Stranded by coronavirus like rest of us, KC’s Kevin Harlan contends with new abnormal
Coincidentally but perhaps aptly symbolic, Kevin Harlan will turn 60 on June 21 — the originally scheduled latest possible date for the NBA Finals that would punctuate what might be perceived as a berserk annual calendar for the enthralling broadcaster whose words are as riveting as his voice.
But if Harlan appears to be a whirling dervish, or perhaps something like one of the Four Tops to whom he nimbly alluded during the Chiefs’ “Shift To Rose Bowl Right Parade” play in the Super Bowl, the calendar is quite methodical for a man who sometimes seems everywhere at once.
(Like the hologram practically cast in December by the University of Kansas graduate and national treasure we’re graced to be able to call one of our own here. That’s when he was drawn to call aspects of not just the Chiefs-Chargers game he was working at Arrowhead Stadium but elements of the Dolphins upsetting the Patriots with a crucial playoff implication for the Chiefs. When partner Rich Gannon said he was confused and asked which game Harlan was calling, Harlan said, “I’m calling both games! … I think I’m breaking every FCC rule in the book.”)
Like many of us of a certain age, Harlan prefers to go “old school.” While he’ll back up his schedule on his phone, he buys an academic calendar “the size of a small book” every fall and soon sets about filling in all the knowns ahead — many of them perennial.
Dozens of NBA games. The NFL postseason and Super Bowl. The NCAA Tournament.
With a multi-colored pen he also uses for game preparations, he clicks red to chart his game schedule and on-air responsibilities, green for his travel plans. Other business-related matters are etched in black, family-related in blue.
Then came March 11, when Harlan flew from Kansas City to Chicago O’Hare Airport and was switching planes to get to Milwaukee for the Bucks’ game against the Celtics the next day.
Suddenly, it all changed
On his way to the gate, he saw the 8:31 p.m. tweet from ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski saying simply but starkly, “The NBA has suspended the season” — the subtext obviously related to the emerging COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
He “raced down the corridor and concourse crossing,” as he put it, and was grateful gate agents “maneuvered things around” so he could get home.
Who knew he’d still be stranded here with virtually all of the sports world screeching to a close in the ensuing 24 hours? And that after what he called that “cavalcade,” he wouldn’t have an NCAA Tournament to narrate and animate for the first time in the last quarter-century?
(Not to mention a way of life extending back to covering his first one soon after graduating from KU — and after a stint broadcasting for the Kansas City-now-Sacramento Kings — when he recalled correctly that in 1984 Wake Forest beat Kansas in the second-round. And the several he covered at Missouri, including a Sweet 16 run when coach Norm Stewart was sidelined with cancer … but still provided a fond memory by calling in to the Tiger Network perhaps from his hospital bed.)
Who knew that ornately diagrammed calendar would have a resounding new feature during this disorienting and hollow time for us all?
“A couple nights ago, I started putting big X’s through (tournament games) that would be in my calendar the second I would get the new one,” he said. “And so it’s weird to do that.”
So … here we are, as he put it during a phone interview with The Star’s Blair Kerkhoff and yours truly that we “simulcast” into a podcast.
Something missing
Like many of us, Harlan understands the shutdown is for the greater good. But he also is left trying to reconcile part of his identity being straitjacketed and his hard-earned and hard-wired instrumentation spinning wildly.
Speaking on a 70-degree Thursday from his back porch in Mission Hills, Harlan thought about the buds on the trees and flowers starting to come up and people walking around.
All remind him of the time of year between the end of the NCAA Tournament and the start of the NBA playoffs.
And he lamented that there hardly could be a season when it felt like more was missing in sports, a diversion that typically helps us through times of crisis.
The tournament, with its office pools. Baseball’s opening day looming. The NBA and NHL playoffs, The Masters and The Kentucky Derby on the near horizon, events which like football in the fall have come to feel inseparably entwined with the four seasons themselves.
It adds up to the most “catastrophic” of times this could happen, he said, and that resonates for those of us who fear an impending mental health crisis amid the deprivation and isolation attached to this.
“When (all) that’s taken away,” he said, “you try to find a compass.”
A compass that for most of us now points almost exclusively to home, where he’s finding solace in having most of his family back from around the country.
