Three definitive Terez Paylor stories: These KC Star stories deserve to be shared again
Talk about an outpouring of love.
Even if you didn’t know Terez Paylor personally, many of you have shared on social media and elsewhere that it felt like you did through through the endless and excellent stream of stories and video work and podcasts he produced.
Maybe you never shared catfish and fries from the Phillips 66 near the old KC Star building, or beers in a rundown Boston dive, but you felt connected with him just the same. Perhaps you were drawn to a story on then-Chiefs cornerback Steven Nelson (Terez marveled after meeting up with him for an interview how no one else in the coffee shop recognized him) or a video he did with Deion Sanders, or one of his many excellent broadcasts with The Star’s “A-Team” or, later, Yahoo teammate and confidant Charles Robinson.
Whatever Terez did until his untimely passing this week at just 37, he poured his heart into it 110 percent, and that resonated with readers and viewers in Kansas City and beyond. I’ve linked some heartfelt tributes to him here but would also encourage you to check out Henry Bushnell’s great Yahoo story, as well as this touching piece Charles wrote about him the other day.
A few other things Terez wrote for The Star during his dozen years in Kansas City stand out to me as I spend this week remembering my friend. I’ve decided to compile and share several here, in one monster take, lest they be lost to time.
The first is a story TP wrote in 2011 when he was covering high school sports for The Star. He pitched me an idea about previewing the state football playoffs with a feature. Good, right? “Here’s the catch, man,” he explained in a slower, lower tone: “It’s about this coach from the fringe of our coverage area. But man, it’s a great story. A sad story. He recently lost his wife and has been trying to rediscover meaning in his life.” Intrigued, I told Terez to start writing.
By God if he didn’t turn in a beautifully human snapshot of this coach from rural southeast Kansas. We used to talk about him one day returning to The Star as a columnist, if he so desired, and he would’ve excelled at that, too.
Next up is his installment in a series we ran several years ago under the heading “Stuff I Like.” A get-to-know us spotlight on a different member of the newsroom each week. Hat tip to colleague Sharon Hoffmann for remembering this one, in which, when it was Terez’s turn to take part, he shared some of the “stuff” he was digging during that period of his life. He loved the series “Black Mirror,” for instance, and got me hooked on it, too. One of his favorite episodes was Fifteen Million Demerits. We’d laugh and shudder about its dystopian twists, and those in other episodes. Terez appreciated Hollywood and was a master of impressions (his Rocky and Tony Montana impersonations, anything Al Pacino, really, were legendary). An affinity for good TV and cinema comes through in his second piece below.
Finally, the Alex Smith story. THE Alex Smith story, on the veteran quarterback being traded to Washington by the Chiefs in a move that made Patrick Mahomes their starter. Breaking this story ahead of guys he admired, like Adam Schefter, Ian Rapoport and (as TP would growl) “Field (effing) Yates,” well, this delighted him to no end. This story was one of the most-trafficked ever on Kansascity.com at the time, right up there with our Royals World Series coverage, and TP paid close attention to those numbers. “How many page views now?” he’d text me. This was back before reporters had their own “dashboards” for monitoring site traffic, and Terez was proud to hear that number climb each time he inquired.
Terez was a competitive man. He so badly wanted to earn a national job — so much so that, even as I dreaded losing him, I came to want that for him, too. I was thrilled for him when his efforts on the Smith story landed him the gig at Yahoo.
He also yearned to find true love. My wife and I have talked a lot this week about how he’d visit our place and sit on our couch or front porch, beverage in hand, and question her earnestly about how to find one’s soulmate. He eventually did, of course, falling in love with a wonderful woman named Ebony Reed. As he’d confided early in their courtship, “Ebs is The One.”
Reminiscing is therapeutic, and I appreciate you indulging it. But now let’s let Terez do the talking.
Toughest kind of loss
Richmond football assistant Reis Wright is still trying to cope with death of pregnant wife Tisharria in car accident
Published Nov. 19, 2011
What’s going on inside the house on Vandiver Road? There’s a man here, mourning, playing a black guitar with equal parts regret and sorrow. There’s a fridge stocked full of beer, and, toward the back, a small room with a burned-out light and more than a dozen unused wedding presents.
What’s going on inside the house on Vandiver Road? An assistant football coach at Richmond High School lives here. He is 28 years old, with a 4-inch scar on his forehead and a gimpy leg he tries hard to disguise. Despite these physical imperfections, he has a reputation as a free-spirited, happy-go-lucky guy.
Only, Reis Wright isn’t very happy these days.
His colleagues, players and friends suspect it, but they don’t judge him. They can’t imagine what he’s going through. What do you do when you’ve lost your soulmate? How do you deal with the guilt of knowing you could have prevented it?
