A few minutes before I learned Thursday that Mike Kahn had died, I thought of my former colleague and longtime friend.
As the partially blue morning skies were replaced by the prevailing gray that expels snowflakes with a fury, memories were rekindled from a trip we once shared from Qwest Field to the North End of Tacoma.
Usually this was a 45-minute commute – with Mike driving, OK, maybe 35 minutes – but when a winter storm turned I-5 into a parking lot during a Monday night game against the Packers, the commute became a five-hour adventure.
Everything was in place for a terrible experience: Brutal weather, harrowing highway conditions, no, uh, oasis in sight.
But it wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t even inconvenient.
It was wonderful.
Spending five hours in a passenger seat, next to Mike Kahn, meant talking about a few of his favorite things: family, religion, politics, the Seahawks, Neil Young, Gary Payton, movies, Jim Brown, Woody Hayes, old newspaper gigs and new restaurants.
Every once in a while, one of us would say: “Can you believe we’ve only gone a mile in 15 minutes?”
And then Mike would direct the discussion toward someplace else: national events, David Stern, the blogosphere, Bill Walsh, childhood memories, the Allman Brothers …
During the three years since Mike returned to Tacoma after supervising a Web startup in south Florida, it was my privilege to share his company on Sunday mornings – and the occasional Monday night – the Seahawks were home.
As the managing editor and columnist for Seahawks.com, Mike was required to cover the Hawks. The job contained one perk not stipulated in his contract.
I got to ride with him.
Remember the old coffee commercial jingle about the best part of waking up? The best part of Seahawks Sunday was driving to Seattle with Mike Kahn. A football game would be on his car radio, or maybe a CD of some live concert, and he’d drive half a block before the volume was turned down so we could resume a conversation that began when our paths first crossed in 1978.
It would’ve been fun to reminisce about the old days in Missouri – he covered prep sports in Jefferson City, I covered preps just up the road, in Columbia – but Mike was so fired up about the here and now, he didn’t waste much time on the way it was.
His interests were peppered with opinions, usually fervent and sometimes fierce. And though he wasn’t shy about sharing any of those opinions in print, he was at his most passionate when it came time to assemble facts.
Not only did he know who to call, he usually had access to both a primary telephone number and a backup telephone number. He’d knock on doors. If a receptionist for, say, a general manager told him the boss was too busy to see visitors – why don’t you stop by later in the week? – he’d wait outside the office, or in the parking lot.
Decades before the Internet boom would prove him a sage, a sports editor once told me that journalists don’t work in conventional time shifts. If a story breaks at midnight, you’re on the clock. If a story isn’t breaking on your day off, pay attention.
Mike relished that challenge.
In the spring of 1984, he boarded a flight from Indianapolis to Birmingham when he noticed a familiar face on the plane: Auburn basketball star Charles Barkley.
You and I might walk past Charles Barkley and think: Hey, that’s Charles Barkley!
Mike walked by and wondered: What’s he doing on this flight? Then he remembered the U.S. Olympic Basketball tryouts were being held at the University of Indiana, and that Barkley was on his way home before the tryouts were over.
Mike introduced himself (the seat next to Barkley was open) and his reporter’s instincts took over.
He asked: What’s up?
A lot, it turned out. Coach Bobby Knight had cut Barkley from the ’84 Olympic team. Sir Charles spilled his guts – considering the source, we’re talking major spillage – and Mike cobbled together a story immediately picked up by the national wire services.
In August 1984, Mike, who had relocated from Birmingham to Indianapolis, traveled to Seattle to report on an exhibition football game between the Colts and the Seahawks. Having spent all his life in summertime sweat boxes (Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, Alabama, Indiana), he encountered the crisp August air and decided to make the Pacific Northwest his destination..
Three years later, he was on the Sonics beat for The News Tribune. An NBA fan who’d grown up following Oscar Robertston’s Royals in Cincinnati, Mike combined his encyclopedic knowledge of pro basketball with an insatiable desire to tell fans what management often didn’t want fans to know. The result was some of the best beat reporting that’s ever been published in this newspaper.
The gravity of Mike’s illness was no secret to his friends; he’d spent too many years stalking the truth, demanding accountability, to pretend otherwise. And yet his candor was accompanied by optimism consistent with his fighting spirit. Last time we spoke, in the Qwest Field press box, he was smiling, happy at work, ready to confront the grim prognosis awaiting him.
Mike had the toughness to endure any crisis, but as he was able to lean on the pillars of family and faith, the toughness was elevated to a fearlessness that should be remembered as heroic.
Before the fight for his life turned from a puncher’s chance to an ultimatum, he sent an e-mail message to me: “I can’t see the end of the road, but at least I can see the road.”
Just as he did after that Monday night game: Looking ahead, plodding forward an inch at a time, determined to eventually gain traction on the slippery pavement. It took a while, but he got us home. Along the way, he told stories, posed questions, raised awareness and, all in all, reminded me how an engaged and curious mind can turn five exasperating hours into five enlightened hours.
We were friends for 30 years, but I found out something about Mike Kahn that night.
He was never more relaxed, more intrepidly upbeat, than when he gripped the steering wheel and drove into the dark, toward a horizon he could only imagine.
John McGrath: 253-597-8742; ext. 6154
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