American sports are a pretty insane landscape: Billions of dollars in contracts, advertising, licensing, and more, coupled with the inherent incentives to ignore systemic problems (like concussions, abuse, or prescription drug usage), creates a truly ripe-for-the-corrupt environment. What’s more, modern-day technologies increase access to athletes of all ages, leading to teenagers with million-dollar earning potential long before they ever graduate high school.
While football feels like the most prominent of these examples, most professional (or even high-level college) sports are just a good world to be a grifter, particularly if you’re looking to take advantage of young people.
Ron Weaver didn’t really want to take advantage, he just wanted to play football. It’s a simple desire, one he shared with God knows how many American kids in the 1980s, but not many kids went to the lengths Weaver would ultimately go.
By all accounts, Weaver was a pretty good wide receiver in high school. He was all-league at Monterrey High in California, but he didn’t receive any substantial offers for college. He started at Monterey Peninsula College, then transferred to Sacramento State in 1988. By NCAA regulations, 1989 would have marked his final year of eligibility for college sports, and Weaver took the leap to try and make it as a professional football player.
He tried out for the British Columbia Lions (Hey, more CFL content! The weirdness with this league truly never ends.) and the Houston Oilers prior to the 1990 seasons for each league, but he was apparently not fast enough nor strong enough. Downtrodden and roughly 24 years old, Weaver’s dream ended.
Temporarily.
According to a 1996 Sports Illustrated article, Weaver stayed in shape and his love for football never waned. In 1992, he jumped at the chance to help coach at Monterey Peninsula College, running drills with the players and realizing that he was still as physically gifted as the best of them.
Weaver befriended a guy named Joel McKelvey. McKelvey is only notable because he was about seven years Weaver’s junior, and as such he would be closer to the correct age to play college football.
One night “over beers,” Weaver basically said, “Hey, how would you feel if I assumed your name and tried to go play college football again?” McKelvey apparently responded with, “Sure. Go for it.”
So Weaver did.
Ron Weaver walked into the coaches’ office at Pierce Junior College and said his name was Joel Ron McKelvey, he’d taken about two years off to work after high school, and he was interested in playing football. The coach agreed to give Weaver a workout, and it went well; the dude was an outstanding athlete.
All he needed to enroll at Pierce was tuition and a Social Security Number. Apparently, the real McKelvey was easygoing, as he provided the requisite number and Weaver assumed his identity as a student and got on the football field. He was apparently an absolute workout monster beloved by his teammates and coaching staff.
Even more useful, he was getting good at football.
Over the course of his 20s, Weaver managed to trim more than a tenth of a second off his 40-yard dash time and added at least 75 pounds to his max bench press. He was now putting up the kind of speed/strength numbers that major college programs salivate over.
The team stunk, but in his second season with Pierce (which was his sixth season of collegiate football, which is… not allowed), Weaver was an all-state selection for junior colleges. That kind of performance puts you on the radar for big schools. And the University of Texas came calling.
Sure enough, all Weaver had to do to enroll at Texas was the same thing he did at Pierce. He continued using McKelvey’s identity, but he now had his degree from Pierce as a document to “prove” who he was. Just like that, he enrolled at Texas and joined the football team.
It was a good time to join Texas. In Weaver’s first season on the field, the 1995 Longhorns went 10-1-1 in the regular season, winning the Southwest Conference. They lost to Virginia Tech in the Sugar Bowl, but ended the season ranked in the top 15. However, Weaver only saw the field sparingly. To his credit, he didn’t care, as he told SI, “My lifelong dream was to play football, I wanted it to last forever.”
But that Sugar Bowl was when things finally unraveled.
Back in Weaver’s hometown, The Salinas Californian ran a feature pointing out that Texas Longhorn cornerback Joel McKelvey was actually Ron Weaver, age 30, playing his seventh season of college football. The news broke one day before the Sugar Bowl. Weaver claimed he would provide a birth certificate, but he ultimately fled New Orleans before the game and went to his sister’s house in Los Angeles.
LA is where the Sports Illustrated interview occurred. Bonita, who was Weaver’s sister and went by the name Bo Money, was… eccentric. The article describes her as “a former talent agent, actress and model who seems to work the fringes of the movie industry, getting famous in typically Hollywood ways.”
What ways, you ask? She landed on national news shows A Current Affair and Hard Copy after she smacked Shannen Doherty, star of Beverly Hills 90210. On interview day, her apartment reportedly hosted a hairdresser, a makeup artist, a publicist, a screenwriter, a man who claimed to be a Saudi prince, and the prince’s friend. Wikipedia also notes that Bo Money later became girlfriend to three-weight-class world boxing champion Hector Camacho.
You might think the whole thing was ripe for a movie (the screenwriter surely did), but it was not meant to be. While there was interest in Hollywood about turning it into a book or movie, federal investigators threatened to indict the Weavers on conspiracy charges if they sold the story.
So now they’ll have to settle for appearing on sites like this, where we wonder at what age he would’ve lost the skill to make the roster at Texas.
For what it’s worth, Texas did not receive any punishment since its involvement was somewhat incidental. And since Weaver didn’t impact wins or losses, the team didn’t forfeit any games. It was a surprisingly clean break.