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[warthog]

Posted on Tue, May. 10, 2011
Joe Posnanski bids a fond farewell to Kansas City
By JOE POSNANSKI
Special to The Star

Editor’s note: Former Kansas City Star sports columnist Joe Posnanski, now a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, is moving to Charlotte, N.C. Here are his farewell thoughts on our town, the place where, he says, “I feel Home. Capital letters: Home.”

The first day I ever spent in Kansas City was the day I interviewed for the job as sports columnist at The Kansas City Star. The paper’s sports editor at the time, a dreamer named Dinn Mann — the grandson of the famed Judge Roy Hofheinz, who built the Astrodome — picked me up at the airport and began to drive us toward downtown.

“What do you think?” he asked roughly three minutes after I had landed. It was a question he would ask me at least 100 more times during the interview. I didn’t think anything. I was 29 years old, single, living with a poor credit score and a beige couch that someone had given me years before and that sort of represented my life. Every day I would look at that couch and think, “I’ve got to get rid of that thing.” On one side, springs were popping out. I sat on the other side.

What do you think? I did not have the capacity then to know what I thought. It wasn’t just that my life was drifting, I was entirely unaware that my life was drifting. I was plenty happy. I watched sports, and I wrote about sports, and I had good friends, and I had a Skyline Chili restaurant right across the street and a great tennis court a half-mile away, and that all seemed pretty good to me. It was pretty good.

Still, Dinn kept asking, “What do you think?”

• • •

My friend Tom Sorensen, longtime columnist at The Charlotte Observer, once described home as something you feel when you are in a descending airplane. You look out the window, out over the landscape, and maybe (like me) you count baseball diamonds or golf courses or you follow the sunlight in the water or you marvel at how slowly the cars seem to move. And there’s a feeling you have. Whenever I’m about to land at LaGuardia, I feel this buzz of excitement. The same is true for many other places.

But flying into a city and feeling, “Oh, I’m Home” ... that’s something different. And it’s not the, “Oh, I’m home, I can sleep in my own bed,” feeling. No, there’s something deeper, something that is wordless, a sense that you are going to the one place that makes you feel centered and comfortable and even a bit certain.

I met my wife, Margo, at our weekly office basketball games. I proposed to her over pasta and champagne at Garozzo’s restaurant downtown, owned by Michael Garozzo who happily sounds like every gangster you have ever heard in the movies. We were married in an old stone house just after a brass quartet, without provocation, played “Take Me Out To The Ballgame.” We bought a brick Tudor in the city, and on the first day I took out the carpet though I had no idea how to do it. We named our first daughter Elizabeth with the intention of calling her Beth, though we never have called her Beth. We had a house built in what people call the Northland, up near the airport. We named our second daughter Katherine with the intention of calling her Katie, which we do.

And all the while, in tiny little ways every day, Kansas City became more and more a part of me.

The guy at the stadium gate knew the names of my children. The server at Arthur Bryant’s piled a few extra burnt ends for me. The guy at the car dealership was more interested in asking who I thought should be Chiefs quarterback than selling me a car.

Sometimes, I would just wander the parking lot at Arrowhead Stadium before a Chiefs game and smell the barbecue and marvel at how many people called out to me and offered food.

I could keep going with this for 5,000 paragraphs because that’s how many days I’ve lived here. Every corner in town, it seems, sparks a memory. Every face, it seems, sparks a story.

I was lucky enough to be a newspaper columnist when everybody still read the newspaper. I heard from a man who would read my columns to his wife at the breakfast table ... his wife was blind. I heard from college graduates who would say they had grown up reading me. I received cards, so many cards, from the glorious Janet Stephenson, who read every one of my columns and whose kind words were like sunbursts on cloudy days.

Every now and again, someone would call and ask me to consider moving to another place. A few times, I took the interview. Why not? A couple of times, I even considered moving. There are a lot of good places to live.

