KC Confidential

OK, I lied…

Dandy Don Fortune is not coming back – not that I know of anyway – not physically. For one thing, he’s older than God now and he didn’t exactly depart the Cowtown in grand style. Everyone from then halfway young WHB sports yakker Kevin Kietzman to Star bloviator-in-chief Jason Whitlock couldn’t say enough about how old and out of it Fortune was.

WHB even mounted a billboard campaign called “Lose a Fortune.”

Remember that one?

So how long ago was it that Fortune got run out of town? Five years? Ten?

Try a dozen. Continue reading →

Raise your hand if you recognize the name Vahe Gregorian?

Lemme see, one, two, three…that’s it?

Truth be told, chances are if you’re a reader of KC Confidential you also keep an eye on the Kansas City Star and probably noticed when Vahe – may I call him Vahe? – effectively replaced Joe Posnanski a couple months back as the newspaper’s second sports columnist.

He’s the dude who looks like a mashup of John McCain and Joe McGuff’. 

Longtime readers may recall that I was bullish early on on Sam Mellinger in the wake of the Jason Whitlock debacle. I’m still a fan of Sam, even given my infinite ability to search for the cup half empty. Continue reading →

Let’s hear it for the unsung heroes of the comments section…

In the five or so years KC Confidential’s been around we’ve come full circle with the comments crowd; early on they were celebrated.

“I enjoy the comments more than the articles,” said some.

Flatterers!

For some writers – Greg Hall and The Scribe to name two – KCC’s comments section almost seemed to represent the measure of their worth. After all, more comments meant more readers, right?

Not necessarily.

Sports is a comment magnet just as Craig Glazer is a hater magnet Continue reading →

Jim Heeter

Try this one on for size, courtesy of frequent comments section flyer Chuck Lowe. Lowe was admiring Dwight Sutherland’s piece taking former Greater Kansas City Chamber head dude Pete Levi to task for referring recently to the red ink stained glory days of using sales taxes to rescue Union Station.

Reminded me of the time I outed Levi in January 2008 for making in excess of half a million bucks a year as the head of the nonprofit chamber – $588,955, to be exact.

Plenty of eyeballs rolled on that one, and when Levi departed the chamber in its 2009 tax filing he was down to a paltry $439,092 or a 25 percent plus earnings reduction.

Another local lawyer, Jim Heeter of Mission Hills took Levi’s place at the more modest salary of $314,829.  And while that ain’t chump change, it was still $124,263 (or 28 percent) less than Levi’s final paycheck and a whopping 53 percent below what Levi was making when I outed him.

But don’t feel too sorry for Heeter because time has its way of healing the wounded.  Continue reading →

Apples and oranges, anyone?

If there’s one thing my pal Kansas City Star business writer Kevin Collison could easily be convicted of it’s downtown boosterism. Think irrational exuberance with an exclamation point.

Never mind, for example, that experts have painstakenly documented how downtown ballparks are tourism killers, open only a scant portion of the year for minimal hours, while at the same time lining block after block with mind numbing expanses of pedestrian traffic killing walls of steel and concrete.

Kevin’s also a bit of a light rail / streetcar advocate, long as Clay Chastain‘s fingerprints are not on the plans.

However, Collison was out of his element earlier this week when he attempted to pyramid a random in-law visit to my old stomping grounds in Tucson into a believable argument that that city’s streetcar plan somehow validates Kansas City’s.

Two entirely different situations. Continue reading →