Mike Lindell's biography, "Against the Wind," won't gloss over the unseemly details of his rise atop the corporate world as CEO of MyPillow.com.
After my February Q & A with Lindell, I received an e-mail: "I love your column and your stuff on the Buzz. I would like to point out a few things though about Mike. I realize that redemption is a great thing, but Mike was known as one of the biggest coke [users in Carver County for years before starting the pillow company," began the missive from a man named Doug.
"Absolutely" said Lindell owning up to his ungodly behavior with "crack cocaine." Doug's e-mail did not catch me off-guard because I spent a day with Lindell and his fiancée Dallas Yocum for that February interview and he told me some of the hair-raising stories he had shared with co-writer Michael Levine.
"Everything will be in there. There are 450 pages, I'm basically ending it" on Saturday, the day he is marrying Yocum, Lindell said. The book will include details of "14 near-death experiences [including the one about] how I fell under ice [on a lake] and couldn't find the hole to get back through. There was that one and the time I fell asleep on a motorcycle, crashed it. A lot of it is about faith, never give up. By the time you read the book if you didn't believe in God, you didn't read the book. There is no way I was protected that much, through addiction and all these things. People say, Why did you quit [doing drugs] Jan. 16, 2009? I knew exactly how far, by instinct, I could [go] and make the greatest comeback in history.
"I want people to think: You know if he can come back from that, and have this huge company — from four employees to 600-something employees — five years later, they can do it," said Lindell. He said he's not being "grandiose," just factual: "If you've been on crack cocaine I can go toe-to-toe with any story you can tell."
He said he recently started the Lindell Foundation to help others because of what he experienced. Employees "can go in there any time, it's also open to the public, for any need whatsoever, if they are having any problems. Something is going on at home or they have other problems; it's usually not work-related but it comes out at work — being late, getting into it with your superior. We've helped people with addictions, with their cars, spousal problems or with their mates."
The proof that Lindell's not running away from his past is that the wedding guests represent "a timeline of my life. Even my drug dealers are invited. They are friends of mine."
By the way, Lindell is a huge fan and now friend of Bob Seger, thus possibly explaining the title of the book.
New WNBA+NBA merger?
Word has it, locally and on the Web, that Minnesota Lynx player Monica Wright and Oklahoma City Thunder NBAer Kevin Durant are more than just friends. He's been courtside to more than one Lynx game, I'm told.
"Durant is rumored to have taken his longtime friendship with Wright to the next level," writes Beyondthebuzzer.com. "Just an opinion, but KD probably would be better off with someone like Wright than a video model or a celebrity girlfriend," writes blacksportsonline.com.
She's a beauty, and he's a doll who donated $1 million to Oklahoma tornado relief. Hoopsters, please feel free to confirm your romance with social media postings, as did Lindsey and Tiger. No pressure.
Meals for wheels
Chef Damon Holter, the Croix Valley Steak Sauce guy, kinda sorta had dinner with TV Chef Gordon Ramsay last week at the Calumet Inn in Pipestone.
My source claims they had dinner together, but Holter made it sound as though they were more or less in the same room. In Holter's defense, he signed a confidentiality agreement, because his presence there had something to do with shooting of one of Ramsay's Fox shows.
C.J. can be reached at cj@startribune.com and seen on Fox 9's "Buzz."
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