KC Confidential

Tommy & Dawn Two…
In better days

I’m baaaaack…

And just in time to share a Tommy Morrison tale or two while I dig myself out from a short vacation and prepare to unleash shocking new revelations about former Kansas City boxer Tommy Morrsion.

Morrison was practically a franchise in my column at the Star for 16 years. From the earliest revelations about his unbridled passion for Elvis and exotic, wild animals – while he pissed off a reported $12 million in career earnings – to his current brush with death as a penniless shadow of the fair-haired boy we once knew.

But return with me now, to those heady days when Tommy seemingly could do no wrong even while actually doing just about everything wrong.

Like the time he bedded & married a pair of comely blondes named Dawn. Continue reading →

Whitlock on Olbermann

This could be his big break…

Word that former Kansas City Star sports scribe Jason Whitlock will be riding herd over his own ESPN sports blog with the stated mission of developing and bringing along new, younger voices (writers) poses a two huge questions.

Could this be Whitlock’s long awaited ticket to a healthy six-figure paycheck? And can he handle the role of being a mentor to up-and-coming, young, African American sportswriter wannabes?

“Pretty bizarre to set Jason up as mentor/role model, unless he’s matured some,” said one former Whitlock editor. Continue reading →

And now, the rest of the story…

Make no mistake, former Kansas City Star reporter Elizabeth Merrill scored a huge coup in tracking down Tommy Morrison‘s mom Diana and getting her on the record for ESPN that Tommy is dying of the AIDS virus. That and tracking down and talking to a number of other Tommy relatives and hangers on.

However that still left plenty of holes in the tragic take of the kid from Jay, Oklahoma who Kansas City came to embrace – the dude at the time who played Tommy Gunn in Rocky.

Enter Susan Martin of Phoenix – the mother of one of Tommy’s close friends – who befriended him in 2006 and let him live with her for six months before Morrison started to go off the deep end again while having an affair with a married woman from California. Continue reading →

Time flies when you’re on vacation and I’m writing this live in Santa Fe New Mexico…

I’m going to keep it short because, after all, it is a vacation but I’ve got some important news updates to share that I’ll be fleshing out later today and tomorrow.

For starters, the Tommy Morrison news that Brandon broke locally Friday – I checked the Star, Pitch and that Tony character and they had nada – was huge. And Brandon put it in perfect perspective. Kansas City has a huge inferiority complex which is why we put our sports heroes – however few – on such loft pedestals.

And Tommy Morrison – even though he wasn’t even close to being from KC – was right up there with Len Dawson, George Brett and Tom Watson, just like Brandon said.

Except that Tommy was a known bad boy.

Don’t get me wrong, Dawson, Brett and Watson have plenty of skeletons in their closets. Continue reading →

Speaking of Elvis aka Jesse…

At the height of the Elvis is Still Alive saga in 2002, former longtime Channel 9 news anchor Maria Antonia got caught up in the excitement.

Way caught up.

In a Christmas Day column in 2002, headlined ” Sealed with a kiss?” I wrote that while “many Cowtowners have been busy posting missives to Santa, now comes word that KMBC-TV, Channel 9, anchor Maria Antonia penned one to Elvis. Or his alter ego, Jesse, if you buy into the school of thought that the King is in hiding and using the name of his twin brother, who died at birth.”

That according to Linda Johson, the assistant to Jesse’s Parkville doc Donald Hinton. Continue reading →

About those twin bars slated to open in the former America’s Pub in Westport…

Mum’s the word on what the partners concept will be, but Westport sources say the owners have been scouting a space for the twin concepts for the past year.

“I don’t know much about it, other than what I’ve heard,” says one source. “But I’ve heard they’re going to divide one part of the space into a bunch of individual rooms – like multiple little rooms that you can rent out and have your own private party with karaoke or whatever.

“And the other part of the space is going to be like an upscale deli that you can go in and pick from a huge selection of all kinds of beer and eat deli sandwiches. And if you like one of their beers, you can buy a six pack of it to go.” Continue reading →

It should have been a no-brainer…

That there’d be a stiff price to pay for revealing to the world that King of Rock n Roll Elvis Presley was still alive. But it didn’t seem quite that evident a dozen years ago and a stiff price for telling that story has been paid.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument thatElvis is still walking the earth. That he’s 77 now and remains in hiding, albeit with the needs of many senior citizens in terms of ramped up healthcare.  After all, he was a party machine back in the day.

Let’s further assume that former Parkville MD Donald Hinton was indeed treating the king in 2001 like he said he was when he wrote in the book, “The Truth About Elvis Aron Presley In His Own Words.”

You guys okay with that for now? Continue reading →