Show Notes

• Acknowledgement by NHL and HOF
• An early love of newspapering
• How the sports industry has changed
• The biggest failing of journalism
• “I’ve been everywhere, man”
• How Kevin approaches a story
• Keeping it fresh and engaging
• A very rewarding profession
• Who is hockey’s GOAT?
• Mr. & Mrs. Hockey

Connect With Kevin Allen

✩ Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/kevin.m.allen.7/
✩ X – https://x.com/bykevinallen

Summary

Kevin Allen is a sports journalist and author who has written professionally for almost 50 years. He was USA Today’s lead hockey writer from 1986 to 2019, and he has written more than 25 sports books. Kevin shares stories from his legendary career covering hockey, and opines on the greatest player to ever step onto the ice.

Full Transcript

Brian  

Welcome to another episode of LifeExcellence with Brian Bartes. Join me as I talk with amazing athletes, entrepreneurs, authors, entertainers and others who have achieved excellence in their chosen field, so you can learn their tools, techniques and strategies for improving performance and achieving greater success. Kevin Allen is a sports journalist and author who has written professionally for almost 50 years. He was USA Today’s lead hockey writer from 1986 to 2019 and he has written more than 25 sports books. Kevin has covered everything from Super Bowls to the Olympic Games to the World Series NCAA Basketball, and, of course, the Stanley Cup Finals. Kevin’s contribution to the sport of hockey has been recognized by the National Hockey League and the Hockey Hall of Fame. In 2023 he was inducted into the Eastern Michigan University Journalism Hall of Fame. Today, he covers the Detroit Red Wings for Detroit Hockey Now. I’m excited for our conversation, and it’s great to have him on the show. Welcome Kevin, and thanks for joining us on LifeExcellence.

Kevin  

Well, it’s a pleasure to be with you. 

Brian  

It’s great to have you. Kevin, in 2013 you were the recipient of the Lester Patrick Trophy. That award given by the National Hockey League and USA Hockey is presented annually for outstanding service to hockey in the United States. Players, officials, coaches and executives are eligible to receive the award, and you joined a storied list of recipients that include superstar players like Bobby Orr, Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky and, of course, closer to home, Red Wings greats including Steve Yzerman, Ted Lindsay, Gordie Howe, and longtime Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch. Then in 2014 the Hockey Hall of Fame honored you with the Elmer Ferguson Memorial Award in recognition of distinguished members of the hockey writing profession whose words have brought honor to journalism and to hockey. What do acknowledgments like that mean for you, Kevin, as someone who’s devoted so much of your career and life to the sport of hockey?

Kevin

It’s interesting. Brian, when you start out in this business, you don’t tell yourself I really want to achieve that award or this award, or reach this area of expertise, but when you get there and you get those awards, you realize how emotional it is. To me, it reaffirmed that I had reached my goal that was really established when I was seven or eight years old, when my goal was to be what I would call a big time sports writer, a guy that covered national stories, that wrote from a national perspective. When I got that award, I just remember, as I was preparing my speech for that, I did what I set out to do and I think that’s all any of us can ask. Very few people have been able to do what I’ve done, which is to turn what I considered my hobby when I was a kid – writing and being involved in sports – to a profession that allowed me to make a living. I teach now at Eastern Michigan University in addition to still being a working journalist and I always tell my students that if you go into this business always remind yourself that you’re fortunate, lucky really, to be able to do something that you truly love and get paid for it. I remember my buddy Mike Emrick, we were talking about our careers when we started out – Mike Emrick was a broadcaster for NBC – he started out working for a radio station at $140 a week. I worked my first job out of college at a small daily in Arizona, and I got $185 a week. Mike said, well, the joke was on them, because what they didn’t realize is we would have done it for nothing.

Brian  

Wow. What a wonderful opportunity, as you said, to do something you love. The other thing I was thinking is that – and of course, in sports, there is an opportunity to ultimately get recognized, and in hockey you want to win the Stanley Cup, for a player, that’s the ultimate, for a coach, that’s the ultimate – but then down the line a little bit further, if you’re really good, you do have recognition in the Hall of Fame and the awards that I mentioned and that we talked about; that’s a way for you to get recognized at the end of your career. I think that’s unique, obviously, not all professions have that so it must be incredibly affirming to not only do what you love, but at the end of your career, or toward the end of your career, to receive that acknowledgment. That, hey, you really have stood out as not just being in the industry, but actually making a difference in your profession.

