AA Q&A: Kevin Harlan

AA: You travel all around the country and stay at these different hotels. Do you have any travel tips that you’d like to share with our readers?

KH: Travel tips. Well with flying, I would always say sticking with one airline is always the best thing to do because you can get your miles and get a little bit of help when there is a delay or a cancellation easier than if you kind of randomly pick an airline.

A lot of people don’t fly that much. You just pick something that fits your schedule and the price is good, and I get that. I totally understand that. But if you do fly a lot and you do stick with the one airline, it does tend to help you. Like this morning, I was cancelled out of Denver and because I had some status with one of the airlines, they were able to put me on another airline and got me home at about the same time. So I would suggest that.

And you know to be quite honest, I’ve always enjoyed hotels that were closer to the airport because I guess I take so many early morning flights, I’d rather be right there. So like in Denver sometimes, we’ll stay in that brand new Westin at the Denver airport, and there’s a Westin at the Detroit airport. And it’s so convenient. When you wake up, you get yourself dressed and cleaned up and you’re out the door and you could be literally at the gate like in about 20 minutes and that’s a real plus.

And I always try to get the earliest flight in the morning, because that way you’re not succumbing to daze, delays and weather issues, or technical problems, mechanicals that can build up throughout a day of travel. If you’re leaving first thing in the morning, you’re usually on time. But if you wait until later in the day, it just seems like the backups build up and build up and now you’re delayed and you’ve got issues. And that’s no fun.

So [laughs] those are the simple-minded things that anybody could probably tell you, but those are the things that come to mind. [laughs]

AA: We’ll get you a show on Travel Channel before you know it. Going back to football, and this is our last formal question, you’ve had Concussion come out and you saw the Pittsburgh-Cincinnati game with all the head trauma and the controversy. Does all that affect, not how you call a game, but maybe how you view the game of football?

KH: It affects the way I announce the game more than the way I view the game. Because I played a little bit in high school, I know how rugged it can be. And because I was a ballboy for the Green Bay Packers for many, many years growing up in Green Bay, I saw a lot of injuries and saw a lot of hard hits. And saw a lot of guys woozy and injured.

And so I feel like because at a very early age, I was watching that stuff during training camp and during games up in Lambeau, I think I’ve got a pretty good appreciation for just the physicality that goes on.

So I’ve never been one to, I don’t think I have, to ever make light of any kind of injury. And it’s not just the injury itself. It’s the months of rehab that then are needed by that player to get back up and get close to what he once was. And I’ve got such great respect for these guys that have to go through all this rehab.

So having seen it firsthand as a kid and then been in the business since I was a teenager, I guess I’ve just kind of grown up with the fact that you’ve got such great admiration for these guys that go through it, and realize that when they get hit in the head, that it’s not just something you take lightly.

The movie I have seen and appreciate the vantage point. The interesting thing is that Mike Webster, when I was doing the Kansas City Chiefs on radio, was — and this may have been his last stop in the NFL — I remember talking to him many, many times. This was obviously much before, but maybe no more than like eight, nine, 10 years before we saw what he became in the movie, but when he was in his last days in the NFL in Kansas City, he was incredibly bright.

And so having seen that Mike Webster, knowing Mike Webster, traveling with Mike Webster as I did for a very short time as he finished his career with the Chiefs, and then seeing how he was portrayed in that movie, was to me, personally, the most jarring thing. I know they wouldn’t have accentuated, they wouldn’t have exaggerated the state they found Mike in and the way they portrayed him late in life those last days. I know they wouldn’t have done that.

So by virtue of what I saw, thinking he was probably very close to that, and knowing what I knew him to be when I saw him a decade earlier — eight, nine years earlier — that to me was the most emotional thing I saw. And just continued to instill in me and the people that knew the Duersons and the different people that had gone through this, just how brutal a sport it can be.

I was with Trent Green last night and yesterday in Denver and he suffered multiple concussions. And that’s pretty much why he left the game, because of that. So I have a great appreciation for that.

But I do think this: I do think while the league and any logically thinking person would have to know that if you hit your head— whether it was in the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, whenever— that yes, you’re probably doing damage. Much like you do damage to your knee or your hip because you got hit there, or you used it extensively, or you were jumping up and down as a basketball player and you’ve got arthritis now in your hips, and your back and your knees and your ankles.

So when I think people say the league has known that, I think we’ve all probably known that as doctors have. But it took this doctor in Pittsburgh the extra mile that he went to really get to the core of the problem and give it a name and unveil it for us. I found that very interesting.

But I do think that the way head trauma is treated now is much like ACLs are treated now. The medical advances in both those areas have been so pronounced. When they were operating on knees in 1965, they were basically just opening up the entire leg and people like Gale Sayers, they were never the same. They could never come back. But now you do an ACL and a guy is back, as you saw with Adrian Peterson, in less than a year. In like eight months.

And I would think, and I’m obviously not a medical person, but I would think if they made those kinds of advances in just repairing and reconstructing a knee, repairing and reconstructing a shoulder, having meniscus surgery — those kinds of things — that goes hand in hand with the improvement, the discoveries, the development, of treating head trauma. So I think they’ve just gone as all medical science has advanced. And that’s what I came out of that movie thinking.

I do think the league knows that to be a long lasting league, it needs to figure this out and protect these players as much as they possibly can so they are as invested in protecting these players as the players are in protecting themselves. And I think that the movement the league is making is, I think, very admirable. They know they’re not even close to be complete in where they’ve got to go, but as someone who broadcasts a lot of NFL games — I probably broadcast as many as anybody in the country because I do a Sunday game, I do a Monday game and I do four preseason games for the Packers — at the end of the year, I probably broadcast more NFL games than anybody else, I have a great appreciation for what the league is doing and trying to get after.

AA: Any final thoughts, or anything you’d like to add?

KH: The only thing I would say is that — and I probably speak for every broadcaster who has a job — from doing college games to pro games, regardless of the sports, I don’t think I’ve ever run across anybody in this business who doesn’t love doing what they’re doing. I think all of us feel incredibly fortunate to be involved in whatever level of sport, on radio or television, regardless of the medium, I think we all feel like “how lucky are we that we get to broadcast this game?”

For me this past week, we had a national audience on Thursday, the CBS national game on Saturday and the national radio audience yesterday for that playoff game. And before I put on my headset every game I do, regardless of who I’m working for, I always say a small little prayer of thanks that I’m in this position. Because I don’t know what else I could possibly do that could ever give me so much enjoyment and satisfaction.

And at the same time I say that, and it’s not the same story for everybody, but the people that I work for, I’ve had a long relationship with both Turner and CBS that are both approaching 20 years here in the next couple of years. That doesn’t happen very much in this business.

And so when I put on that headset, those are the things I think about. I think about how lucky I am to be in that position, to do that game, to be doing something that I love, and lucky enough that I’ve found employers that would think I’m worthy of being on the air and representing that company doing those games. And I think I speak for a lot of people in that regard, that think we’re so fortunate to be doing what we’re doing.