Kobe Bryant ain't got nothin' on Kevin Harlan. The familiar voice of NBA games on TNT, now in his 12th season working the network's coverage, was a high school prodigy every bit as much as the Los Angeles Lakers star. Only Harlan's career roots came from atop the roof of an old station wagon, hanging onto a telephone pole for balance, while calling prep football games as a student at Green Bay Premontre.
Harlan has the bloodlines, too, same as Bryant (son of Joe): Bob Harlan, Kevin's dad, spent a lifetime in sports, eventually becoming the longtime president of the Green Bay Packers. So it might seem preordained that his oldest child would make a living in and around games, too. Except that Kevin Harlan wanted nothing more as a teenager than to fly commercial airliners. He talked about that early passion recently, among many topics, from a hotel room in Salt Lake City, where he was working the Orlando-Utah game:
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NBA.com: Your old pal, Timberwolves broadcaster Tom Hanneman, told me you once confided your ambitions to be an airline pilot. True?
Kevin Harlan: Some kids want to be firemen or policemen, I wanted to be a pilot. I'd ride my bike to the Green Bay airport and sit by the runway under the few planes that were there. Then my dad said to me one day when I was in high school, "To be an airline pilot, you have to know a lot of math and a lot of engineering." Of course I didn't like either of those. Then he said, "You'll probably have to go into the military to get flight time." I didn't know how much that appealed to me either when I was 12, 13 years old.
He'd been a journalism major at Marquette and he told me, "If I had to do it all over again, I might look into radio and television. You can be involved in sports and you can be at these great games, and you can still travel and have that as part of your life."
NBA.com: So you end up flying for a living anyway. When I saw the George Clooney movie, Up In the Air, I laughed at the scene where he and his female counterpart top each other with all their special frequent-flyer clubs and travel status. NBA writers travel a lot, but what you do is ridiculous, living in a non-NBA city (Kansas City).
KH: This is going to be a pretty significant year, too, because I threw the Monday Night Football thing [for Westwood One Radio] in there. I stick to two airlines, really. Living in Kansas City, I don't have the greatest selection of flights, so I've got to connect quite a bit through Chicago or Minneapolis or Denver. So it's like I'm flying double what everybody else does.
NBA.com: So you're, what, Titanium Level in everything?
KH: With United I'm in this level called Global Services, which is the top of the top of the top. I guess it's in the Clooney movie. And I qualified with Delta for a new status called Diamond Medallion. And that's their top of the top of the top. I don't take great pride in that. It just helps me if there's a cancellation or something else that's happened -- they'll take care of me pretty quickly. They'll get me where I need to be.
NBA.com: How have you handled the double-duty of NBA and NFL schedules?
KH: It's tough when these two seasons are going head to head. You can't give 100 percent to either -- you've got to go down to about 75 percent on each. There's just so much to cover, doing three games in about a five-day span. From Thursday with TNT to Sunday with CBS to Monday Night Football [for Westwood One]. It's become a little daunting, more so than I actually thought. I only signed a one-year deal because I wasn't sure how it would work out with Monday Night Football. I'm not sure whether I'll continue or not. It's a lot.
NBA.com: You're not living check to check at this point, so why do it?
KH: People cannot believe that I do football. I'm so much associated, I guess, with basketball, so I'll hear, "I never knew you did football." I've only been doing network football since 1994 with Fox. It's interesting. I guess [it's] because every game is national on TNT.
But when I was growing up, my whole goal -- and I started doing this when I was 13 -- was to do network radio play-by-play. I just loved everything that the radio side had to offer. That you could use your words to create every emotion, every visual in a person's mind. And convey the excitement. TV, you're accenting picture [but] your analyst is the star and you're setting him up all the time. In radio, you're creating everything. You're setting up every play: Where the quarterback is. Where the running backs are. How the offense is set up. What kind of secondary does the defense have? What color are the uniforms? What direction are they headed? You take it for granted when you see it, but if you're listening on radio, there's so much empty that you've got to color on that canvas. That's the great challenge of it, to have the right words to create the right picture in a listener's mind. I've always been real intrigued by that. That's what I wanted to try.