Kevin  

And it’s also – you never think of this when you first hear it, you’re going to win the award – it was probably just as big, maybe more so, for my family as that was for me to be able to bring them to the Hall of Fame. I haven’t done it yet, but I have six grandchildren, and my plaque is sitting in there, and I’ve been trying to convince my kids to get their acts together and get all my grandkids and let them pose for a picture by my Hall of Fame plaque. I said, I don’t ask for much, but I would love to see that. It was so much fun to have all of my family there. By coincidence, I grew up in Wayne, Michigan, went to Wayne Memorial High School, and Mike Modano entered the Hockey Hall of Fame in the same year that I won the Elmer Ferguson. So he was, I was, part of that group that was honored. Wayne-Westland are sort of sister cities. They abut each other. Kids from Westland and Wayne both feed into Wayne Memorial High School. Mike Modano actually fed into Livonia’s system. But it was really sort of coincidental and fun. We talked about it, Mike and I, that from Wayne-Westland we would have a writer and reporter to get in the exact same year so that added to it. The local newspaper did a story and here’s Mike Modano, the fabulous athlete, and then the writer, Kevin Allen, getting in in the same year. And for those who haven’t seen the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, it’s in a very historic old bank building. It’s said to be haunted by a ghost of a teller that worked there 100 some years ago. So it’s just a great venue as well, and it’s just a heck of a party, so to be part of all that just added to it. I didn’t ask Mike or any of the other players, but I bet I was just as nervous making my speech as they were making theirs.

Brian  

Oh, I’m sure. Well, what a great opportunity, what a great occasion and how neat to be doing it with another hometown boy, with Mike. Kevin, how did you break into the industry? You mentioned early on your love of sports. You obviously had a gift for writing. I think a lot of people have an attraction to the sports business if they’re not athletes and can’t play sports, then maybe go into sports marketing or in journalism or another way. How did you actually break into the industry all those years ago?

Kevin 

It was pretty clear to me when I was young that I loved newspapering. I remember being seven years old and walking down Wayne Road. I lived off of Wayne Road in Wayne and going down to put my – I think it was 10 cents or 15 cents – to get a Detroit Free Press. I read the great Detroit writers of that era, Joe Falls, Jim Hawkins was covering the Tigers, and Curtis Sylvester was covering the Lions. I read all of them, and they were like demi-gods to me. These were people that I was just as familiar with as the great athletes in Detroit as well. I just put all my energy into making that happen; I wasn’t sure that it could. Then in eighth grade I was going to Wayne St Mary’s, a parochial school, and I had a nun there who told me you can do this, you can write and really encouraged me not to be denied, to use some perseverance and drive and ambition to fuel [it] because she said, look, I don’t know a lot about journalism, but in most professions talent alone won’t get you there, you’ve got to work hard. And that turned out to be true. I think what I’ve learned all along is that talent will get you so far, but then you need a lucky break. Mine actually, believe it or not, was the 1984 Tigers. I was working in Port Huron for the Port Huron Times Herald, and the Tigers won the World Series that year. They got off to a great 35-5 start. The Port Huron Times Herald belonged to the Gannett chain, and they needed someone to chronicle that 35-5 start and I was close enough, I was covering it for the Port Huron Times Herald. So my stories got picked up and ran in the 100 or so Gannett papers that they had at the time. From that, I went to spring training the following year. I covered the World Series that year, I covered the division playoffs. Then I ended up going on loan to USA Today, and when I was there, there was some winking and stuff. The way it worked back then, you had to go back to your home paper for the proper mourning period but if they liked you, you could end up coming back. I actually had tried to get a job at The Free Press, and I was getting close. I thought I might get it at The Free Press. I went in to see the editor of the Times Herald and I said, I really would prefer to go back to USA Today because I’d like to be a national writer. And she said, well, let’s put a call in. To get me to pull out, they offered me a job at USA Today in 1985. I went there and I ended up staying 34 years. I went there as a baseball writer but we already had a multitude of baseball writers, and it just so happened that the hockey writer had stepped down to actually go to baseball, of all things. And he said to the sports editor, Kevin’s from Michigan, he probably speaks hockey fluently, why don’t you give him a shot? He brought me in, Henry Freeman was his name, and I said I’d be happy to do it. He says, well, we’ll give it to you on a temporary basis and see how you like it. And I held that beat on a temporary basis for 34 years.

