this momentous occasion in his life, he overdosed on cocaine and died. There were people that thought it was a joke, that there was no way Len Bias was dead. I remember as a kid, you know, eight, nine years old, I didn't understand what had happened to him. I just knew that they had drafted this incredible player and now he wasn't going to be playing for them because he had died suddenly. When you think about Len Bias and Reggie Lewis, there is an alternate timeline where the two of them take the mantle of the Celtics as Bird McHale and Parrish start to get older, and we don't have the 1990s Celtics that were pretty much a joke in the NBA. Number two is Marcus Dupree. Marcus Dupree was a football player, a running back. He is seen sometimes as the greatest that never was due to his incredible talent, physical skills. He played college ball for the Oklahoma Sooners, and then briefly for the University of Southern Mississippi before skipping out on college to try to go to the NFL, but they wouldn't let you into the league without a certain amount of seasons played in college. So he went into the USFL in 1984 and tore knee ligaments, which pretty much ended his career. Although before then, he was seen as kind of starting to believe his own hype, getting lazy, out of shape. That being said, DuPri was drafted by the Los Angeles Rams in the 1986 NFL draft. He lost over a hundred pounds and got back into shape and actually was signed by the Rams in 1990. He would end up playing sparingly for two seasons with the Rams before getting cut in the 1991 season. In his NFL career, Marcus Dupree rushed for a total of 251 yards. Number three is Tony Conigliaro. We're going back a ways to Boston Red Sox player Tony Conigliaro, Tony C. He was a right fielder that joined the Boston Red Sox at the age of 19. He was a prodigy. During his first four seasons, he batted 276 and averaged 26 home runs per year. His downfall was nothing that was his fault. He was hit by a pitch in his eye. And there are pictures, if you go to look at Tony Conigliaro after that incident, his eye, his left eye, is just all black and blue and swollen shut, and it's awful. He was never the same again. He missed the rest of the 1967 season, all of 68. He came back in 69, and he was better, but he was not what he was before. After such a promising start for his first four seasons, Conigliaro played a total of eight seasons in the majors, finishing with a career 264 average and 166 home runs, and he died young at the age of 45 in 1990. But that was due to a long issue with cardiovascular disease. I don't think it had anything to do with that hit by pitch. Number four is Greg Oden. Greg Oden was a seven-foot-tall basketball player. He played for the University of Ohio State. He was drafted first overall in 2007 by the Portland Trailblazers and was seen as kind of like that successor to Bill Walton, who had played for the Blazers in the 70s. Within a few months, Oden had undergone surgery for micro fractures in his knee. He missed his entire rookie season. In his first two NBA seasons, he played 61 and 21 games, with his knee issues becoming more and more of a problem. He then missed three more full seasons, finally being signed by the Miami Heat and playing for them in the 2013-14 NBA season. He was perceived as the next big thing, and in his career, Oden played a total of 105 games out of a possible 574. That's equal to 18% of possible games. And finally, number five on the list of top five could have been athletes. This one might be controversial, but it's Bo Jackson. Bo Jackson was one of the most famous athletes on the planet in the late 1980s. A superstar in the NFL with the Los Angeles Raiders. A superstar in Major League Baseball with the Kansas City Royals. He is the only professional athlete in history to be named an all-star in two different major sports. In January 1991, in a playoff game against the Cincinnati Bengals, he suffered a devastating hip injury. That immediately ended his football career, but he still played a few more years in baseball for the Royals, the White Sox, and the Angels. It is a major could have been. Think about it. Those of you that are around my age, you remember Bo Jackson, the Bo Knows commercials. For all of that fame, he played a total of 38 games in the NFL. And he played a total of 694 games in Major League Baseball. It's hard to understate how big of a deal he was for those that didn't grow up with Bo Jackson. He was so good and he was basically done at the age of 28. Sure, he played a few more seasons in Major League Baseball, but he could have easily had another seven, eight, nine amazing seasons in both sports. He could have gone down in history as the greatest athlete ever, but we'll never know because of that hip injury. That'll wrap up the top five could have been athletes of all time. Which ones of these you think could have been the biggest deal that didn't quite make it? The ones where the athletes got lazy, I don't feel bad for, but the ones that had injuries they couldn't overcome, like Tony Conigliaro, Greg Oden, Bo Jackson, or in the honorable mentions Derek Rose, or Bill Walton, or Sandy Koufax, it is amazing to think what could have been with all of these different athletes. Today in the 2020s, we are all more connected than ever. Seriously, pretty