On the beauty and joy of Terez Paylor, a teammate who will always be in our hearts
Of all the sights and sounds and experiences we are fortunate to encounter in covering sports, the most true fulfillment tends to be in the relationships.
At times, we find that engagement with the people we cover. In other ways, it’s in feedback from our audience … encouraging or dissenting.
But for many of us, the closest thing we might know to exultation in the work is the sense of shared adventures that only colleagues can know … and only teammates can really know.
So it was that on Monday night in Tampa, Blair Kerkhoff, Sam Mellinger and I went to a late dinner to exhale after the Super Bowl. And somehow we were talking, once again, with wonder about former Star writer Terez Paylor and his ascent in our business and his infinite work ethic and magnetic personality and his quirks.
I like to think Terez heard us or felt us in some way before he died unexpectedly at age 37 on Tuesday morning in Kansas City ... and took part of all of us with him.
I also like to think he knew how very loved he was all over this land: from his hometown of Detroit to his alma mater of Howard University in Washington, D.C., and surely all across the NFL in his job with Yahoo Sports.
It was Terez’s idea a few years ago to start calling our Chiefs’ coverage group the “A-Team,” and it tells you something about how he was the glue and the catalyst that we always figured we were just “a team” when he left.
For a while, I had misgivings about keeping the name. But now I figure it’s a nice little tribute to him that we should keep in perpetuity.
Not that we need the symbolism, exactly: Given the devastation all of us at The Star felt Tuesday and the indelible imprint he left, I truly know he’ll live forever within us.
Such sudden loss is unbearable, and we especially grieve for his family and fiancee Ebony Reed, and we’re all a long way from finding any solace right now.
But it’s also true that this dreadful event has set loose a stream-of-consciousness flood of memories — from the humorous to the poignant to the essence of who we think he was.
When I think of Terez, I’ll think of his relentless study of the game and endless desire to keep improving his craft and his creativity and that laugh and smile.
I’ll think of how proud he was to be a Pro Football Hall of Fame voter and how respectful and responsive players were to him in the Chiefs’ locker room.
I’ll remember a road trip to Baltimore that included going to the White House with him (and Sam and Blair and then-Star photographer David Eulitt) as the guests of Josh Earnest, press secretary to President Barack Obama and a Kansas City native and Chiefs/Royals fan. And I’ll smile as I think of the ease with which Terez engaged with Josh.
I’ll treasure his absolute gift for imitating voices, from Gordon Lightfoot to Sam Mellinger’s (and Sam’s of him) to channeling John Facenda for the “Autumn Wind” and conjuring that persona for a narration on electric football.
I’ll cherish the way he used to imitate Mizzou basketball coach Frank Haith saying my name, which Terez swore was with a favorably soft lilt that he started using on me himself and that often had me saying “Terez” back at him with the same touch.
I’ll smile as I picture how he could summon each of the very distinct voices of Chiefs linebackers Dee Ford, Tamba Hali, Justin Houston and Derrick Johnson and how badly I wanted him to put together a little one-man audio skit using each of them.
The first time I met Terez was at a University of Missouri basketball game in Columbia, Missouri, when I was working at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and he was taking on that beat for The Star.
A few weeks later, Missouri was playing at Baylor and we arranged to drive the 100 miles or so from Dallas to Waco, and we talked and talked and talked on the way to and from.
He felt like a friend from that day forward, and all the more so a year or so later when I heard from The Star about taking this job.
As I was considering the situation over lunch with Terez at Flat Branch Pub & Brewing in Columbia, he literally pounded his fist on the table and told me I had to take the job. Or words to that effect.
Not long after I arrived in 2013, Terez became part of the Chiefs beat. He was so good at what he did that we knew some day we might lose him to another job.
But I also know that each of us appreciated in real time those magical days of working with him, through the slog of training camp (and his downright geeky in-depth videos) or covering ongoing playoff heartbreak or brilliant podcasts he orchestrated
(Those were performance art, complete with his patented laugh to kick them off and segments such as “Old Man Football” or, once, a bit on “where we rip your airport” — which brought some conciliatory laughter for Sam and me as we sat in Atlanta on Tuesday afternoon.)
Luckily for us, Terez stayed around the region when he left for Yahoo in 2018. It was always something of a happening when he’d show up at the Chiefs’ facility, in part because of where he had gone in the business but in part because we all still felt connected to him.
One of my favorite pictures of Terez was taken at the Super Bowl last year by our sports editor, Jeff Rosen, and it makes me melt now to see him standing behind me, beaming, with his hands on my shoulders.
I’m 99 percent sure that was the last time I saw Terez but the time warp and confusion of COVID and seeing him on Zoom calls may be messing with my memory.
But I do know this:
Terez and I shared a birthday, Jan. 28, and I loved knowing that and trying to be the first to contact him in the wee hours every year.
This year, I was getting ready to conk out early-ish on the 27th, so I texted him at 11:49 p.m. and told him that it never gets old sharing the day with him, and that I hoped to see him in Tampa.
He texted back and shared the sentiments but told me he wouldn’t be going out of concerns over COVID.
I told him to stay safe and “stay gold.”
“Nothing gold can stay,” the Robert Frost poem ends. But Terez always will.
This story was originally published February 9, 2021 at 4:26 PM.