FOX’s Joel Klatt might not have the name recognition of Kirk Herbstreit, but he might very well be on his way. The former Colorado quarterback has been FOX’s lead game analyst on the college side of the sport since last season, and on its own, that would be a great story.
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“There are several different types of alcoholism,” Klatt said. “Mine was the binge variety. It wasn’t that I would have five drinks a day. I would have 15 to 20 drinks every time I drank — which was once or twice a week, on an off day or something like that. I just had no governor.”
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“My identity was at that point completely wrapped up in being an athlete and being successful — being the quarterback,” Klatt said. “It was gone. I was lost.”
Klatt began drinking as heavily as he had in Idaho Falls. “This time, though, I was married,” he said. “So I had to hide it even more.” He and Sara would share a bottle of wine at dinner. When Sara went to the bathroom, Klatt would gulp down all the wine in his glass and then refill it to its previous level. When Sara went to bed, Klatt would polish off the rest of the bottle. “It was almost like this cat-and-mouse game,” he said.
When Joel and Sara went out to dinner with friends, Klatt could see his wife get nervous as soon as he ordered a second drink.
Klatt has been sober since Labor Day 2011. But it’s perhaps his detailed accounts of his history with concussions, and the symptoms that he’s still faced with each day, that might stick with you most.
Klatt says he suffered ten concussions, with the tenth and final occurring in the 2005 Big 12 championship game against Texas, on this play:
That’s hard to watch, and harder when you hear of the effects:
Klatt has no memory of the immediate aftermath: of doctors coming out to the field, of trying to get up on his own. The first thing he remembers is waking up in a hospital hours later and seeing a doctor wearing a white coat with a Longhorns logo stitched on it. Klatt thought he was having a bad dream.
A few days later, Klatt was back in Boulder taking a final exam. He stared at the first page of the test. “All the lines began to wave,” he said. “I couldn’t read it. I started getting dizzy, started sweating. I just took it up to my professor. I said, ‘Is there anyway you could tell me what my grade would be if I just took a zero on this?’
“He said, ‘I think it would be about a C.’
“I said, ‘So I’ll pass?’
“I just handed in the blank test and walked out. I took a C-minus on my GPA for that class because I couldn’t take the final.”
That’s a tough story to read, especially extrapolated outward to the many, many concussions suffered by football players of all ages. Klatt says he already has lingering symptoms, including an inability to deal with direct sunlight for any period of time:
Klatt’s head still tingles with the effects of his concussions. “I’m actually right now having an effect of it,” he told me. A few minutes before we talked, he’d been sitting in the sun, addressing a group of employees from Fox Sports’ programming and research departments. Anytime Klatt is in the sun for more than 20 minutes without sunglasses, he gets a headache.
Klatt is 34.
The whole thing is certainly worth your time, as Klatt goes into detail as to what he thinks when he sees players suffer concussions during games, why he thinks rule changes to punish defenders for targeting or roughness actually cause more dangerous situations, and just the overall work ethic he puts into his craft.
When compared with certain other analysts who tend to rely the same cliched lines week after week while not educating the viewer at all, it’s a refreshing approach, and one that has certainly served him well.
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