Sports Bar Launches Investigation After Obsessed Basketball Fan Secretly Changes Cable Package

You just have to look at the bare-chested dudes who fill the stands at Lambeau Field in December, or notice the homemade Duke Blue Devils tattoos on a stranger’s neck, or realize that people attend Mets games on purpose to know that sports fans aren’t known for being rational. But it seems that Kevin Cayton took his obsession with the Arizona Wildcats basketball team to new levels of crazy—and he’s facing two felonies and a decade-plus in prison because of it.

Last December, Cayton had to travel to Lake Delton, Wisconsin on a weekend when the Wildcats had a game scheduled. Instead of borrowing a friend’s DirecTV password or shouting at a shitty, endlessly buffering stream, he allegedly called Charter Spectrum, pretended to be the manager of a local restaurant, and tried to upgrade its cable package to include the PAC-12 channel so he could watch the game.

According to the Baraboo News Republic, the 51-year-old made at least 11 different calls to Charter Spectrum, telling representatives that his name was Pat Barkley and that he wanted to upgrade the channel lineup at Buffalo Phil’s restaurant. (Whoa, do you know HOW BAD you have to want something to willingly call a cable company even once?) Cayton might’ve gotten away with it, if he’d called back a couple of weeks later to cancel the channel; instead, the business manager of Buffalo Phil’s noticed that their cable bill was significantly higher and started to investigate.

The Lake Delton Police Department got involved and, oh boy, were they thorough. They collected 11 recordings from Charter Spectrum and, in one of them, the officers heard “Pat Barkley” step away from the phone and introduce himself as “Kevin.” In another, they listened to a woman in the background negotiating as she bought a car, and she mentioned that she worked at an Illinois healthcare facility. The cops contacted her at work, asked her about her recent car purchase and learned that she’d been at the Howard Buick-GMC dealership.

The officers scrolled through social media posts and found only one Kevin who worked at that dealership—and he was the same Kevin who had stayed at a hotel in Lake Delton in December. When Lake Delton’s finest visited Cayton at his office, he declined to speak to them, but they had enough dirt to arrest him on charges of felony identity theft for financial gain and unauthorized use of an entity’s identifying information.

He is scheduled to appear in court today, and could face up to 12 years in jail if he receives the maximum sentence for each charge. On the bright side, the Wildcats won all of their games in December—including whichever one Cayton watched at Buffalo Phil’s—so at least the felonies and fines were surely totally worth it.