'Walking Fat Man' -- out of deals, out of money, out of chances

From time to time during 2005 I posted about this guy walking across the US from San Diego to New York. The desperate ex-Marine had ballooned to 410 pounds after being injured in an auto accident and was miserable, so he figured he could do the one thing he'd been good at back in the Marines: march. Walking 3000 miles might force him to lose weight, and it'd give him a chance to think over his life.

So he set out in April 2005 with almost no preparation, quickly got injured and wrecked his equipment, started over, dealt with more injuries... Eventually he got the book deal you'd expect, and someone jumped on and did a documentary of his crossing, which he completed in 13 months. During the trip he often wrote (in an online diary, natch) about how his wife back home was supporting him. He also often defended himself against detractors who, he said, sent him negative email (though we never saw any). Along the way he lost some weight -- but still wound up the trip weighing 320.

But now he is broke, nearing a final divorce, has blown through all the money he got on his book deal, and now the publisher is demanding the money back because no manuscript was ever delivered (Vaught said the ghostwriter prepared something unpublishable that "contained entire passages Vaught said weren't true and put words into his mouth he had never uttered or even thought"), and the documentary has no distributor. Since he lost less than half the weight he wanted to, and is now gaining it back, he seems to have wasted the whole point of the trip.

So he blew his book deal, he blew his chance at free publicity, he blew the whole purpose of the trip, he lost his family, and he is still fat. I feel sort of sorry for the guy, but my sympathy is limited. In America if you do one original thing and get a book deal, and then don't make the most of it, you really have a problem. Maybe he should go on that "Intervention" show.