Brian  

What a great story. I know the newspaper business has certainly changed over that time in terms of the job itself. Kevin, how is sports writing the same as it was when you started your career and how has it changed? 

Kevin  

That’s a great question, and one that I must always discuss with my students when I teach them. How it’s the same is that, much like an athlete… if anyone who’s watched the Detroit Lions this season and their turn-around and making a run – even though it didn’t last as long as Detroit fans wanted it to – have heard many times it’s said that to have a good wide receiver what you need to do is to get a wide receiver that can get separation from the man who’s covering them. You need to get some distance, some space, so that the quarterback can get to the ball. The same is true in my business. It’s always been true, and still true if you want to rise up and write for the top outlets; you have to get some separation from the other competitors in your field. You’ve got to do something that distinguishes you. You got to be the best reporter, breaking news, getting facts and unearthing stories that others don’t get. You’ve got to be an exceptional writer, a guy that can hold interest, or you’ve got to be a clever, gifted lede writer. If you have one of those, if you can get some separation, I think that’s the same. It was the same in 1974 when I started working, getting paid to write and it’s true now. How it’s completely different, well, when I started, I started on a typewriter. You wrote your story on a typewriter, and then you had to send it. And we used these… it’s almost like a fax machine, but it took six minutes per page. So if you wrote a standard story it was like four type written pages, it took you 24 minutes to send that back to the office so it could be typeset, and then put on a plate for printing. And now everything is all instantaneous. The other thing that’s completely different is the news cycle. We used to say it was 24 hours before, where if you had a scoop it wasn’t going to be printed until the next morning. Now, you have a scoop, you get it up in ten minutes and everybody else has it and they’re rewriting it in a minute or two. I’ve had scoops that have lasted several hours, or longer, years and years ago because people couldn’t catch up because they had no means to do it. Now everything you do is everywhere. And of course, now everyone is a national writer. If you write something, even for a small paper, it’s going to be picked up in social media and it’s everywhere almost instantaneously.

Brian  

I think that’s a huge difference. You even look at the national networks like CNN and they’re using footage from people’s cell phones. If I’m in the middle of a nationally newsworthy story and I have my cell phone, then I become the reporter because I’m there and that footage can get used. The other thing that I’ve noticed – I’m a big fan still of physical paper, I like to read physical papers; I know nobody does that anymore – like with the Wall Street Journal, is you’ll read a story in Monday’s paper that actually appeared in the online version, to your point, on Friday or Saturday or sometime over the weekend. Because really it’s not instantaneous publishing, but it’s publishing as soon as you can get it online. Then, if there’s a print medium as well, it gets into the newspaper or the magazine whenever that happens.

Kevin  

I mean, I think that the biggest failing of journalism was not anticipating the internet arrival with any plan in place for what to do with it. I think it has set journalism back because of that. If you look at the New York Times, for example, they decided to use the pay wall pretty quickly. Because of that, they’re thriving. At USA Today, we did not do that. That’s been a recent development at USA Today and I think because of it we had difficulty making the change over back then. We still wanted to believe that that newspaper, the print edition, was going to carry us for much longer than it really did, even though it still exists today, but not to the impact. In the middle of my career we were printing more than two million copies of that, and the reach on that seemed incredible to us, but that really isn’t anywhere near the reach that you [have] with the internet. You can get anywhere. I mean, once we started… I’ve covered ten Olympic Games and once we moved to an all internet approach to the Olympic Games, we can achieve, like, a half a million readership on some stories if it was big enough, because you’re drawing readers from all over the world, not only from United States. What the internet taught us as well is really what they were [actually] reading; we were only guessing before. We would put stories in and we use the formula that if it was unique we wanted to write it. But we’ve learned that certain things that were staples, for example, feature stories on athletes, that was standard operating procedure right up until and into the 90s. Then what happened is, with the internet, we discovered [people] just really would rather have harder news than that, that they don’t really need features. And if you think about it, it makes sense because by then, almost instantly, athletes were having their own social media and they could [put] their own stories out on social media; they didn’t need the reporters to be a conduit to get to the fan base. They could reach the fan base on their own. So you see much fewer feature stories on athletes than you saw in the heyday of my career.

