Hearne: The Kevin Kietzman Saga; Take One

Kevin Kietzman

The bigger they are…

Into a world where people start GoFundMe pages for waitresses who spit on the president’s son and applaud the heckling of politicians they disagree with in public places, crash landed legendary WHB sports talker Kevin Kietzman.

Much to his complete and utter chagrin.

Face it, taking shots at wildly popular local sports heroes like Chiefs head coach Andy Reid is risky business…especially in a town like KC with a bad case of over-the-top Super Bowl fever.

No Chiefs fan in what passes for their right mind wanted to hear or read anything truly awful about the team, Reid – not even sleaze bag star Tyreek Hill for that matter.

I was listening to 610 Sports last year after the team axed Kareem Hunt and most of the caller reactions were essentially, “So what if Hunt kicked the you-know-what out of some floozy outside his hotel room?”

Given the Chiefs’ subsequent failure to make the Super Bowl in the wake of Hunt’s loss – and the Cleveland Brown’s picking him up – it appeared from the get-go that the team wasn’t about  to make the same mistake twice. And sure enough, barring yet another incident, it looks like Hill will be back on the field at Arrowhead in time for a playoff run.

So while Kietzman majorly messed up by seemingly tying the death, drug use and other unfortunate things about Reid’s sons to the handling of scumbag Chiefs players, he was pretty much right on with his point that Reid doesn’t have a very good record of keeping highly skilled football thugs out of trouble.

Then again, who does?

It’s nothing new that any number of professional athletes hale from circumstances where violence is part and parcel of their everyday lives.

And while writers at dying newspapers like the Kansas City Star are happy to muse in equally bogus unsigned editorials about things like former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach getting “kneecapped” and left by the side of a road nobody travels, they’re more than happy to award the death penalty to Kietzman for alluding to the struggles of Reid’s sons.

Poor word choice aside, Kietzman’s point was lost in the wake of his political correctness beat down.

Truth be told, we’ll likely never really know exactly what Kietzman was – not just trying to say – but what his specific point was in throwing Reid’s family under the bus. Is there something more to the reason he chose those words that will forever go unexplained? Or was it merely a brain fart, an accidental mid-rant slip.

My hunch is Kietzman either knows – or thinks he knows – more than he is willing to explain.

Too late, because the verdict is in and like former Fox News superhero Bill O’Reilly, he’s toast.

Think about it, no one in today’s television news was even close to being as highly rated and paid as O’Reilly. Yet in not much more than a year he’s all but forgotten.

Bill, who?

All of that said, Kietzman’s last hurrah at WHB – a sports radio station he literally co-founded and single handedly put on the map, fostering its success – deserves more than a mere generalized condemnation and smattering of watered down recaps of his 20 plus years there.

So let’s take a look…