much any of you out there could reach out to me. I've gotten so many great comments through YouTube, email, social media, with texting, with social media and emails. It is possible for you to find anybody, friend, stranger, people you used to know, and reach out to them. Oh, but this convenience, it wasn't always that way. When I was a kid growing up in the 1980s, if I wanted to talk to a friend, I had to remember their phone number and call their house. And if they didn't answer the phone, I had to get on my bike and ride to their house to see if they were home. There was no texting, where are you? But in between those Stone Age days of the 1980s and present day, there was a transformative era in digital communication. This was the 1990s. It was when these technologies that we have today that we take for granted or really common were first coming around. What we're gonna do now is we're gonna look at two of the most groundbreaking innovations from 1990s communication, and those both come to us from the internet. So we're gonna look at chat rooms and instant messaging. So hold on here while I boot up the modem. Oh man, nobody better grab the phone and throw me off the internet. When I think of chat rooms and instant messaging, I start to think of my first dalliance into the internet, 1995-96. But the concept of digital communication, it goes back from before the 90s. I mean, you had beepers, you had cell phones, car phones back in the 80s that looked like bricks that you plugged into your lighter. It was during the 90s, though, that digital communication entered the mainstream. As home computers became more common and dial-up internet providers like America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy gained popularity, so too with it came chatrooms and instant messaging. So for those that don't know what they are or want to trip down memory lane, chatrooms allowed multiple users to converse in real time. Usually they were around shared interests. You'd go on the AOL homepage and there would be all of those colorful sidebars that had different topics, sports, politics, movies, music, whatever you name it. You could click on it, you could find chat rooms that were kind of specific to what you wanted to talk about. You'd create your fake name, your handle, and then you just go in there. Back then in the mid to late 90s, these chat rooms were usually unmoderated, meaning you were kind of at the mercy of what kind of people were in there with you. Because they were unmoderated, you could use pseudonyms and fake identities. You'd get people in the chat room that would randomly want to know who was in there, so you'd get the A slash S slash L question for everyone to answer, which stood for age, sex, location. So I could easily put today 47 male Cape Cod. Or you could just pretend and put 17 female Indonesia and no one's gonna know the difference. Now, instant messaging, by contrast, was more private and one-on-one. It allowed users to send and receive short messages in real time. It was basically the precursor to text messaging, but over the internet. What I remember back then is I think you had to accept these messages. You couldn't just get people coming at you. Like if you wanted your chats to be private or your account to be private, you could be in chat rooms, but you'd have people reaching out, want to chat in private. Most of the time this was innocent stuff. It was fun stuff. People would really talk about life and interests, and you'd make new friends from all around the world, which was brand new. In the age when, like I said, you'd have to remember phone numbers to call family and friends or go to their houses. Now, here it was, you could get someone that was thousands of miles away popping up on your computer screen, and you're talking about favorite recipes or favorite movies or sports or whatever your topic du jour was. When it came to chat rooms and instant messaging, there were a few platforms that popularized it. First and foremost, the most iconic one is America Online AOL. This was the one that I was always in if I was IMing people. There were literally thousands of themed chat rooms that covered any topic you could think of. It was almost like option overload, where you wanted to try all these different rooms, but yet it seemed like there wasn't enough time. I came up in a time when it was when the weather was good, get outside and stay out until the streetlights come on. So the idea of being able to kind of travel the world while sitting at a desk in front of a computer, it was foreign to me. In 1997, AOL launched their instant messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, also known as AIM. This was the one that became the cultural touch tone with the distinctive door opening and closing sound. That one. And iconic away messages. Those were fun because you could create your own away message. So if someone saw that you were not online or they wanted to reach out to you and sent you a message like, hey, what's up? You could have an away message saying like you got sent back to 1955 by Doc Brown's DeLorean. That kind of individuality and freedom of expression was totally brand new in that sense for me. It usually came down to music and clothing as far as how I expressed myself. Now I could have stupid away messages to