Kevin Harlan’s early talent opened doors
Announcer was doing play-by-play commentary even before he had a job
Allen Fieldhouse and ‘this beautiful campus’ convince the Wisconsin kid to attend the University of Kansas.
DANNY LUPPINO
Thursday, May 10th, 2007
The deep, husky voice is familiar to anybody who watches football.
The enthusiastic bellowing of “right between the eyes” is instantly recognizable to basketball fans.
Over the last 25 years, that voice has told the stories of epic KU comebacks, the rebirth of the Chiefs franchise and too many memorable NBA moments to count. Kevin Harlan, the man behind the voice and his story is just as compelling as any he has told on an NFL Sunday. It is a story of a boy who worked hard to achieve his one goal, a student whose mentor offered him unflinching support and a family man who was able to find time for what was really important to him amid the hectic schedule that his fame brought.
Just soaking in Allen Fieldhouse, seeing this beautiful campus, I was completely taken.
- Kevin Harlan
“I knew what I wanted to do”
Harlan has known sports his entire life. His father, Bob Harlan, is president of the Green Bay Packers.
Harlan was born in 1960 in Milwaukee and grew up in Green Bay, where his father’s position as assistant general manager allowed him access that most kids could only dream about and introduced him to sports broadcasting.
“There was a brief time where I wanted to be a commercial airline pilot,” Harlan said. “But for the most part I have always known this is what I wanted to do. When you know what you want to do at an early age, that just starts the whole thing.”
Harlan said during his childhood he would sometimes go into the broadcasting booth at Lambeau Field and make up play-by-play for imaginary Packers games. By the time he was a sophomore in high school, he was doing the real thing, broadcasting his school’s sporting events on the school radio station. It was a tape of a high school hockey game that first got Harlan noticed and began the chain of events that landed him in Kansas.
A broadcaster at the University of Wisconsin, Bob Johnson, heard the tape and began recruiting Harlan to study under him. At the same time, CBS broadcaster Gary Bender heard the tape and told Bob Harlan what he thought Kevin should do.
“I was all set to go to Wisconsin,” Harlan said. “Then Gary Bender was doing a Packers game for CBS. He was a KU alum, and he talked to my dad and told him I needed to go to Kansas and learn under Tom Hedrick.”
Hedrick, a veteran broadcaster and KU journalism professor, had known Bob Harlan for about 25 years when Bob called him to say his son wanted to be a sports broadcaster and asked Hedrick to help.
“I asked ‘is he actually good or is this just a dad talking about his son?’” Hedrick recalled. “He said he would send me a tape. After about two or three minutes of the tape I just started laughing and I thought ‘this kid is phenomenal.’”
Harlan nervously called Hedrick to arrange a visit to Lawrence in January 1978.
“Just soaking in Allen Fieldhouse, seeing this beautiful campus, I was completely taken,” Harlan said.
To make things even better, Hedrick told Harlan that he would get the opportunity to fill in for Hedrick on his local sports radio show.
“That sold me right there,” Harlan said.
“As much work as I could possibly handle”
“When I went there,” Harlan said of his arrival at Kansas, “it was like I was stepping into a completely different world.”
Hedrick kept his promises to Harlan, who, as a freshman, would fill in for Hedrick on his radio show whenever Hedrick was out of town.
By the time he was a junior Harlan had enough experience that the Kansas City Chiefs hired him to produce the radio pre-game show.
All of this work, which required Harlan to be involved with a broadcast every Thursday through Sunday, left him little time for a normal college life. Still, he was involved in the Greek system and frequented local landmarks like The Wheel and Joe’s Bakery.
“There was still enough freedom to get just to the edge of trouble,” Harlan said.
By his senior year, Harlan had his own KU sports talk show on Sunday nights and did some KU baseball play-by-play on Kansas City radio. He was no longer a broadcasting student, but a broadcaster who happened to be a student.
“That put me in a position that few kids in the country were in as far as practical experience,” Harlan said.
His first big break professionally came three days after the end of his senior year, when Kansas City television station KCMO told him its announcer for Kansas City Kings NBA games was leaving and he was the choice as the replacement.
“By the time I was walking down the hill, I knew I would be an NBA announcer,” Harlan said.
