“He Ran to His Car, Got His Gun”: Delanie Walker Once Almost Got Shot by a Teammate Over a Joke

When you stand at 6-foot-2 and weigh nearly 250 pounds, it’s not often that you find yourself intimidated. Unless you’re in an NFL locker room, of course. NFL locker rooms are built on bravado, money, and razor-thin egos. And sometimes all it takes is a casual joke for everything to spiral. In recounting one such incident years later, former tight end Delanie Walker laid it out with brutal honesty, walking listeners through how a $25,000 watch, a bruised pride, and bad timing nearly turned a verbal jab into something far more dangerous.

As with any good story, the former tight end began with “What had happened was…” According to Walker, one of his teammates had just purchased a newly released Apple watch that was priced at about $25,000.

After asking his teammate to confirm the cost, Walker looked at him and stated, “Damn dog, you’re gonna go broke.” Rather unsurprisingly, this unnamed teammate didn’t take too kindly to Walker assessing his financial situation. “He got mad.”

“He was like, ‘Yo you think you’re so rich. Nobody knew your name before you got here,’ and I was like, ‘And they still don’t know yours.'” The second those words left his mouth, Walker knew that he had perhaps taken things a bit too far.

Unbeknownst to him, however, that teammate had just recently been benched. As a result, his comments carried an extra bit of weight with them, and as a result, things quickly escalated.

Pushing and yelling the word “stop” quickly ensued throughout the locker room. Walker then decided to “shun” the teammate, spouting, “You’re a little boy to me. I’m big money.” Walker maintained that he was simply ribbing the guy, and that his teammates were more than welcome to reciprocate. “You can come joke on me, I wouldn’t get upset.”

Nevertheless, the teammate insisted that they settle things the old-fashioned way. Walker proclaimed that “I don’t fight,” to which his teammate allegedly responded by asking, “Oh you don’t fight? You play with burners? Come outside.”

“He ran to his car and got his gun, and people were like ‘Don’t go outside, he’s got his gun,'” Walker recalled. Thankfully, he noted that the two of them were able to talk things out amicably after about five days of separation.

Walker noted that both of them had roots in Los Angeles and would even go on to apologize, explaining that he was unaware of the benching incident that occurred beforehand. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to improve the player’s overall standing with the team.

“Then he got cut, and I was like, f**k,” Walker exclaimed. Sometime afterwards, the tight end found himself back in Los Angeles, and the name of his now-former teammate came up.

“Oh that’s the homie,” he reacted, but the other person simply remarked, “Oh, he didn’t say that you were a homie.”