showcase my humor. Another popular platform was ICQ, which was released in 1996 by Israeli company Mirabilis. ICQ, the letters, were short for I Seek You. Three different words. It was one of the first standalone instant messaging programs. ICQ allowed users to send messages, URLs, files, and even play games. On this platform, you were assigned a unique number called a UIN, user identification number. I wasn't big into ICQ, but the idea of sending files to someone in the late 90s, those of you that remember how slow internet was back then, you'd be like, here's a song I want you to listen to. You'll get it in three days. Or you'd send a picture that stopped downloading halfway through so you don't know what it is. There was also Yahoo Chat and Messenger. They launched their chatrooms in the mid-90s, followed up with Yahoo Messenger in 1998. Much like AOL, these tools were integrated with Yahoo's larger ecosystem. So it allowed seamless communication between email, chat, and news platforms. You out there of my age or of the age that you were on the internet in the late 90s, did you have a preferred platform for chatrooms and IMs? Or did you have accounts on all of these? I basically stuck to AOL. Another platform was the MSN Messenger, which was introduced by Microsoft in 1999. They quickly became a rival to AIM and ICQ, offering direct integration with Hotmail. It introduced some of the popular features like emoticons, status updates, and later video chats. It was a whole new world in chat rooms and instant messaging. You had screen names so you could make your own whatever you wanted it to be. I can't remember my very first AOL screen name, but I can share one with you. In 1999, my screen name was Millennium Y2J Man. It was named for professional wrestler Chris Jericho, who had debuted in the WWF in the summer of 1999. I know my sister Lindsay, who got she was probably 12 or 13 at the time, her screen name was S301B6. So if you break that down, it's SOB316 for Stone Cold Steve Austin, another professional wrestler. You also had buddy lists with instant messaging, which that's pretty self-explanatory. You make friends online, you put them in a buddy list so you know when they're online and you can jump in and chat with them. You have similar stuff still with social media today, Facebook and Instagram. They have these little green dots by someone's face on Instagram letting you know they're on the app currently. And Facebook, you can have a sidebar with whoever's online. Like I said before, there were away messages where you could tell people what you were doing or where you were, whether real or super fake. In addition to file sharing, there were, I mentioned the emoticons, the precursor to emojis. They were basically done on the keyboard. That's where you got the smiley face, the colon and the parentheses symbol. You had to learn the emoticon language. So you could do smiley face, winky face, sticking your tongue out, all this foolishness. This is where you got a lot of the shorthand that is used in texting to this day. The first one I remember is L O L, which is laughing out loud, not lots of love. My favorite was the long one, was rolling on the floor, laughing my ass off, Rothle Mayo. Like the I thought of it as one word instead of all these words shoved into one. Now it's to the point today, you've got so much laziness. People can't write thank you, it's T Y. They can't write happy birthday, it's HBD. Boy, that took a lot of time. They can't even write okay, it's just K. Like, is that really saving you that much time typing one less symbol? Oh, but despite their popularity, chatrooms and instant messaging platforms had a lot of issues. First and foremost was the privacy in predators. Like I said a few minutes ago, you could be anonymous, kind of a fake person. This made it easy for these people to go on to teenage chat rooms and be like, I'm also a 15-year-old girl, but instead there's some 50-year-old guy driving around in a white van saying, Come meet me here. This was also where you had the beginnings of online harassment, trolling, bullying, which now is just commonplace on social media. I know there was harassment and bullying before the internet, but this just kind of has given it a space to blow up where it's just seen as, uh well, it's just the way life is. Be ready for it. You had security risks, where if you could send files to people, they could send them to you. You get Trojan horse viruses, phishing links that would start to get into your bank accounts as they started to go online. And another issue was addiction. Addiction to the internet, to instant messaging. You need to be on there to chat with your friends. What about schoolwork? Uh, that can wait. I've got to talk to these people in this chat room. By the time I got on the internet, I was a senior in high school. I had spent my childhood being outside and entertaining myself. So the internet, much like video games, they never became an addiction for me. But I could easily see people younger than me wanting nothing more than to stay inside and talk to people in faraway lands rather than going out and doing stuff. By the early 2000s, the golden age of chatrooms and instant messaging was fading. The big part was the rise of social media with MySpace in 2003, Facebook in 2004. These