But then I would ask myself: Why? What was missing? What did I think? When I met Dinn Mann, I had no idea what I wanted out of my life. But quietly, without me noticing, an idea began to form in my head. It wasn’t a complicated idea. It was so simple, in fact, that I could describe it in a single word. Trouble is, that word, like always, is on the tip of my tongue, just out of reach. All I really knew was that when I imagined myself waking up at Home, my bed was in Kansas City.

• • •

There’s really no other way to say it: Kansas City sports stunk when I was a columnist at The Star. The Chiefs did not win a playoff game. The Royals never came close to making the playoffs. Kansas State fumbled away the chance to play in the national championship game — Wildcats coach Bill Snyder compared the loss to the loss of his mother. Missouri had a long series of bad things happen, so many that every time I would go to Columbia I would look up for the dark cloud. Kansas basketball finally won a national championship, but only after a decade of heartbreaking losses that invariably led to Roy Williams crying.

When I came to town, the Chiefs looked like one of the best teams in football, the Royals were not so far removed from their days as a model baseball franchise, the NCAA was still here and Tom Watson was still viewed as young enough to win big tournaments. Things looked as promising as just about anyplace else.

But there was to be little but sports misery and heartbreak. As it turned out, that kind of fit my personality. I had grown up in Cleveland, so I knew all about irrational hope and crushing defeats and making the best of things.

There is no way for a sportswriter to fit everyone’s tastes, and there were many people who could not stand me and let me know about it. They still do. But, all in all, I think my own view of sports fit in with the view of many people in town. When two Royals outfielders jogged toward the dugout with the ball still in the air ... when the Chiefs lost a playoff game without a punt on either side ... when Johnny Damon was traded because the Royals could no longer afford him … when quarterback Elvis Grbac announced that he could not throw the ball and catch it too ... when Missouri almost fired its athletic director on the very day that he had hired a basketball coach ... when the Royals announced that they would not wear Negro Leagues uniforms on Negro Leagues Day because it cost too much money ... when so many things like that happened, we were all in it together.

When good things happened, wonderful things ... when Priest Holmes set the single-season touchdown record ... when Mike Sweeney emerged as a great hitter ... when Mario Chalmers hit the shot ... when Missouri beat Kansas in the biggest football game in America ... when Derrick Thomas came free around the end ... when Bill Snyder’s Kansas State team turned around after a near-century of futility ... when Tom Watson led the U.S. Open ... when good things happened, we were in that together, too.

• • •

Dinn Mann is now editor of MLB.com. I no longer work at The Star. A lot has changed.

I still love Kansas City. I love it in ways I never could have imagined that day Dinn picked me up at the airport. What do you think? Now I know what I think. I have lived here longer than any other place. I know this place, know its rhythms, know its flaws, know its music. When my flight lands at KCI, I feel that thing Tom Sorensen talks about. I feel Home. Capital letters: Home.

And ... now we’re moving. Well, you didn’t think that I would write all this if we were staying, did you? We are moving to Charlotte, N.C. for many reasons, personal and professional — it is the right thing for us — and the last couple of months have been wrenching, both physically and emotionally. We have spent those days packing and hauling and talking it through with the girls and giving away things (“All those books have to go,” my wife said) and painting and caulking and interviewing people and it has been pure madness. It has been so busy that I have not taken time at all to look back. I don’t like looking back anyway. I shudder at goodbyes.

But we’re getting close now. Dates have been set. Papers have been signed. Plans have been made. When we drive around Charlotte, it feels familiar — that is where I went to high school and college. It also feels unfamiliar — so much has changed. But it does not feel like Kansas City. The girls don’t know anything about it. It does not feel like Home.

Maybe it will someday. For now, I just feel wonder that this town in the Midwest that felt so unfamiliar to me that first day has become such an intense and thorough part of my life.

Something kind of funny happened in my later years in Kansas City. People were always nice, but in those early years there was a distance. I was a Clevelander. After a while, though, that distance disappeared.

And lately, when I meet people around town, they often ask me something like: What part of Kansas City did you grow up in? They seem surprised when I tell them that, no, I didn’t grow up in Kansas City.

“Really,” they will say, as if they don’t quite believe me. And maybe they shouldn’t believe me. I did grow up in Kansas City. What part? All of it.
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