They figure Reis deserves some leeway, even when he holes himself up in that house, alone with his beer and his conscience. But they still worry about him.
Truth be told, Reis worries about himself. The holidays are coming, and his one-year wedding anniversary is in January.
Feb. 14 will be the worst of all, though. For the rest of his life, a day manufactured for couples will mark the anniversary of the night he lost not only his wife, but another person who was very special to him as well.
“I wouldn’t mind November being extended for a little while,” he says.
How did Kelly Michale know that Reis was just right for her friend, Tisharria Huggins?
The first thing Michale noticed was the hair -- long and flowing and brownish-blonde.
Then she saw the muscles. At 5 feet 9 and about 190 pounds, Reis was a former college running back who helped Platte County High to a state title in 2000.
And when Michale discovered he played the guitar? Well, that clinched it.
“He looked like a California surfer,” Michale says. “But when I met him, I was like, ‘This is what Tisharria is looking for!’ “
Michale and another mutual friend arranged a casual meeting between Reis (pronounced “Reese”) and Tisharria in July 2008, and it didn’t take long to see they shared a lot in common. Not only were they both athletes-turned coaches — Tisharria became the girls basketball coach at Ruskin High after a four-year career at Wichita State — they were family-minded people who believed in God, laughed at the same things and even shared an obsession with gym shoes.
“We’d go shoe shopping and spend three hours in the mall,” says Reis, an elementary physical-education teacher.
But they had differences, too, and not just skin color. They were only a year apart in age when they met — he was 26, she was 27 — but Reis was immature. He liked to drink and he liked to date, and if he wanted something, he bought it. Bills were an afterthought.
“Reis was a little wild; someone who needed a little guidance,” says Jared Ripley, an art teacher at Richmond. “And in Tisharria, he found someone who was more than willing to give it to him.
Tisharria demanded the best from Reis, but she did it out of love. They were homebodies, and on Sundays, they loved to snuggle together, drink beer and root on the Chiefs.
“I was hanging with my best friend, and somebody I was totally in love with at the same time,” Reis says. “It was perfect, man. It really was.”
He figured this out quickly. They had dated for just a month when Reis asked Tisharria to be his girlfriend. She said yes, of course, and later that night, he did something he’d never done for a woman before — he played the guitar for her.
He began with a Pearl Jam song called “Last Kiss,” which he chose because it was easy to play.
Oh, where oh where can my baby be? The Lord took her away from me ...
Tisharria, always the critic, told him singing was not his thing. But she loved the way he played, and she melted at the sentiment. The guitar player had landed the girl with a song about a car crash.
It would be a few years before Reis would anguish over the irony.
Over the next two years, Reis and Tisharria became inseparable. They agreed to marry in the summer of 2011 and then moved up the date to January when Tisharria discovered she was pregnant in November 2010.
The pregnancy was not planned, and Tisharria — who by then had become a graduate assistant for Pittsburg State’s women’s basketball team — was worried.
“Listen,” Reis told her over the phone, “you have a good man. I’m going to be here. We’ll be fine.”
Having a child on the way was an added responsibility, to be sure, but Reis had grown up a lot since he met Tisharria. He cared more about his appearance now, and he began dreaming big. Maybe he could be a head coach one day, or even a principal. He was ready to provide.
“He actually cared about somebody else,” says longtime friend Joel Page, a fellow assistant coach on the Richmond football staff. “It wasn’t just about Reis anymore.”
Last fall, with Richmond in the midst of a magical 15-0 season, Reis routinely made the three-hour commute to Pittsburg to see “his little superhero,” the woman he credits for changing his life.
“I was on top of the world, man,” Reis says. “We won state, I’m getting married to my dream girl, and then I come to find out we were pregnant? I felt like the man.”
Reis and Tisharria got married in January — she was adamant they keep her pregnancy a secret — and come mid-February, they were ready to find out the sex of the baby. They favored naming it Liam if it was a boy, Jurnee if it was a girl.
The doctor’s appointment for the ultrasound was set for Feb. 15, the day after Valentine’s Day.
Reis and Tisharria sped southbound on 260th Street, toward Joplin. It was Feb. 14, the day for lovers, but they had been fighting. Reis was being immature again, so much so that the day before, Tisharria had gone to church without him — a rarity.
“Just being a punk,” Reis says now of his attitude.
They’d made up in time for Valentine’s Day, and once Reis arrived in Pittsburg that night, they looked at their wedding pictures together for the first time and decided to celebrate with a simple dinner.
Tisharria, who was more than four months pregnant by now, was driving. She’d taken this road dozens of times because Joplin had better restaurants and a big mall that allowed her to indulge that passion for gym shoes.
But as they approached the intersection of Kansas 171 in Cherokee County, she noticed a stop sign on her right that was twisted to the side and was not facing them directly. She asked Reis whether that was their stop sign; he said no.
