Best of The Authority: Who’s Your Founding Father? with David Fleming

Welcome to Best of The Authority! Thanks to wonderful listeners like you, this Be Podcast Network original series is growing and going strong. In fact, it now ranks in the Top 5% of the more than 3 million podcasts globally.

In case you haven’t been with us since the beginning, the “Best Of” is designed to catch you up on some of the best and most popular episodes you may have missed.

In this episode, I had a ton of fun chatting with David Fleming, a senior writer at ESPN who has been one of the industry’s most prolific, versatile, and imaginative longform writers over the last three decades at Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine, and ESPN. He has reported on everything from the Super Bowl and Steph Curry to the Musical Chairs World Championship and the NFL’s obsession with glutes.

We discussed his great book, Who's Your Founding Father? One Man’s Epic Quest to Uncover the First, True Declaration of Independence:

• The Mecklenberg Declaration of Independence (the MecDec!) — what it is who wrote it, and who signed it
• John Adams accuses Thomas Jefferson of plagiarism — the evidence and the defense
• Traveling to London to uncover an international conspiracy and discovering North Carolina’s Freedom Spring, previously lost for a century
• If 11 US Presidents along with Ken Burns, David McCullough, George Will and others acknowledged the MecDec, why haven’t we heard more about it?
• The South’s critical role in the American Revolution
• Thomas Jefferson...shockingly awful
• Captain James Jack, the Paul Revere of the South (only braver)
• The playlist at the Musical Chairs World Championship, and more!

Who's Your Founding Father? is available from Hachette. Find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you get your books: https://bit.ly/43Wt6F6

Read David’s 2013 ESPN story about the Musical Chairs World Championship here.

About our guest

David Fleming is a senior writer at ESPN. During the last three decades at Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine and ESPN he has been one of the industry’s most prolific, versatile, and imaginative longform writers, traveling the globe while penning more than 35 cover stories and numerous groundbreaking pieces on everything from the Super Bowl and Steph Curry to the Musical Chairs World Championship and the NFL’s obsession with glutes. Fleming’s unique work has earned numerous national awards as well as a handwritten note from the White House.

He is also the author of two previous books, Breaker Boys: The NFL’s Greatest Team and the Stolen 1925 Championship and Noah's Rainbow: A Father’s Emotional Journey from the Death of his Son to the Birth of his Daughter. A native of Detroit, Fleming and his wife, Kim, live in North Carolina with their daughters.

Follow him on Twitter @FlemESPN

About the host

Ross Romano is a co-founder of the Be Podcast Network and CEO of September Strategies, a coaching and consulting firm that helps organizations and high-performing leaders in the K-12 education industry and beyond clarify their vision and make strategic decisions that lead to long-term success. Connect on Twitter @RossBRomano or LinkedIn.