NBA.com: How different is it, working basketball vs. football?
KH: A lot. Basketball's so high-energy. Every play, every score has some highlight value to it. Whether it's a great screen that opens up some drive down the lane. A great shot. A great move by a defender. They score every time they touch the ball, basically. Well, the NFL, you might have a ton of plays where it's a 5-yard gain, a 2-yard gain, a 1-yard gain and a punt. Then you take your 2 1/2 minute commercial. You come back again and maybe you do the same thing again with no scoring. You might have a nice run or a good catch, but the number of highlights in an NBA game are constant. You could get excited on every play.
In the NFL, it's kind of a march and you're marching along, trying to set up your analyst. You're throwing out little anecdotes about the team and you're trying to get the rhythm of the drive. In basketball, it's truly an ongoing conversation as you both almost try to call the score, the play. Doug [Collins] is so good at that -- if he's in the middle of something and a guy has a quick drive, he'll say "... as you see Iverson scoring right there..." and then he'll continue with his story. In football, once the analyst hands it over to you, it's yours until the end of the play. There's no jumping in by him. It's two completely different sports.
NBA.com: Have you done baseball too?
KH: No. I had a chance when I was in Kansas City. The baseball Cardinals and the late Jack Buck, I had a chance to become the third guy in their broadcast in the late '80s. I was doing Missouri football and basketball. But my dad was in baseball for six years [St. Louis Cardinals media director, 1965-71], and the reason he got out of baseball was it's such a long season, and he was gone all the time. We were little guys and we'd go with him to the ballpark. While he was typing up his game notes, my brother Bryan and I would be at another desk typing up our supposed "game notes," too.
NBA.com: So he went from SID at Marquette to St. Louis?
KH: Right, he was with Al McGuire at Marquette. Then he was with the Cardinals when they opened up the stadium and had the All-Star Game and, of course, won two World Series. Then when Dan Devine left the University of Missouri, he [hired] my dad.
NBA.com: You started in high school with that "10-watt radio station'' in Green Bay you talk about. Take us forward from there.
KH: Well, in my freshman or sophomore year, the Packers were playing a preseason game in Milwaukee against the Patriots and it was being televised nationally by NBC. Jim Simpson and John Brodie were doing the game and, as was the case a lot of times, they were looking for somebody to get them Coca-Colas or popcorn. But on this particular night, they asked me to be on a headphone back to New York to relay baseball scores back to the broadcaster. I'd get these scores from New York, write 'em down on a piece of paper and hand them to Jim Simpson.
Just watching how they constructed that broadcast and how they conducted a network game, I was sold from that point on.
NBA.com: Why Kansas for college instead of Wisconsin?
KH: Gary Bender was doing a Packers game in Chicago and happened to ask my dad where I was thinking about going to school. He said Madison. Gary Bender told him I should go see "this guy'' at the University of Kansas who had helped a lot of young broadcasters over the years. I gave him a call and went down there, and loved the school. And everything they promised me came true: As a freshman, I was doing pregame, halftime, postgame and sideline on the KU football network.
NBA.com: Where were all the sophomores, juniors and seniors?
KH: They had never used a student before; they basically created this position for me. Then I did some stuff on commercial stations and had an internship in Topeka the first summer. The next year, I started producing the Kansas City Chiefs' radio pregame show and postgame shows. One thing kind of led to another.
Getting out of school, [current Bulls broadcaster] Neil Funk, who'd been doing the Kansas City Kings, took a job to go do the Philadelphia 76ers. The Kings were looking for someone very young and very cheap, and I was a young, cheap hire. I did their last year, '84-85, and I had a decision whether I was going to follow the team out to California. It just so happened, during this decision process, that Wayne Larivee -- who was doing the Chiefs -- accepted a job to do the Chicago Bears' radio play-by-play. And I got the Chiefs job.
