Everybody reveres Walt Disney, Harry Truman, George Brett, Stan Durwood…
They’re expatriates who’ve done Kansas City proud, and exemplify the attributes and skills that make our little corner of the world a more recognized, better place to be from and live.
Guess who’s missing from that list, courtesy of today’s “woke” cancel culture?
Luminaries such as – or perhaps, former luminaries – Country Club Plaza founder J.C. Nichols and Kansas City Star / Nelson Atkins Museum founder William Rockhill Nelson. They’re absent from that list, having been outed as politically incorrect creatures of long ago, kinda like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and a host of others once respected and admired.
Ah, but today I bring to you another – a person yet to be proven so faulty – apart from his controversial sports opinions and love of the Kansas City Chiefs.
So I say, raise a glass to broadcaster Nick Wright – quickly, I might add – lest anyone comb his past and allege him to be racist, sexist or otherwise undeserving.
Nick Wright, you say?
The gent from Kansas City whose father was a former fire fighter, and who rose from radio station 610 Sports to become arguably the top, up-and-coming sports caster in the nation on Fox Sports.
Yep, that’s him.
I remember Nick best from deceased KC Confidential columnist Greg Hall.
Mrs. Nick
Nine long years after Wright left KC, and tangling with former Star scribe Jason Whitlock and surviving a cheap shot from Hall, Wright is literally atop the sports broadcasting world, right up with Fox superstar Colin Cowherd.
You heard me right, not only is Wright the star of Fox’s weekday morning First Things First show with Chris Broussard, Kevin Wildes and Jenna Wolfe, he’s a weekly regular on Cowherd’s ‘cast and is starting a brand new sports blog.
In other words, not only is Nick raking in the big bucks, living large in New York City, happily married to a beautiful black woman named Danielle with has three kids, in all likelihood he can barely remember the time Hall wrote about out-of-work at the time Whitlock ambushing him on air. Hall then accusing Nick of having to leave the airwaves for two days, when in point of fact, he was off for major dental work.
If that doesn’t sound insignificant enough today – all things considered – Wright’s comments to me back then were almost confessional.
“It’s like I didn’t go to the dentist for like a decade,” he told me. “And today they did a procedure on one half of my mouth. And tomorrow, they do the other half. Then in the next couple months I’m having all four of my wisdom teeth out. And hopefully, the rest of my teeth won’t fall out. They numbed my whole mouth so I wasn’t able to talk very well for several hours.”
Wright’s bottom line at the time:
“In the last week, Greg offered to tuck me in at night on Twitter, he called me a bitch twice and he’s written three columns entirely about me. One of which was a complete and utter fabrication by a middle-aged software developer who I’ve never met but is obsessed with me, which at this point is getting a little creepy…He either thinks I got suspended or I am so mentally depressed by the fictitious beat down at the hands of Jason Whitlock that I’m taking a couple days off.
“You know, a grown man calls you a bitch and offers to tuck you in at night – he definitely wants me to acknowledge him on Twitter. I mean, if he picks up 10 percent of my Twitter followers, that doubles him. I don’t mind the name calling, but I do mind the lies. And I don’t care how small his audience is, it’s still an audience.”
Hard to imagine – given Wright’s explosive rise in fame and fortune – but true.
Yawn. He’s on an also-ran sports network and written about on this has-been site.
Snooze-fest.
Are you c-r-a-z-y?
Nick is making probably more than everybody in KC sports talk radio combined. Living large in NYC, a regular on Colin Cowherd’s show and quite excellent at his game.
But hey, we all have our critics!