During my time at Rice as an undergraduate (2006-10), I had the immense pleasure of having a class with James Casey. This was after James was already drafted by the Texans and was taking classes to finish his degree. I wasn't friends with him or anything but I did strike a few conversations with him, and he's genuinely a smart, nice, humble guy. Anyways, I forget what the class was called (it was a blow-off class during my last semester), but it was something to the effect of "Statistics in Excel". One day, being a blow-off class that it is, the professor didn't give a lecture but instead got one of his former students to come back and give a talk about having success after school. This lady, some young executive for a big company, was very condescending and all in all annoying about how successful she was and how many people were under her without really providing any good advice. At the end of her talk, she began to start pointing at random students and asked "what do you want to do when you grow up?" After a few students, she pointed at James Casey and asked him the same. He answered "I want to be a football player". Having no idea who this was and seeing that he was a mountain of a person, she goes "Oh, I assume you play for the Rice football team?" Those of us who knew who Casey was started cracking up and told her "Yeah, he plays for the freaking Texans", and she got embarrassed. How's that for success, biiitch? I know, cool story bro, TL;DR. Go Rice! Go Texans!
My sister's friend attended U of H during the Phi Slamma Jamma days and in one of her classes a guy started a conversation with her. It was Reid Gettys. I should explain that she is not a sports fan and very blond. He mentioned to her that he plays basketball and she replies: "Oh really, who do you play for?"
In fairness, football players wear helmets most of the time, and except for iconic, face of the franchise types, I don't know how many NFL players I would recognize on the street. Funny story though.
If James Casey delivered me a pizza tonight I wouldn't know it was him. How doe's her not knowing who he is "own" her?
Yeah, if she had said something like "well I don't think you should rely on football as a career", then that would be more of an ownage.
It's not so much that she didn't recognize her, but rather the entire lecture was about how awesome she was and then she condescendingly went around asking people what they want to be when they grow up.
I study the faces of Houston Texans players every night before I go to bed. In hopes that I meet one of them one day. "Hey guys! It's NFL superstar... Trindon Holliday!"