A “meteoric” rise
After graduating with a degree in broadcast journalism in 1982, Harlan worked for one year as the voice of the Kings before the station lost the rights to the games and acquired KU football and basketball in its place. Fittingly, Harlan was paired with Tom Hedrick.
They worked KU games for a year before the station lost the rights. Harlan bounced around for a while until he did the radio broadcast of the spring football scrimmage for the University of Missouri.
The game itself was not notable, but it served as Harlan’s audition for a job that just opened up, the radio voice of the Kansas City Chiefs. He got the job.
While with the Chiefs, Harlan gained local fame for his catchphrase, “oh baby what a play,” which he would exclaim after a great play by the Chiefs.
“It was a Monday night game against Buffalo, the first Monday Night Football game in Arrowhead in a long time, and I guess I used it a couple times during that game,” Harlan said. “I was driving home with my wife after the game and listening to the post-game show and some drunk guys in the parking lot called in and talked for a while and then when they were finished they said ‘and one more thing: Oh baby, what a play!’ So I thought people must have liked it and I started using it.”
In 1994. FOX hired Harlan as one of its play-by-play announcers for NFL coverage. He was now working a network television job, the top of the ladder in sports broadcasting, and he was just 34 years old. At the same time, he kept a job with the Minnesota Timberwolves, where he gave Kevin Garnett his nickname, “The Big Ticket.”
In 1996, he started doing NBA playoff games for TNT and left the Timberwolves to work regular season games on TNT the next season. He now had two national broadcasting jobs.
Harlan left FOX for CBS after the 1997 season, a decision he said may have had its roots in his Kansas experience.
“I was really missing college basketball,” Harlan said.
Now, Harlan does college basketball games after the end of the NFL season and covers the NCAA Tournament, including the Final Four on CBS radio.
“Whatever is humanly possible”
Harlan’s only regret about the path his career has taken is the heavy travel requirement limits his time with his family.
“That is unquestionably, unequivocally, the worst part of the job,” Harlan said.
Harlan has been married since 1987. He and his wife Ann have four children: Abigail, 17, Haley, 16, Olivia, 13, and Robert, 10.
“He’s as good a family guy as you will ever meet,” Hedrick said. “He’s kept things in perspective, which not many guys in this business are able to do.”
During the fall and winter, when the NFL and NBA are both in their regular seasons, Harlan often finds himself on different coasts during the week and on the weekend. Still, Ann said, he takes every opportunity to be with his family, regardless of convenience.
“He does whatever is humanly possible to get back here when he’s not working,” Ann said. “Sometimes his definition of ‘humanly possible’ is different from most other people’s.”
Ann says that even though Harlan is working constantly and barely getting any rest during football and basketball seasons, she would never categorize him as a workaholic. She compared his life to that of an accountant during tax season.
During the off-season, things are different.
“I’m not working during the summer, so we’ve tried to make our summers really special,” Harlan said.
When the NBA playoffs move into the Finals and off of TNT at the end of this month, Harlan will be done working until the NFL starts back up in August. During that time, the family heads up to their cottage on Lake Michigan for the whole summer, where Harlan is finally able to get some much-needed relaxation.
“He literally leaves a message on the answering machine that says ‘I am out of the office until August and I cannot be reached,’” Ann said.
Ann said Harlan doesn’t watch any sports while he is away, including the NBA Finals.
“He just completely tunes out,” Ann said. “People will see him and ask what he thought of the game last night and he’ll just say ‘I have no idea.’”
When Harlan comes back to Lawrence now, it is as a detached observer for whom neutrality is second nature. Still, it is his experience at Kansas and the help of Tom Hedrick that Harlan says got him where he is today.
“My kids are starting to look at colleges now, and I don’t know if they are considering KU, but I can only hope that their experience comes close to how fulfilling and gratifying my college experience was,” Harlan said.
Meanwhile, his mentor, now a retired Lawrence resident, watches happily as his student ascends to the top of the sports broadcasting world.
“He didn’t cut any corners and he’s done it the right way,” Hedrick said. “I’m very proud of him.”
Kansan senior staff writer Danny Luppino can be contacted at editor@kansan.com.
— Edited by Trevan McGee
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