Dr. Smith and I touched on all sorts of topics, including how he got into sports, the start of his sports psychology career, almost becoming team psychologist for the Boston Red Sox, and much more. He also shares great tips on how to manage stress, how to properly utilize positive stress to boost performance, and the dangers today’s athletes face with the boom of sports betting and social media.

If you would rather read the full interview, check it out here.

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It was an awesome chat. Insightful. Engaging. Humorous. Thought-provoking. In case you missed it and would rather read most of my interview with Rafi, head here. But if you want to catch the entire interview, including my bizarre story about a racially charged incident I was caught in the middle of during a pickup basketball game, check out the podcast, exclusively for subscribers.

Thank you for reading my work and supporting mental health awareness for athletes!

The Human Athlete Chronicles is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Born less than two weeks after me in the fall of 1980, our young sports-obsessed lives followed a similar path. Brad and I both fell in love with baseball and pro wrestling at an early age. And it’s never left our hearts.

Brad, bitten by the wrestling bug a little bit early than I, started watching “Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling” cartoon on Saturday mornings in the mid-1980s and soon realized those animated characters were based on real grapplers that battered and bruised each other in the ring every week in front of packed arenas across the country.

As an adult, Brad’s obsession with the squared circle continued, leading to a friendship with legendary villain the Iron Sheik. While an attempt to write Sheik’s autobiography never fully materialized, it left him with a void that needed to be filled. What happened to his wrestling hero? Why did a project that began with such promise 20 years earlier, turn sour so quickly, with Brad fearing for his life? And what became of other wrestling icons that rose to fame when the WWE boomed in popularity in the mid-’80s?

To find out, Brad hit the road to track down these legends in what became his outstanding 2024 release “The Six Pack, On the Open Road in Search of WrestleMania.” It’s his second book, following the success of “The Wax Pack, On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife,” a writing premise that I will forever kick myself for not thinking of years ago because it’s so damn cool.

Brad opened a random pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards (the first year he started collecting cards as a kid) and embarked on a baseball road trip to track down every player in the pack. From searching for hall-of-famers like Carlton Fisk to Jaime Cocanower, a name only die-hard Milwaukee Brewers fans will recall, it was a journey that changed Brad’s life and inspired a book tailor made for baseball fans.

When he’s not trekking cross country, trying to connect with retired wrestlers and ballplayers and writing about their lives, Brad spends his time tracking down … bugs. Serving as a research assistant at the California Academy of Sciences, Brad has discovered 17 species of insects in Tahiti, dubbing one “Harrison Ford.”

Brad graciously sat down for an interview recently as we discussed everything from eighties wrestling to baseball nostalgia to Netflix’s take on the very polarizing and perplexing Vincent Kennedy McMahon.

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