The Greg Hall that I thought I knew was leading a double life…
On one hand, the dude I just wrote about yesterday – and that most locals and sports aficionados knew – was the edgy skeptic who liked nothing more than making sports media know-it-alls eat their words by zeroing in on their dumbest utterances and making fools of them.
Greg hated former WHB kingpin Kevin Kietzman, for example.
Case in point, this soundbite taking Kietzman to task from a 2014 column in the Platte County Landmark:
“…Kansas City is not populated by a bunch of idiot Hoosiers. This is a city filled with great sports fans – just like a lot of cities that have professional sports teams. Kevin seems to be obsessed with how the rest of the country views Kansas City and whether or not they look down their nose at us. That is a problem with him not us. I think we are pretty darn great no matter what they’re saying about us on either coast.”
Greg’s earlier works were far harsher, as he gradually mellowed after throwing in the towel on landing a sports media career and settled into being a top notch family guy.
The latter was the Greg Hall I only knew tangentially…
However as I look around the Internet at some of the tributes to him, while it’s a bit foreign to me, it’s clear that in Hall’s second coming as the world’s nicest guy, he’d left much of his angry guy personality in the rearview mirror.
Check out a couple of the tributes…
“The Missouri running community has been shaken to its core with the recent news of the passing of all-time great photographer and contributor, Kansas City native Greg Hall,” reads Kyle Deeken‘s Tribute to a Legend, Remembering Greg Hall post on MileSplitMo.
“It is impossible to put a price-tag on his knack for not only capturing the essence of cross country and track and field, but also living it.”
Pardon me, but who knew?
Okay, referring to Nebraska native Greg Hall as a Kansas City native is pretty sloppy and inaccurate, but more importantly it’s indicative of far he’d distanced himself from the two decades he spent pursuing fame and fortune in the public eye.
“He never considered himself a big deal,” writes Neosho Daily News contributor Bill Althaus. “He was just an avid runner who competed in several Boston Marathons, who loved to be around young people, chat with their coaches and take those kind of photos that are worth more than 1,000 words.”
I was far more surprised to get the following text from Roger Shelton a friend and former commodity broker from my investment career past who lives in Grandview:
“I alway enjoyed his posts on KCC and his other writings. Was a great motivator for high school track members. High school coaches loved him.”
The bottom line:
Greg may not have achieved his goal of becoming a household word in local sports, but he achieved far more in terms of becoming a beloved figure on a smaller, but arguably more important stage.
I was looking back on his brief time at the Pitch in 2002 before his falling out with editor C.J. Janovy and found this short graph about how he had first fantasized at how the death for former Royals star Darrell Porter might have gone down:
“The first mention of Darrell Porter’s death crackling over my car radio said he’d died while fishing at La Benite Park, in Sugar Creek. It sounded like a peaceful way to go. As I weaved through afternoon rush-hour traffic, I envisioned a well-fed fifty-year-old man making one last cast with his ultralight rod before clutching his heart and passing into the hereafter, surrounded by a mess of crappie who shared a similar fate.”
