AA Q&A: Kevin Harlan

Kevin Harlan has become one of the most recognizable voices in sports broadcasting over his roughly 20 years calling the NBA on TNT and the NFL and college basketball for CBS and football on the radio for Westwood One.

The son of longtime Green Bay Packers executive Bob Harlan, Kevin grew up around sports and took an interest in broadcasting at an early age. After various early jobs with the Minnesota Timberwolves and Kansas City Chiefs, Harlan has now become a national institution in three different sports.

Harlan conducted a lengthy interview with Awful Announcing on Martin Luther King Day following one of his busiest weekends. After broadcasting Lakers-Warriors for TNT on a Thursday night, he flew to Washington D.C. for a Saturday afternoon broadcast of Villanova-Georgetown for CBS. Finally he flew from Washington to Denver, where he did play-by-play of the Steelers-Broncos divisional round playoff game for Westwood One radio.

Harlan, among other things, discussed how he prepares for all these broadcasts, the difference between calling TV and radio, the origin of his famous “no regard for human life” call, his thoughts on head trauma in the NFL, and even his favorite travel tips.

Note: This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Awful Announcing: What’s your background in broadcasting and how did you end up getting to this point you’re at today?

Kevin Harlan: If there was a moment that kind of changed my whole compass and what I wanted to do, with my dad being with the Green Bay Packers for almost four decades, I would have the chance to work in the PR office with the Packers. They used us to be spotters, sometimes, for the visiting networks and things.

In the summer of 1975, I was 14, I guess, I got a job through the Packers to be the interlink guy for NBC’s preseason broadcast of the Packers and I think they played the New England Patriots at County Stadium in Milwaukee and Jim Simpson— the great, great Jim Simpson— and John Brodie did that game. And I sat right in back of them and watched them do this game, and I always had a liking to broadcasting and was kind of trying to figure out how I could get running up in it and trying to do something in that. And this kind of gave me a chance to watch them do it and that kind of lit the fuse, watching Jim Simpson do that game. And things kind of went from there.

My dad was a journalism major at Marquette and he wanted to be a sportswriter. He wanted to be a columnist. And he went to Marquette, and he was actually the editor of the student newspaper there back in the late 50s. But he said to me one time, “you know, if I had to do it all over again, I would get into radio and television. Newspapers are great, being a writer is terrific, he said, but the business is going towards radio and TV.” And that’s what kind of got me interested as well. So him leading me onto that road and watching it first hand, I caught the bug. And it was all she wrote from that point on.

AA: And your dad said the future was going away from print way back then?

KH: He said that if he was getting into journalism at that time, he would go into radio and television. He just had a sense that radio and television was really a great way to make a living. Like I said, I took his advice.

So I would do games on our high school station when I was 15, 16 years old and he would listen to the games. And I’d come back to the house and he’d have all kinds of notes that he wrote and suggestions and things he liked and things I could improve on. So right off the bat, I had someone that was helping me and trying to form the way I would approach a broadcast and the way I would report, and that was pretty important to him. And it kind of rubbed off on me, obviously.

AA: And you talked about Jim Simpson, who recently passed away. Did he have an impact on you, even from 14 years old?

KH: He did. I loved his voice. I guess when you first get in the business, maybe, you’re attracted to the biggest names in the mid-70s, 80s and 90s. And Jim Simpson was a very big name in broadcasting at NBC and then later certainly at ESPN when he made the switch.

For instance, just the other night, I was sitting in Washington D.C. getting ready for the Villanova-Georgetown game on Friday night, and NFL Network aired Super Bowl I and Jim Simpson did the radio broadcast on NBC Radio, and just to hear his voice again was just like music to my ears.

When I was a kid, I would record his voice doing games on television on a cassette recorder and I’d record Keith Jackson’s voice and John Facenda’s voice, Don Criqui’s voice. Voices I was really attracted to and loved to listen to at that time and would fall asleep listening to those voices. I would let the cassette run underneath my pillow [laughs] and would fall asleep listening to Jim Simpson’s voice or Keith Jackson’s voice. I thought that those were my idols. Those were the guys that I admired the most and I wanted to be like them growing up.

AA: I bet there are people who do the same thing, on whatever devices they have, with your voice as well.

KH: Maybe they do, I don’t know. There are so many now. Back then, the broadcasters like Bill Flemming, Chris Schenkel, Curt Gowdy, Jim Simpson, and Pat Summerall, who was certainly beginning at that stage back in the mid-70s. There were so few broadcast outlets, that really you could probably circle 10 names and that would be the crux of what you would listen to. Local announcers were probably as famous, in a lot of ways, as the big national announcers were.

Now, you’ve got so many outlets and so many guys doing play-by-play. There are so many different people to listen to, great broadcasters out there to listen to. It’s nice to be in the mix. It’s nice to be part of that fraternity more than anything else, because there are so many talented people out there.

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