But it was. She sped through the intersection, and the next thing Reis remembers was the headlights. A car traveling eastbound had smashed into the passenger side of Tisharria’s Oldsmobile Alero.
In the aftermath, Reis was groggy. His face had been badly cut, and his right leg was broken. Blood was everywhere, but it was not Tisharria’s. Reis looked to his left, and his wife’s eyes were closed, head against the window. She was breathing, and her face was unscarred. Reis was sure he’d see her again, even as he was being airlifted to a hospital.
When Reis awoke, he saw his mother. He was groggy, but he remembers being surprised that his little superhero wasn’t also there alongside him in the hospital room.
“Where’s Tisharria?” he asked.
His mother told him the terrible news: Tisharria was dead, and they couldn’t save the baby. Turns out it was a girl.
As bad as the physical pain was — it would be months before Reis could walk again — that anguish paled in comparison to the emotional effects that followed. His future, his hopes and dreams ... all of it crashed down on him at once. And along with the aching came the questions.
Why didn’t he drive?
Why didn’t he play it safe and tell Tisharria to stop?
Why did God have to take the both of them?
Why was he still alive?
“You feel,” Reis says quietly, “like you’re not worthy to live.”
Reis’ saving graces in the months since the accident have been his family and the Richmond community. When he left the hospital in late February, Reis — who had never been one for cleaning — returned to a spotless home, thanks to Ripley and Page, who also took turns shuttling him wherever he needed to go.
Cards and letters poured in from people he didn’t know, and for weeks, an endless stream of visitors dropped off huge, home-cooked meals.
“The dude gained like 20 pounds because he was eating a full-course meal every night,” Ripley says.
Reis returned to teaching about a month after the accident and continued coaching track and football. The feelings of unworthiness haven’t disappeared -- far from it -- but he keeps a brave face for his football players, who have put together a 12-1 season and are only one victory away from reaching the state championship game again.
Star senior Gabe Vandiver says he and the rest of the running backs go out of their way to make practices as stress-free as possible for their position coach. That means a lot to Reis, who would like to be a role model for his players. This desire makes it easier to be positive around them.
“They’ve had my back from day one,” Reis says. “At least 15 of them came to the funeral. That meant everything to me.”
But the past is never far away, especially when he’s alone. That’s when the battle between the good Reis and the bad Reis rages.
On a recent weeknight, Reis climbs into a black truck after practice and turns onto a narrow dirt road. He makes a sharp turn, drives about a quarter of a mile and turns into a driveway. In front of him is the creaky old house on Vandiver Road.
He rents this place, about 10 minutes away from the high school. In many ways, it is a shrine to Tisharria. He’s hidden their wedding rings, their love letters and most of their gifts far from view, but at least 20 pictures of her hang on the walls, many of them grouped together into two large collages in the living room.
He literally cannot turn anywhere without seeing her face, and this is both a good and bad thing. Sometimes, he sees those pictures and is overcome with sorrow. It’s not uncommon for him to come home after work, reach into his fridge and grab some beer.
“Sometimes, a little more than I should,” he admits.
Those who know Reis worry about their friend. They call and text him often, inviting him to all sorts of events. More often than not, he turns them down. But there are signs that he is healing. He looks at those pictures of Tisharria and recalls the good times they shared. These are the moments that fortify him, that remind him that he must stay strong — not just for himself, but for the family he never got to grow old with.
“It would be too easy to give up, way too easy to give up, on life and everything,” he says. “If I just sat around and drank and was negative all the time, I’d be doing such a disservice to her and Jurnee, it would not even be right. I want her to be proud of the person she married.”
The man Tisharria fell in love with is not scared to die anymore, but he is firm in his conviction to live. He believes that she would want him to find somebody else, to become the father and husband she always believed he could be.
He has decided that when he is ready to move on, he will take down the photos of Tisharria. It wouldn’t be fair to put that burden on another woman. He still doesn’t know when that will happen -- the pain of his loss is still too fresh, and this manifests itself once in a while when the right combination of sadness and hope takes hold of him. That’s when he grabs the instrument his lost love treasured the most, sits on his couch, and pours out his heart.
What’s going on inside the house on Vandiver Road?
A good man in mourning is playing “Last Kiss” on his guitar again, fighting a never-ending battle he knows he will somehow win.
Oh, where oh where can my baby be?
The Lord took her away from me
She’s gone to heaven, so I got to be good
So I can see my baby when I leave this world.