And where he’s occupying himself with such tasks as “ramping up” tax preparation and finishing up expense reports. Like others among us, including Kansas coach Bill Self, he evidently has been assigned some chores.
Their “COVID-19 commandant,” aka his wife, Ann, perhaps has suggested cleaning out closets.
“So we’re cleaning out closets,” he said, laughing. More seriously, he called this “an unexpected nice little time with our family.”
He added, “So, you know, it’s funny. When one thing closes, another opens. And I guess that’s the most optimistic way to kind of look at this very different and weird time for all of us.”
Another optimistic way to look at it locally might be to consider how meaningful it was to the area that the Chiefs’ run to their first Super Bowl in 50 years just weeks ago wasn’t halted in progress by the virus.
To Harlan, who broadcast his 10th straight Super Bowl on Westwood One radio that night in Miami, the most poignant and even surreal element along the way was seeing Norma and Clark Hunt at last holding the AFC championship trophy named for the late Lamar Hunt.
And the image of fans celebrating struck him as “almost more compelling” than that of seeing players up on the stage afterward.
A disconcerting time
For all that, this is a disorienting time for all ... and, in its own way, for those immersed in sports for a living.
If he knew the NBA season was over, for instance, Harlan joked that he could let his mind go to mush. At least he’d know he had some down time before doing his annual NBA 2K video video game work and that his next broadcast wouldn’t be until he went back to his hometown of Green Bay to do Packers preseason games.
Instead, all of our schedules are only theories and mysteries right now. That’s one of the distinctions between this and a different kind of terrifying time when sports shut down: in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when the NFL canceled the next weekend’s games.
When play resumed, Harlan’s assignment was in Dallas, where, like other game broadcasters, he recalled being required to get on the PA system to essentially conduct pre-game ceremonies, such as moments of silence.
“I was almost more concerned about that (than the game broadcast) and hoping that I had the right tone in my voice,” he said. “Because it was not only heard in the stadium … (but also) we had a big (television) audience.”
It had a “very, very different” feeling than this, of course, with “a different kind of enemy” that the brightest minds in our country and world ultimately are facing together.
And yet there is an unsettling commonality between this and other times of peril, he noted, from world wars to the spread of fear during the Cold War and amid the Cuban Missile Crisis.
All different, but all evoking to some degree what Harlan called “the same feeling that we’re having right now about the unknown and what it’s going to bring.”
Father, son, and perspective
This is the known that Harlan has immersed himself in since he was around 11 or 12 years old. Back then, he wanted to be a pilot but was perhaps challenged by the math skills then deemed necessary.
In what he recalled as either sixth, seventh or eighth grade, he brought home his report card and had his father look it over. The math grade stuck out.
“He would look at the grade and then look at me. And then look back down at the grade and then look at me again,” he said, laughing, remembering the advice that came next: “‘You know, if it were up to me, I might think about a career in journalism.’”
As it happens, his father, Bob, had enormous appreciation of that work. He had been a journalism major at Marquette and sports editor of the student newspaper in sports. And in subsequent conversations, they’d talk about the importance of the fundamentals of “who, what, when, where, how.”
Also as it happens, his father was a longtime executive for the Packers who rose to their presidency in 1989 — long after Kevin had been a team ballboy and teen broadcaster of various sports at 10-watt WGBP-FM, the radio station for alma mater Our Lady of Premontre High School.
His father often listened to those games. And when the son came home, he typically offered him a list of what he liked and a list of “things that maybe I should improve on.”
He also offered many examples that set a tone. Those included a sight the son remembers from his office: a monthly planner, perhaps two feet by one foot, with penmanship that was “always precise and very neat” and embellished with important dates in red.
That may or not be why he came to keep his own calendars, Harlan said. But he imagines it planted an idea. And he has kept some version of them going back to those early days, at least in part because it has the therapeutic feel of a diary to him.
About “what I’ve got to do, and what I did, and where I was and where maybe my family was …” he said.
Even now, when the X’s mark a certain spot that, like all of us, he’ll never be able to forget.
But one this mellifluous voice of America reminds us to try to make the most of amid the void and accompanying bizarre circumstances.
“This is a special time that we have together as a family and kind of gives us a little perspective to all of us,” he said. “And I think a little perspective is good from time to time.”
This story was originally published March 21, 2020 at 5:00 AM.