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A DISCONCERTING TIME
For all that, this is a disorienting time for all ... and, in its own way, for those immersed in sports for a living.
If he knew the NBA season was over, for instance, Harlan joked that he could let his mind go to mush. At least he’d know he had some down time before doing his annual NBA 2K video video game work and that his next broadcast wouldn’t be until he went back to his hometown of Green Bay to do Packers preseason games.
Instead, all of our schedules are only theories and mysteries right now. That’s one of the distinctions between this and a different kind of terrifying time when sports shut down: in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when the NFL canceled the next weekend’s games.
When play resumed, Harlan’s assignment was in Dallas, where, like other game broadcasters, he recalled being required to get on the PA system to essentially conduct pre-game ceremonies, such as moments of silence.
“I was almost more concerned about that (than the game broadcast) and hoping that I had the right tone in my voice,” he said. “Because it was not only heard in the stadium … (but also) we had a big (television) audience.”
It had a “very, very different” feeling than this, of course, with “a different kind of enemy” that the brightest minds in our country and world ultimately are facing together.
And yet there is an unsettling commonality between this and other times of peril, he noted, from world wars to the spread of fear during the Cold War and amid the Cuban Missile Crisis.
All different, but all evoking to some degree what Harlan called “the same feeling that we’re having right now about the unknown and what it’s going to bring.”
FATHER, SON, AND PERSPECTIVE
This is the known that Harlan has immersed himself in since he was around 11 or 12 years old. Back then, he wanted to be a pilot but was perhaps challenged by the math skills then deemed necessary.
In what he recalled as either sixth, seventh or eighth grade, he brought home his report card and had his father look it over. The math grade stuck out.
“He would look at the grade and then look at me. And then look back down at the grade and then look at me again,” he said, laughing, remembering the advice that came next: “‘You know, if it were up to me, I might think about a career in journalism.’”
As it happens, his father, Bob, had enormous appreciation of that work. He had been a journalism major at Marquette and sports editor of the student newspaper in sports. And in subsequent conversations, they’d talk about the importance of the fundamentals of “who, what, when, where, how.”
Also as it happens, his father was a longtime executive for the Packers who rose to their presidency in 1989 — long after Kevin had been a team ballboy and teen broadcaster of various sports at 10-watt WGBP-FM, the radio station for alma mater Our Lady of Premontre High School.
His father often listened to those games. And when the son came home, he typically offered him a list of what he liked and a list of “things that maybe I should improve on.”
He also offered many examples that set a tone. Those included a sight the son remembers from his office: a monthly planner, perhaps two feet by one foot, with penmanship that was “always precise and very neat” and embellished with important dates in red.
That may or not be why he came to keep his own calendars, Harlan said. But he imagines it planted an idea. And he has kept some version of them going back to those early days, at least in part because it has the therapeutic feel of a diary to him.
About “what I’ve got to do, and what I did, and where I was and where maybe my family was …” he said.
Even now, when the X’s mark a certain spot that, like all of us, he’ll never be able to forget.
But one this mellifluous voice of America reminds us to try to make the most of amid the void and accompanying bizarre circumstances.
“This is a special time that we have together as a family and kind of gives us a little perspective to all of us,” he said. “And I think a little perspective is good from time to time.”
A DISCONCERTING TIME
For all that, this is a disorienting time for all ... and, in its own way, for those immersed in sports for a living.
If he knew the NBA season was over, for instance, Harlan joked that he could let his mind go to mush. At least he’d know he had some down time before doing his annual NBA 2K video video game work and that his next broadcast wouldn’t be until he went back to his hometown of Green Bay to do Packers preseason games.
Instead, all of our schedules are only theories and mysteries right now. That’s one of the distinctions between this and a different kind of terrifying time when sports shut down: in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when the NFL canceled the next weekend’s games.
When play resumed, Harlan’s assignment was in Dallas, where, like other game broadcasters, he recalled being required to get on the PA system to essentially conduct pre-game ceremonies, such as moments of silence.
“I was almost more concerned about that (than the game broadcast) and hoping that I had the right tone in my voice,” he said. “Because it was not only heard in the stadium … (but also) we had a big (television) audience.”
It had a “very, very different” feeling than this, of course, with “a different kind of enemy” that the brightest minds in our country and world ultimately are facing together.
And yet there is an unsettling commonality between this and other times of peril, he noted, from world wars to the spread of fear during the Cold War and amid the Cuban Missile Crisis.
All different, but all evoking to some degree what Harlan called “the same feeling that we’re having right now about the unknown and what it’s going to bring.”
FATHER, SON, AND PERSPECTIVE
This is the known that Harlan has immersed himself in since he was around 11 or 12 years old. Back then, he wanted to be a pilot but was perhaps challenged by the math skills then deemed necessary.
In what he recalled as either sixth, seventh or eighth grade, he brought home his report card and had his father look it over. The math grade stuck out.
“He would look at the grade and then look at me. And then look back down at the grade and then look at me again,” he said, laughing, remembering the advice that came next: “‘You know, if it were up to me, I might think about a career in journalism.’”
As it happens, his father, Bob, had enormous appreciation of that work. He had been a journalism major at Marquette and sports editor of the student newspaper in sports. And in subsequent conversations, they’d talk about the importance of the fundamentals of “who, what, when, where, how.”
Also as it happens, his father was a longtime executive for the Packers who rose to their presidency in 1989 — long after Kevin had been a team ballboy and teen broadcaster of various sports at 10-watt WGBP-FM, the radio station for alma mater Our Lady of Premontre High School.
His father often listened to those games. And when the son came home, he typically offered him a list of what he liked and a list of “things that maybe I should improve on.”
He also offered many examples that set a tone. Those included a sight the son remembers from his office: a monthly planner, perhaps two feet by one foot, with penmanship that was “always precise and very neat” and embellished with important dates in red.
That may or not be why he came to keep his own calendars, Harlan said. But he imagines it planted an idea. And he has kept some version of them going back to those early days, at least in part because it has the therapeutic feel of a diary to him.
About “what I’ve got to do, and what I did, and where I was and where maybe my family was …” he said.
Even now, when the X’s mark a certain spot that, like all of us, he’ll never be able to forget.
But one this mellifluous voice of America reminds us to try to make the most of amid the void and accompanying bizarre circumstances.
“This is a special time that we have together as a family and kind of gives us a little perspective to all of us,” he said. “And I think a little perspective is good from time to time.”