Stuff I Like, right now: ‘Black Mirror,’ ‘Luke Cage,’ Wings Cafe
Published Nov. 6, 2016
Here’s what Kansas City Chiefs beat reporter Terez Paylor is into:
“Black Mirror”
When I was a kid, I loved the Fourth of July, and not because of the fireworks. July 4 meant “The Twilight Zone” marathon on the Sci-Fi channel, and I couldn’t get enough of it. So understand, what I’m about to say is high praise coming from me: Netflix’s “Black Mirror” is the evolutionary “Twilight Zone.” It’s a superb and cynical show about technology and the way it has changed us. Season 3 just popped up, but start with Season 1 and give it at least three episodes (though you’ll really be missing out if you skip Episodes 4 and 5). You won’t be disappointed.
Wings Cafe
I’m a classic dude, which means I’m into sports, beer and wings. And while I like all sorts of wing places around KC - including the Peanut - one of my favorites is Wings Cafe, which dubs itself an “artisan wings restaurant.” The owner, Lee, is a cool dude, and the wings (and catfish) are excellent. My favorites are the traditional buffalo and ranch and Cajun dry rubs. The original location is on Englewood Road north of the river, and a second spot at 39th and Broadway opened last year.
Snkrs
I fashion myself as a mid- to low-level sneakerhead, and my brand of choice is Nike - specifically Jordan brand. This iPhone and Android app is the way I stay up on all the newest Jordan releases. And yes, your boy has his eyes on the Space Jam 11s set to come out in December (insert fire emoji).
“Luke Cage”
Let’s see: a show about a large African-American male who likes to wear hoodies, has a deep moral code and is literally bulletproof with superhuman strength? Why yes, I’m in. Big time. Throw in the presence of two of my favorite actresses — Rosario Dawson and Simone Missick (a Detroit native and Howard U. alum, like me) — and that’s a recipe for an automatic watch on Netflix for your boy. (And just for the record, here’s how much I revere “Black Mirror”: I interrupted my “Luke Cage” watching to binge-watch the entire third season.)
As a reporter and football junkie, I’m interested in a bunch of stories that pop up everyday, but I don’t have the time to read them right away. Pocket, however, is a lifesaver. With this app, I can scout Twitter and save a story directly to my phone. That way, when I’m on a flight and don’t have cellphone service, I can read all the things I’ve been meaning to.
Mr. Smith goes to Washington
Chiefs trade Smith, clearing the way for Mahomes
Published Jan. 31, 2018
Quarterback Alex Smith has a new home, as sources tell The Star that the Chiefs have reached agreement to trade their veteran starter of the last five seasons to Washington.
The Chiefs will receive a 2018 third-round pick and promising young cornerback Kendall Fuller in exchange, a source confirmed, though any trade involving Smith can’t be completed until the first day of the new league year, which begins at 3 p.m. on March 14. But the sources say the deal is in place and will definitely proceed.
Fuller, 22, was a third-round pick for Washington in 2016. He’s coming off a season in which he recorded 55 tackles, 10 passes defensed and four interceptions and emerged as one of the NFL’s best slot defenders.
Smith, 33, is coming off a stellar season in which he set career-highs in passing yards (4,042), touchdowns (26) and passer rating (104.7), throwing just five interceptions.
But Smith was entering the final year of his contract with the Chiefs, and he has a cap number of $20.6 million for 2018. By trading him, the club stands to save $15.6 million.
The deal also clears the way for 2017 first-round draft pick Patrick Mahomes to become the Chiefs’ new starting quarterback. Mahomes’ regular-season NFL debut, a 27-24 win over the Denver Broncos on Dec. 31, was a success.
Mahomes completed 22 of 35 passes for 284 yards with an interception in that game and showed poise while leading the Chiefs’ game-winning drive.
“I think he’s got what it takes, man,” Denver cornerback Aqib Talib said at the Pro Bowl. “He’s got a super strong arm, he can make all the throws. He made great reads in our game. I know we had a simple game plan on defense, but he made great reads and took control of the game.”
Talib said the Broncos were intent on blitzing Mahomes and playing man defense. But Mahomes made them pay.
“He just needs to keep at it, keep on studying, because this league is year-to-year, and you can be super-high one year and super down the next,” Talib said.
Indeed. But word has already spread around the league about Mahomes’ prodigious talent ahead of his debut as the Chiefs’ full-time starter.
“Patrick, everything I hear, he’s gonna be great,” Hall of Fame coach Tony Dungy said. “They love him in Kansas City.”
Hall of Famer receiver Cris Collinsworth agreed.
“(I heard) he’s like a secret weapon,” Collinsworth said.
Smith posted a 50-26 record as a starter since arriving in Kansas City from San Francisco for two second-round picks in 2013. He has made two straight Pro Bowl appearances.
Smith’s contract extension with Washington will be four years for $94 million, with $71 million in guaranteed money, according to a source with knowledge of the deal.
This story was originally published February 11, 2021 at 2:16 PM.