were all in one site. So you didn't need a separate chat room. Around that same time, you started to get cell phones that became more affordable, so text messaging became more common even before smartphones, when you had to press each number a certain number of times to get a different letter to text, oh the stone age days of texting. And then smartphones came around, so that became easier. And a lot of it was oversaturation and spam. Many of the public chat rooms were overrun with bots and advertisements, and it got to be you lost the plot of why you were there in the first place. Over time, Yahoo closed its chatrooms in 2012, AIM got discontinued in 2017, MSN Messenger merged into Skype by 2013. But still to this day, the core principles of chat rooms and instant messaging, the real-time connection, personalization, and community, they're integral today to apps like WhatsApp, Discord, Slack. For a generation raised on dial-up tones and away messages, internet chat rooms and instant messaging in the 90s, it represents a formative period, a time when the internet felt new and thrilling, filled with possibility. And while those platforms might be gone, their influence on digital communication to this day is undeniable. But until next week, that's gonna wrap up episode 204 of the In My Footsteps Podcast. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for making it to the end. I hope you had a fun trip down memory lane this week. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, I've got 203 other episodes you can check out. I've got hundreds of YouTube videos, so there's plenty of content for you to binge on. I've spent countless hours and months and years cultivating my never-ending portfolio of content. I've got so much content that next week I'm debuting something new on the podcast. It's going to be mixtape number one, where I take similar subjects I've talked about on previous episodes and put them into one larger episode, a mixtape where I put those subjects together. Next week will be classic mall stores of the 70s, eighties, and nineties. I'll be there with a new intro and outro, but this is something different. I have plans to do mixtapes every now and then, because as I've gotten to over 200 episodes, I've noticed there are segments that I could take and put together and make a whole new different episode of the podcast. So it's not quite a greatest hits, but it is a semi-cheat. It's a little bit like a clip show. But if you haven't heard these segments before, or if you've wanted to hear them all in one place, you're gonna get it starting next week. And don't worry, the week after will be episode 205. It's gonna be 1984, the year in pop culture, coming out coinciding with the birthday of my twin sisters, Lindsay and Ashley, so they'll get to know all about what was going on in the world the year they were born. As I said at the beginning, we've got some housekeeping at the end. Five dollars a month if you want to become a member on Patreon, support me, support my content, check me out all over social media, Instagram, my Facebook fan page for the podcast, Threads, Blue Sky, subscribe on YouTube, visit my homepage, Christopher Setterlund.com, with links to all nine of my books. I'm still working on book ten, my Cape Cod History Anthology. The holdup is that in order to self-publish and to do it right, I need an ISBN number, which will allow bookstores to carry it if they want to. ISBN numbers are not free unless you want the place you buy it from to own the rights to your book, which is not going to happen. But don't worry, sometime this summer that book will be out and you can check it out. Happy birthday the day this podcast goes live to my stepfather Serpa. That's his last name. His first name is Chris, like me. We have the same initials. I've known him now for 30 years. He's been one of the most stable male role models of my life. My father, my first stepfather were not the greatest male role models. So I feel blessed that I have had some good male role models. I already know what I got him for his birthday. Just in case he listens to it before he gets it, I'm not going to say what it was. So I hope you have the best birthday yet, and you don't work too hard. Also, happy birthday yesterday from the day this podcast goes live to my old friend Shayna. She's one of the truly favorite people I've known in my life. Her sense of humor is probably a little more wacky than even mine. The plan is to go and pay her and her family a visit the end of next month for my vacation. We can celebrate like it's old times. Except maybe this time when we go hiking, you can drag me behind you in a wagon so I don't have to walk with my ruined legs. And as for all of you else out there, thank you so much for listening wherever you are. I hope you have stayed cool. We are getting close to the dog days of summer. But luckily you can listen to this podcast anywhere, like in the AC. I'll be back next week with the first ever. Mixtape. But until then, remember in this life, don't walk in anyone else's footsteps. Create your own path and enjoy every moment you can on this journey we call life because you never know what tomorrow brings. This has been the In My Footsteps Podcast. I am Christopher Setterlund, but you already knew that. I'll talk to you all again soon.