Brian  

That’s really interesting and that’s absolutely true. I hadn’t thought about that, but players are marketing themselves, their fans are are able to go and learn about them in a variety of ways and much of it directly, whereas, when we were growing up, for example, we didn’t have that same same access. We would wait for that feature story or wait for the Sports Illustrated to come out, or USA Today to come out and be able to read about those athletes. I have to tell you, Kevin, as a huge sports fan, I’m a little envious of the front row seat that you’ve had for now half a century covering some of the greatest moments in sports. I know a lot of your coverage has been around hockey, but you’ve talked about the Olympics and baseball, and you’ve covered some pretty amazing events in all sports. As you reflect back on your career, what are the most memorable events or interviews you’ve been privileged to be part of?

Kevin  

Well, there have been so many; the Johnny Cash song, I’ve been everywhere, man, that was my theme song for a lot of years at USA Today. Early in my career, I would travel 150 days a year. When we covered the NFL at USA Today, it was all hands on deck so even though I was the national hockey writer, I covered probably 300 plus NFL games in my career and did some playoff as well and got to some Super Bowls. And because I was living in Michigan, oftentimes they would pull me off to do a Michigan State story, or a Michigan story, or go down to Indianapolis to do the NFL, or to Cleveland, and so forth. So I got to see a lot. I did two NASCAR races a year because they were in Michigan and it was convenient for me to do that. But I always found it was the stories that you couldn’t really plan on that I always enjoyed the most. The most memorable story without question was when I went to the Arctic Circle, to Nunavut, which is a province in northern Canada, up on Hudson Bay. I went in July and the ice had just broken up, like two weeks before, and Jordin Tootoo has the first Inuit to be drafted into the National Hockey League. I went up there and spent several days with him in what would be his off season training. There were no gyms there with great equipment so training for him would be filling up five gallon paint cans with water and then running through the tundra with his niece on his back. That’s how he trained while he was there. Since he wasn’t home very much and he loved to seal hunt, he dragged me and a photographer seal hunting. Now that is a lot less glamorous than you think it is. You get out and you’re out in the middle of Hudson Bay and you might as well be in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, because you don’t see any land anywhere. We were in a, I would say, a 12 to 15 foot boat with a Johnson 70 horsepower engine, not a life preserver to be seen, no radio, no oars. On the second day we went out, our photographer brought a satellite phone, he said, just so we could say goodbye to our wives if we go down. Because safety was not their concern. They didn’t think in those terms. They told great stories of being out there on snowmobiles when the ice broke off. And I said, well, what do you do? And he says, well, you wait and you hope somebody will come out and brave the ice and try to bring you in. But they lose snowmobiles when the ice thaws, because they park them out there. It was just a crazy existence. It was daylight 24 hours there, when I was out there. It was a tremendous story. It was hard to describe a player who had come from that environment and contrast that with mostly the American players who make it, or a lot of them – not most, but a lot of them – come from pretty rich backgrounds. Prep school hockey out east is very big. A lot of great players have come through there. Contrast that lifestyle with Jordin Tootoo who lived in relative poverty; they went caribou hunting not for sport but for food. They both – the prep school kids and the Inuit from Nunavut – both ended up making the NHL. So it’s one of my all time favorite stories. Learning about the culture of the Inuits I became friendly with Jordin and I followed his career. He’s had it up and down. He conquered alcoholism as well, and he’s still… he’s been clean for a long time. So it was one of my all time favorite stories, and I ended up writing a cover story on it. When I did make my speech after the Hall of Fame, I talked about that story and the impact it had on my life. 

Brian  

That’s a great story, and it’s a unique story. You talked earlier about getting separation from other reporters. I’m not sure how many reporters had an opportunity to participate in that assignment. I just have a question about that though, was your editor giving you that assignment as an opportunity, or was that punishment for something?

