Thankfully, most American kids these days don’t know what an a**-whooping looks like. But their parents and their parents’ grandparents weren’t quite so lucky. There was no being grounded for our poor folks, just plain old-fashioned whooping. And while no one’s trying to bring back those days, it doesn’t hurt to look back and see how good we have it these days.
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Just ask Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson, who got the whooping of a lifetime as a young man trying his hand at the wheel for the first time.
On the latest episode of Nightcap with Unc & Ocho, Shannon Sharpe could hardly keep it together as Ocho launched into an unforgettable tale from his reckless youth, a moment that ended in what he proudly called the “worst a*s whopping” of his life. However, his beating didn’t come at the hands of his parents. Rather, it was his grandparents who brandished the hand.
“I was a young man,” Chad began. “My grandmother, my grandfather…they’d gone to church, and I had the nerve to pull that goddamn car out the driveway.”
Without a license, permission, or any sense of how to operate a vehicle, young Chad decided to sneak out in his grandparents’ prized ride.
“I never forget. It was a 500 Benz. But it was diesel. That old steel fence we had back in the day? That slide-back kind? I lit it open, put the car in reverse… and I don’t know how to drive. I don’t know how far I am from the rails!”
Safe to say, it didn’t end well for young Ocho.
“I done caught the goddamn right fender on the rail trying to get out. So I’m thinking, ‘Well, if I just keep going, it’s gonna loosen itself. Man, I done ripped the whole damn bumper off.”
“Man, let me tell you, those people came home from church, boy… I ain’t never got whooped out like that ever again. Never had an a** whooping like that. From both of them!”
Sharpe truly lost it and threw his head back in laughter as Ocho concluded, “How y’all coming from church, but y’all beat me like the devil?”
However, the former tight end had an equally hilarious (in retrospect) a** whooping story of his own. His whooping came over a Saturday morning fishing trip that turned into a full-blown backyard beatdown courtesy of his beloved grandparents.
“We used to go fishing, you know? That was our thing—Saturday,” Sharpe began, setting the scene in vivid, Southern detail. “I done got a milk jug, cut in half. Got me some good old wet dirt. I’m down in the ditch digging.”
He had everything: the premium Louisiana Pinks, sawyer worms, even the fat, juicy grub worms you pull out from under old stumps. His grandpa had even bought him a brand-new cane pole for a quarter. Little Shannon Sharpe was ready to fish like a pro.
Until Granny came along.
“My Granny come up to me like, ‘Boy, give me them baits.’ I said, ‘No, Granny.’”
Sharpe mimicked his grandmother yelling for his grandfather. “‘Barney, that boy won’t give me them baits!’”And from there, young Shannon’s day took a sharp turn, right into an unforgettable a*s-whooping from his granddad.
“Oh man, I don’t know what possessed me to say no,” he laughed, shaking his head. “I couldn’t have been more than five or six. She could’ve got some from my cousins, but nah, she wanted mine because I was the youngest.”
“He beat me so bad, I didn’t even want to fish no more,” he concluded.
