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Milwaukee just won the World Series for the first time in the history of the franchise. Go back to the first night of it, and the man they sent out to throw the first pitch. He walked to the mound wearing another man's jacket. A plaid sport coat. One of Bob Uecker's actual ones, off the rack in his closet. Robin Yount is the one who asked. When he found out he had the first pitch, he went to Brewers broadcaster Lane Grindle and asked whether it would be appropriate to wear a plaid jacket in honor of Ueck. Grindle told him he thought it would be incredible. Then Grindle went a step further and asked Uecker's family whether the crew could borrow the real coats. They said yes right away. So Yount walked out in Bob Uecker's jacket. And then on the mound he took it off. Underneath was a Brewers jersey. Number 19. UECK across the back. The entire radio crew wore the coats too. Josh Maurer got the one Uecker wore in the Miller Lite commercial with Whitey Ford and John Goodman. Outside the ballpark people were setting Miller Lite cans down at the foot of the Uecker statue. Now understand why it had to be Yount. He played 20 seasons and every single one of them was in Milwaukee. He was the starting shortstop on Opening Day of 1974, at 18 years old, and he did not stop until 1993. He finished with 3,142 hits and all of them came in one uniform. Bob Uecker had been in that radio booth since 1971. Which means Uecker called every game Robin Yount ever played. All 2,856 of them. And in 1982, the last time this franchise got here, Yount was the Most Valuable Player in the American League. He hit .414 in that World Series with a home run and six runs batted in. Milwaukee lost it in seven games. Be straight about what tonight is and is not. Robin Yount is not a World Series champion. He got one chance at it, in 1982, and it got away in a seventh game, and he retired in 1993 without another. Bob Uecker did not get one here either. He passed in January of last year at 90, after 54 seasons calling Brewers games, and the team won it twenty-one months later. The booth has his name on it now, which is not the same as having him in it. So the two men who gave this city the most got the least out of tonight. But on the first night of the whole thing, one of them walked to the mound carrying the coat of the other, took it off, and showed 40,000 people whose name he had on his back. Milwaukee waited 57 years. Those two waited longest.

Case Keenum has been in the NFL since 2012. Until Monday night, his two kids had never seen him play a game. Not one. Not ever. Here is what he said before kickoff. "It means everything. It's incredible because we always say 'Keenum's can do hard things.' So we'll do some hard things tonight. And hopefully I can show them tonight how it's done." He is 38 years old. He was the third quarterback on the Chicago Bears depth chart. Caleb Williams was ruled out. Backup Tyson Bagent went into concussion protocol. So the job fell to the guy nobody expected to take another snap in his life. It had been 1,009 days since Case Keenum started a regular season NFL game. The last one was Christmas Eve of 2023 with the Houston Texans. His son Kyler was born in November of 2019. His daughter Cadence was born in April of 2021. Which means Case Keenum has been an NFL quarterback for every single day that either of his children has been alive, and neither one of them had ever seen him play a game. Cadence was two years old the last time he started one. He arrived at Soldier Field carrying what looked like a paper sack, dressed like a man on his way to a parent teacher conference. The internet had a wonderful time with it. Somebody said his wife must have packed him a lunch. That wife is Kimberly. The family calls her the logistical ninja, because she is the one who has packed and unpacked their whole life through the Houston Texans, the Rams, the Minnesota Vikings, the Denver Broncos, Washington, the Cleveland Browns, the Buffalo Bills, Houston again, and now the Chicago Bears. This is also the man who threw for 19,217 yards at Houston, which is still the most in the history of college football, and then went undrafted. Then the game started. 24 of 34. 247 yards. Two touchdowns. No interceptions. Not sacked one time. Eight yards to Luther Burden III in the first quarter. Forty one yards to Kalif Raymond in the third. Then in the fourth he kept it himself and walked it in from a yard out. Three touchdowns from a third string quarterback. Chicago Bears 27, Philadelphia Eagles 7. When it ended he walked off hyping up the crowd in the north end zone, and the whole stadium stood up for him. And then came the part nobody could have written. Keenum went out to do his postgame interview on the SportsCenter set. His daughter came with him. Five years old, out on that stage next to her dad, waving at a stadium full of Chicago Bears fans who were still standing there cheering for him. Fourteen years of practice squads and backup jobs and new cities and moving trucks. He said it himself when he signed here. More than knowing how to get hit, he knows how to get back up. The first NFL game his kids ever got to watch, their dad won it, and he scored three times doing it. Keenums can do hard things. For more stories like this, follow us on any platform @thesportsontap

Junior Bridgeman made about $2.95 million in his entire twelve year NBA career. Never more than $350,000 in a single season. He died worth $1.4 billion. And the way he did it started with him working a drive-thru window while he was still an active player. Here's the whole thing. Bridgeman went 8th overall in the 1975 draft, then got traded to Milwaukee in the deal that sent Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to the Lakers. He was never a star. He was a sixth man, one of the best in the league at it, long before there was an award for the job. Twelve seasons, 13.6 points a game, zero All-Star appearances. Solid pro. Nothing that makes you rich. So in the late 1970s, during the offseason, Bridgeman got a job at a Wendy's in Milwaukee. Not as an owner. Not as an investor. As a cashier. Working the window, taking orders, handling complaints, watching how the kitchen timed tickets during a lunch rush. He didn't need the money. He needed to know how the business actually worked. Then in 1988, a few years after he retired, a woman walked up to the counter at a Wendy's in South Milwaukee and a tall man handed her a tray. She recognized him as an NBA player. Later that week she called a local radio station to complain about it. Bridgeman was driving to his downtown office when he heard her on the air saying it was a shame that a former NBA player had to work fast food. He owned the restaurant. And several others in the city. His first attempt at it had actually failed. He and teammate Paul Silas opened a Wendy's in Brooklyn together and it went under. He started over in Milwaukee with a handful of locations and just kept buying. At its peak his company owned more than 450 restaurants across the country. Wendy's, Chili's, Fazoli's, Golden Corral. At one point he was the second largest Wendy's franchisee in America. In 2016 he sold most of it for a reported $250 million. Then he did the thing that made him a billionaire. He took that money and bought Coca-Cola bottling territory. Heartland Coca-Cola, covering Illinois, Kansas and Missouri, and later a stake in Coke's entire Canadian bottling operation. Bottling is unglamorous, protected, and enormously profitable. Heartland grew toward a billion dollars in annual revenue. In 2020 he bought Ebony and Jet magazines, two of the most important publications in Black American history, for a reported $14 million, after they'd gone through bankruptcy. And in September 2024, Junior Bridgeman bought a 10 percent stake in the Milwaukee Bucks at a $4 billion valuation. The team that traded for him in 1975. He went from a bench player on that roster to an owner of it. In February 2025, Forbes put his net worth at $1.4 billion. Only four men who ever played in the NBA have reached a billion dollars. Michael Jordan. Magic Johnson. LeBron James. And Junior Bridgeman, who averaged 13.6 points a game. He is the only one of the four who wasn't a superstar. The other three built on fame. He built on knowing how a kitchen runs. On March 11, 2025, Bridgeman was in Louisville doing a television interview when he said he thought he was having a heart attack. He died at the hospital that day. He was 71. The Bucks retired his number 2. A sixth man who never made $350,000 in a season spent his summers learning to run a drive-thru window. Fifty years later he owned a piece of the franchise. For more stories like this, follow us on any platform @thesportsontap