UPDATE: Now with audio of the job offer
A guy who was homeless yesterday has a house and a career today, and he owes it all to Al Gore, inventor of the internet. After being featured on this site and countless others (all of whom totally copied me), Ted Williams, Columbus Ohio’s golden-throated hobo, was inundated with job offers. I didn’t want to be the d*ck who pointed out that radio jobs pay about the same as panhandling, but the happy ending is that the job came from the Cleveland Cavaliers, who offered him a position doing voiceover work and a house. A house in Cleveland? That’s like a $10,000 value right there.
“The Cleveland Cavaliers just offered me a full-time job and a house! A house! A house!,” repeated a stunned Williams,
71,53, on local radio station WNCI.A caller to the show who said she represented the Cavs offered Williams a full-time job doing voiceover work for the team and parent company and a free home in Cleveland.
The Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, native trained to be a radio announcer before drugs and alcohol ruined his chances at a career, and he was reduced to begging on the side of a road in Columbus, Ohio, before the newspaper found him.
Local police would refer to Williams as “Radio man,” when chasing him from his usual begging spots, where he earned around $30 an hour, Williams said.
THIRTY DOLLARS AN HOUR??? This guy didn’t need a job, he needed an accountant. [Update: the video below puts the figure much lower, but don’t think that means I’m rewriting my joke]
“I’ve been out there about a year; I just didn’t know anything like this would ever happen,” an overwhelmed Williams said earlier in the show. “There’s so many words. I’ve already been compared to Susan Boyle [that was me! -Ed] … I’m just so happy.”
Before the Cavs made their bid, the station said a group of credit unions offered Williams a contract worth up to $10,000; a caller claiming to rep MTV expressed interest in having him guest-announce a show; and callers who said they were the voiceover actors behind plugs for “The Simpsons” and “Entertainment Tonight” said they wanted him to compete on their upcoming “America’s Next Voice” — where the prize includes a home studio. [NYPost]
It’s kind of anticlimactic after the thing about the job and the house, but he also has a website and a Twitter page. Anyway, I wish the guy all the best. He has an amazing voice, and that makes the story so much nicer because it doesn’t give you that icky feeling you get when people do something solely out of pity, like when the retarded kid wins the dance contest. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m about to embark upon a far more lucrative career in the field of alcoholism and panhandling. Though I suppose I could just say “a career in the field”, couldn’t I.
(I’ll post the latest videos below as they come)
Ted Williams on a CBS morning show: (To be fair, he says he sometimes made $25 an hour, other times 25 cents an hour. Still, you get to set your own hours and you don’t have to deal with some pissant middle manager telling you not to throw your poop at passing cars.)
CNN’s coverage:
The original clip:
[hat tip: PressCoverage.Us]