NBA.com: Your timing has been impeccable. You started calling Minnesota Timberwolves games when the franchise was born in 1989 but you had an unusual arrangement -- you commuted to and from the Twin Cities to call their games.
KH: We had a little baby at that time, so my wife and I moved up there. And she's an Oklahoma gal and we went through a winter up in Minneapolis ... we were pregnant with our second one, too, so she was really homebound. And that was a particularly tough winter, as I recall. I asked if I could move back to Kansas City -- I loved the job -- and so I commuted for the next eight years.
NBA.com: With some brutal itineraries. Hanneman recalled a Wolves game on the West Coast on a Saturday night, after which he flew back home with the team. That day, he turned on his TV and you were doing the Chiefs game in Miami.
KH: There are a lot of guys who put this together. If you look at a lot of them, they've got a schedule like mine. Marv Albert, when he was busy with all his stuff, he had the same brutal schedule. I'm just doing one NBA game a week -- some guys are doing three or four, then trying to do something on the weekends with another team or another network.
Early on, I was trying to be back with the kids all the time [Kevin and wife Ann have four children]. And I really don't think I missed that much. There were some all-night drives and some red-eyes [flights], but we all did that stuff. I feel fairly confident that my kids would say, "Yeah, he missed some things. But he was around for the important stuff. And if you have a dad who works from 7 in the morning until 7 at night and does it five days a week, I'd rather have it the way my dad had it.'' And I've got my summers off.
NBA.com: Vin Scully just signed on for his 61st season with the Dodgers. Since you've done multiple teams, multiple sports, have you ever totaled up how many "team seasons'' you've done?
KH: Well, a lot, because I've always done at least two [jobs]. But you'd be surprised -- I think there are a lot of guys like that. But you can never have too many balls in the air because of how fleeting some of these jobs are. Plus I'm still in my 40s, so I feel like I still need to [push].
NBA.com: Any particular role models among sportscasters?
KH: The guys I admired growing up were nothing like I am now, but guys like Pat Summerall, John Facenda, Ray Scott, they're the ones I guess I dreamt how I would be. Then beyond those voices that I loved while I was young, there were two NBA broadcasters I listened to religiously: Jim Durham in Chicago with the Bulls and Joe Tate in Cleveland. Living in Green Bay, I could get their stations as clear as a bell across the Great Lakes. Those were my two guys.
I never really heard of Marv Albert until I got to the league and people said, "You kind of sound like Marv Albert. Do you try to sound like him?'' I'd never really heard of him growing up because I never got his broadcasts. Those other guys, I went to bed listening to every night.
NBA.com: What do you make of the stature attained by local broadcasters such as Johnny Most with the Celtics and Chick Hearn with the Lakers?
KH: There's nothing more fulfilling than being the recognized voice of a team and feeling like your voice, your product, is as identifiable as the team itself. I think that's what Most was in Boston and Chick was in Los Angeles. They loved where they were and what they were doing. They were fulfilled as broadcasters, and such a part of those franchises, that's a pretty powerful thing. Just like Cawood Ledford at the University of Kentucky, John Ward with the Tennessee Volunteers and Larry Munson, the longtime voice of Georgia. Those guys were all good enough that maybe they could have moved on to something else. But there is a satisfaction there that you don't get when you do a network broadcast. You are never part of those fans' minds the same way -- unless you're like Marv, who's the indelible voice of all those NBA Finals or Vin Scully with the World Series.
Plus you travel around with this extended family. You know the history of the team, you feel you're a part of the team. At the network level, you don't feel any of those things. You're part of a team, but I've got a group of about four or five people I travel with and that's my team. It's pretty business-like. Enjoyable, but a different satisfaction.
NBA.com: I'd like to have you tell me your favorite -- and least favorite -- analysts to work with, but I know you won't. So tell me how much you adjust your call to fit the guy sitting next to you?
KH: More and more the older I get. I feel that on television, I'm a distant third. It is the picture first, the analyst second and then the play-by-play guy. Our job is basically to fill in some of the factual gaps and then to set up and complement what the analyst says first and what a graphic might say second.
