It's a crazy weatherman JLB. Those ARE NOT outtakes, either.I live that viewing area and used to get the weather from him. Here's an article that just ran in the paper a few weeks ago. The guy still has a future in porn:
"Charlotte weatherman works to reclaim life
By MARK WASHBURN | The Charlotte Observer
Fans of his wacky weatherman act on WCCB-TV wouldn't have known him.
Even Mark Mathis wasn't sure who the man in the mirror was -- drunken, disheveled, solitary, hunkered down in a $99 room at a Doubletree hotel, a weekend destination he had chosen because he knew he could get vodka from room service if the bottle he'd brought along didn't do the trick.
"I saw a man that I didn't recognize," says Mathis, 38.
"It was almost like I saw the devil himself, a man who had been given so much and had made the decision to ruin his life.
"I knew that if I didn't get help, I was going to die."
Mathis joined Fox Charlotte's 10 p.m. newscast in March 2002, bringing a bombastic approach to forecasting.
He sang, he danced, he came dressed as a snowflake, he swung the microphone like a lariat. Sometimes he'd never even get around to the weather in his 90-second solos.
Viewers would call the station to complain about his clowning, vowing never to watch again. But they would, if only so they could call the station the next day to complain some more.
Mathis became the foundation of the personality-driven matrix WCCB built to overcome the fact it had the smallest TV newsroom in town. Before long, its ratings topped competing newscasts produced by newsrooms four times its size.
Fox Charlotte became competitive, drawing more than 100,000 viewers for the first time, and a young audience at that, the kind coveted by advertisers. And Mathis was the station's best-known personality, a nightly splash of unpredictable bonhomie.
Life in the limelight
Mathis admits craving the limelight all his life.
He was born in Austin, Texas, a hyperactive middle child. In fourth grade, he got a solo in a Mary Poppins skit before a crowd of 3,000 for a family-night show sponsored by First Baptist Church of Dallas. He vividly remembers the thrill he got from the applause.
At Baylor University in Waco, Texas, he majored in broadcasting and after graduation went on to a series of forecasting jobs at local TV stations, including in Dallas, Austin and Charleston.
Intense partying
Through the years, his after-work partying grew more intense, a tonic to tame a gnawing restlessness, he says.
He spun through money, buying drinks for everyone in the bar, taking spur-of-the-moment weekend trips to San Francisco or South Beach.
"It was not uncommon for me to spend $1,500 on a Saturday night in my Dallas and Austin days," Mathis recalls.
In 2000, he was arrested for drunken driving near San Diego and vowed to curb his ways.
Things were OK for a while. Then in 2003, a year after he joined Fox Charlotte, he made a joke at the expense of Gastonia and disappeared for a month. WCCB did little to dispel the notion he'd been suspended for the remark.
In fact, Mathis had decided his drinking was unmanageable, and he scheduled himself for rehabilitation at a Texas treatment facility.
First date
Rebecca Branner remembers their first date about 18 months ago. He took her to Latorre's and didn't order a drink.
"I thought, wow, that's cool. A guy who doesn't drink," said Branner, 34, a Charlotte artist.
"Then I asked him, is that by choice or do you have a problem? He said by choice."
But the illness exerted itself again late in the summer.
After about six months of sobriety, Mathis let his 12-step program slip and started having the occasional drink. Then a bottle of wine at one sitting. And then more.
"I got the thought I could drink like a normal human being," he recalls. "It was a self-deception phase."
One day in August, he called the station and said he couldn't work. It was clear to those at Fox Charlotte that he had relapsed.
"They knew and suspended me for a couple days," Mathis recalls. And he got back on the straight and narrow.
But by late fall, alcohol was on his mind frequently. Then he started disappearing on weekends, checking into Charlotte-area hotels and spending the time alone and drunk.
"When I'd run out of liquor, I'd just call down to room service," he says. "That's why I'd stay in nice hotels. Seedy hotels don't have room service."
Mostly he drank vodka and wine. He'd put a splash of soda on top of the vodka and drink it through a straw. He says he would down glasses of merlot like they were shots.
Three to five times over the course of the last year, he admits, he used cocaine to extend the high.
The bottom
He managed to keep the drinking away from work hours until Nov. 5. It was a Friday evening and he left the studio around dinnertime. He bought a bottle of wine and checked into the Doubletree.
Branner knew something was wrong when she couldn't reach him on his cell phone. Fearing he was out on another binge, she called the station to see where he was.
He had left for a meeting, she was told, and had not returned to prepare for the 10 p.m. newscast or the follow-up magazine show "Fox News Edge."
"Then he called me from the hotel at 9:30 p.m. and said, 'Come get me,' " Branner recalls.
She did. And infuriated by yet another relapse in such a short time, she took the tough love approach.
"I spent the next three hours yelling at him," she recalls. "I told him, 'You're disgusting me.' I told him to get his stuff and get out."
Mathis booked a flight to Dallas the next day to visit his parents and enter a second rehabilitation program.
Fired
Two weeks after entering a rehabilitation program at the Starlight Recovery Center in Center Point, Texas, he was told by Fox Charlotte that he was being fired.
"I loved it over there," Mathis says. "I loved all the people there. I need to make amends to them. They're not interested in 'I'm sorry.' They've heard that before."
In the two Carolinas, there are an estimated 960,000 people who abuse alcohol or are alcoholics. Nationally, nearly 14 million Americans -- or one in every 13 adults -- are alcoholics or alcohol abusers.
While there is no cure for the illness of alcoholism, there are treatment programs and even medications to help alcoholics stop drinking.
The illness cuts across lines of gender, race and nationality. Men are at higher risk, and alcohol problems are highest among young adults 18 to 29. Relapses are not uncommon, particularly for people in the early stages of rehabilitation.
Abstinence is the solution.
"I know I can never have another drink for the rest of my life, period," Mathis says.
Mathis was making more than $100,000 as Fox Charlotte's forecaster, getting speaking fees for public appearances and doing commercials for an Asheville Dodge dealer that paid $800 a week. His annual income was near $160,000.
Now the money is mostly gone, squandered on trips, good times, partying.
Mathis now spends his days in Charlotte working out (he's lost 20 pounds since November), attending meetings of his 12-step program, studying the Bible and saying hello to people who recognize him on the street.
When Mathis returned from rehabilitation, Branner agreed to pick him up at the airport.
"I'm not the kind of girl who asks guys to marry me," Branner said last week. "But I definitely see us together."
And she adds, smiling, "I just don't want him to think he's got me yet."
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