Best "Never meet your heroes" Stories?

Pete Rose. Not a cool dude. Felt like digging up his Tops baseball card to toss it in the trash.

I’ve met quite a few celebrities but didn’t write about it in the other thread. Hands down, the one who seemed like the worst person and the biggest disappointment was Ken Jennings.

Heard him give a talk in-person, and he seemed extremely narcissistic and self-absorbed. After the talk was over, he was very dismissive of the people who were going up to him (which made me not go to him), and for a few minutes I just watched how he interacted with people and he treated people like dirt. It may have just been a bad day, and perhaps I saw him at a bad time, but as a featured guest speaker, I feel he should have been on better behavior and treated the people who were wanting to talk to him with more savoir faire.

EDIT: For the pre-emptive avoidance of doubt, I don’t know that I would have ever seen Ken Jennings as a role model, although I certainly had some degree of envy for his mental feats and had seen him competing on Tournament of Champions before. 

I saw Jeremy Piven on a Sunday night in a sleepy town a relative lives in. His show hit Groupon for 50% off and the theater was still at 40% capacity. He was pretty petty about how uneventful his career had been and even said why the f am I doing standup on a Sunday to a cheapskate crowd. Someone yelled Ari up at him and flew off the handle back at them. He had beef with The Rock who hasn’t taken a single acting class, yet is the highest paid actor in Hollywood where he did it like he was supposed to doing film school, bla bla bla.

A strange performance to say the least. I feel bad for the bros who paid for a meet and greet.

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I used to play golf with a NetJets pilot who had his share of run-ins obviously.  He said Carmelo Anthony and David Spade were two of the worst.  In Carmelo's case, not a lot of detail provided, just an asshole.  He said Spade would show up coked out with models who were taller than he was and annoy everyone throughout the flight.

I don't have anything specific, I'd just add that this usually happens because its hard to be good at both, meaning, great at business/sports and also be a fun person. 

Its like the NBA or golf, Kobe and Tiger are probably a lot of people's "hero" but that's only because they win and we build up who they were/are in our heads, meaning we think they are also fun to be around to social. When in reality, they most likely aren't and probably the more fun guy to be with would be the 8th guy on the Lakers or some journeyman on the PGA tour. 

Worked with a woman who was originally from Detroit. Her daughter was in Hailie Jades grade (unsure if same school).

Anyways, she said she saw Marshall at a number of volleyball games. Actually, she never didn’t see him in attendance. He was never ‘Em’ but just like any other dad cheering on his kid except he had this huge black bodyguard.

I spent the afternoon getting a ride from a mega church's senior pastor a decade or so ago (I was one-on-one in the car with a pastor who commanded a 20,000-50,000-person church, depending on how you measure it, i.e., online attenders, members, once-a-month people, etc.). I was dreading it because he was my hero and I never wanted to meet a hero lest it ruin it for me. The guy was terrific--funny, down to Earth, perfectly imperfect. He was rushing us between events across town and was driving...quite fast. I figured if I die I was going out the right way. He's a Jewish Christian and I asked him about dating a Jewish woman and he said something to the effect of, "No! It'll ruin your life. The in-laws will make your life miserable!"    

Not the traditional kind of "hero", but early in college when I was trying to determine what finance path I wanted to take, I found the blog of a guy who hit CF VP at 31 and kept a blog of his international travel experiences. I liked his writing style, and to my 20 year old self he seemed like a master of the universe. His path (and a few I saw on WSO) led me to pursue CF. Anyway, I commented on one post, asking him to elaborate on his success principles that he had mentioned, and he started posting about them before going dark.

He eventually took his blog down, and years later while trying to locate it on the wayback machine I stumbled across a site that gave the name of the person who registered the blog.. I found that he registered a few other sites, and it turns out he was the Financial Advisor he'd link to/talk up on his blog. No problem with that, but at the time I thought that VPs are the people who've "made it"- that at the VP level you'd stop chasing money or career changes since your life is perfect. Also found that this guy married the girlfriend he'd mention in his blog, but that they divorced shortly after.

I've since come to realize that no matter what level you are, there is always someone above you and there is always another level that is juuuust within reach.. but at the time, as a 23 year old analyst pulling $65k, I thought there was no way you could be a VP and not have a perfect life. So this experience was the first crack in that belief

EDIT: I should clarify that his actual career did indeed match up with what he said on his blog- just that it seemed like he was trying to start up a side gig of being a financial advisor. Which is what stuck out to me- aren't you happy and fulfilled? Why try to transition your career to something else? It was the first experience that showed me that no specific title or amount of money will suddenly make you happy

Taylor Swift, not as tall as the internet says she is and she was super duper rude

I don't have any heroes, but did have a crush on Erin Burnette 10 years ago. I saw her on Wall St. one day with this older guy and she didn't look attractive off screen to me. I was disappointed and glad that I didn't talk to her.

Kind of a tangent, but I played the trumpet for a long time, and I saw several of the greats in concert, eg Håkan Hardenberger, Alison Balsom, et al. One time I had been gifted tickets to a baroque concert by Ludwig Güttler, who's one of the greatest living baroque musicians, and after the concert I very sheepishly went up to the sacristy (the concert was in a church) and asked for an autograph. He replied somewhat annoyed that he would come out later to a table to sign - I got the autograph afterwards. And one time, my teacher and I went to see Håkan Hardenberger and after the concert my teacher said "let's get you an autograph" and we ran out of the concert hall to its back where the artist's door is, but apparently he had already left by then or they wouldn't let us through, I don't remember.

It's funny, great artists present such a burning energy in their work, but when you meet them outside of their performances, they are just like any other person.