I'd be a fool to do it any other way. Doug Collins is in the Hall of Fame for his work as a broadcaster. I'm very comfortable "following" and I wouldn't have it any other way. It's a better listen if we're setting them up and going back and forth, than if it's a play-by-play heavy broadcast.
NBA.com: In Minnesota, you and Kevin McHale put on some incredibly entertaining broadcasts with a team that often wasn't entertaining at all.
KH: The great thing about Kevin was, he was so honest. And he was funny with his honestly.
When he became the president, I don't know if that came out as much because he was in a completely different theater. But as a broadcaster and a guy who had just left the game, he was someone who could give great insight and not sugarcoat it either way. He was so remarkably good that NBC pursued him for a long time to become their lead analyst when they had the NBA and had people leave for coaching or whatever.
The shocking thing was, the team was really struggling then and maybe one of the bright spots, they thought, was they had a telecast that was a little bit irreverent and pretty honest and maybe annoying to some but entertaining to others. McHale was such a big Minnesota name that he drew people to that broadcast.
NBA.com: Things could get a little rambunctious, from eating popcorn on the air to other crazy moments.
KH: I am amazed that I was never fired or reprimanded. The only thing anyone ever said to me was, occasionally I got "too excited'' for the opposing team. My response was, well, our team wasn't doing much and we're trying to sell the NBA. If we can make this sport look so captivating, when you do get a good player, maybe there will be some sort of carryover.
Nothing was scripted. If the game was good, we just did the game. If the game was rotten and we were getting creamed, Tom Hanneman and I would start to giggle and that would just lead to a horrible, wayward broadcast. We would pretty much try to amuse ourselves. But that was a great time to do the Timberwolves. There was such optimism and the team was new and the market was so into them. McHale took over and Garnett came along in there, and they had a little run. But the majority of the years I did it there, they were just really bad.
NBA.com: People talk about some of your calls, including referring to Tom Gugliotta as "Googly-oogly-ottal'' and nicknaming Kevin Garnett "The Big Ticket.'' Do you have any favorites?
KH: They all were just such spur-of-the-moment things ... The "No Regard For Human Life!'' with Garnett came when he was young and he was just starting to get some meat on his bones and show that great emotion. There was one time -- I don't recall what game -- he threw the ball down so hard that guys backed up and backed away. The first thing that came to my mind was, he had no regard for what was in his way. I've used it a couple times on TNT because the same basic scenario played out. Kobe, one time in Madison Square Garden, I used it. I used it with LeBron against Kevin Garnett, ironically enough, where it had the same feel to it.
Some of those things are so silly and just ridiculous. I will tell you, more times than not, I turn away and cringe when I've gotten caught up in the heat of the moment. Never planned, never scripted, it just happened and kind of popped out.
NBA.com: There were times when you actually would rise out of your chair during the call.
KH: That was all radio. On my Monday night gig with Westwood One, I've noticed that I'll rise out of my chair. I don't know if that's to get the right words out or if I'm just like a fan. But those big plays, they're just so fun to watch. When it happens in basketball and, say, it's a great dunk, it requires so many words and every ounce of energy you have to push a big call through, sometimes standing up helps you, for whatever reason.
NBA.com: Last thing: Do you still have the metabolism of a hummingbird? Many of us have never seen someone who can eat as much as you do.
KH [laughing]: Yeah, for whatever reason. That has not escaped me. I have not battled my weight. Maybe it's because I miss meals, I'm going so many different directions, I'll double up when I have a chance to. Whatever. I enjoy a good meal like everybody, I guess.
NBA.com: So do you have any restaurant recommendations around the league?
KH: To be quite honest, I come in the last flight the night before a game. Then I leave the earliest flight [the morning] after a game. I like Joe's Stone Crab in Miami. And I like the places that have great ambiance too. There are so many great little places... When Doc Rivers and I were doing games, we liked this little hot-dog place in Portland called "Good Dog, Bad Dog.''
NBA.com: That downtown spot has closed, but a PDX location remains. Seems about right, Harlan picking an airport restaurant.
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