Kevin  

No, believe it or not, it was my own idea. I knew the player, I knew he was coming to his first training camp, and I knew he was on the Nashville Predators and I knew David Poile for many years, the GM there. I just pursued that thinking that this could be a great story because they had never had an Inuit before try to make the National Hockey League. So, yeah, I tell you though, it was real eye opening; the barge only came in because basically the port was only open for a very short period every year. They would get two barges in so they fly everything in. This was almost 20 years ago now and even then, like milk there in Nunavut was $8.50 a gallon, a big liter of pop was like $5; it was so costly to live there. Of course, there’s very little in the way of employment for the Inuit people there. It was a real hard life and it obviously gets quite cold there in the winter. My other favorite moment on that is, I was out with Jordin on, it was probably day three, and he wanted to take me to a couple of the islands that have lots of tribal lore associated with them. We pulled up to this island, as we’re coming up, Jordin reached down for a 22. He takes his gun out and he fires a bunch of shots into what looked like a cave. And I said, what’s that all about? He goes, well, the polar bears like to hang up there and we go onto the island through that cave. He said, I just didn’t want any surprises. And I thought, holy cow, you’ve got to chase away the polar bears. The other thing he told me too, about learning about nature, he said that down in Manitoba – it’s very famous place, they’ve done documentaries where polar bears like to hang out in Churchill, Manitoba, there’s a large garbage dump there – so all the polar bears, when they are looking for food, will come to Churchill, like it’s the greatest restaurant ever. Jordin’s father told me that there used to be a lot more polar bears up where he was but then he said Manitoba passed the law that said you couldn’t shoot polar bears down there. And he goes, they all just moved south like they knew that the law had been passed and that they’d be safer, because we can shoot them, Inuits have the right to hunt polar bears, he said, but you can’t if they go south about 50 miles. He said it’s almost like they go down and go, na-na-na-na-na-na, you can’t kill us now, [laughter]. We did go seal hunting. Now, I’m probably the least likely person you’ll ever meet to go seal hunting. I take my grandkids to see seals at the zoo, I don’t have them for Sunday dinner. But having spent time out there and having those little critters just diving under the boats and almost taunting you, by the end, I was rooting against the seals. I really was, it was just part of their culture. They love seal meat and it just sort of changed my whole perspective on it, to go out there and be with Jordin and his friends on a seal hunting expedition. But I will say this, we were out there all day, and nobody shot a single seal while I was there.

Brian  

What an eye opening experience on so many levels, and neat that you were able to experience that yourself, and then you came back and were able to share that with your readers. Kevin, as a journalist, how do you approach a story, and what’s the outcome that you strive to achieve for the reader?

Kevin  

Well, that’s an interesting tale, because they teach you about the importance of being objective and I’ve never liked that perspective just for this reason. The way that I craft my story, the way I assemble this story, the way I choose the order of the paragraphs and what’s important, that’s very subjective, in my opinion. You make decisions and you influence the story just by what you do. Early on in my career – and I’m saying even when I just was starting out my first year in college – I would argue with the journalism profs that the objective is not to be an objective reporter; that the goal is to be fair. So that was always my… when I went into a story it’s that I’m going to be fair, I’m going to show both sides of it, and yeah, I’m going to choose the order the paragraph’s going in, but I’m going to make sure each side gets their say. Always, there are two sides. It is rare that you come across the story where everybody is in agreement. Everybody’s got their take on [things] and it’s still true today. When things aren’t going well, there are always different opinions among the players and the coaches and the management about what’s happening out there. Everybody can look at the same thing but come away with different perspectives. I think that’s one of my strengths, that I’ve always been able to sort out all the different opinions and present them in such a way where I let my readers have an understanding that, hey, it’s not all black and white. There’s a lot of gray there, I think that’s true. I’ve often said… one of the things that readers often ask me is, as well, you make predictions on games and you’re wrong sometimes. And I always say, well, I’m wrong a lot of the times. But, I said, this is why. The difference between me AS a fan, and me AND a fan, is this:  I know that even though I’m very close to the game and I live in this world with athletes and coaches and everything, I understand and know that I have no idea who’s going to win, because there are so many variables that’s impossible to know that. But a fan really doesn’t understand that, they think there really is a way to know who’s going to win every game and that’s just impossible. It really comes down to mathematics, probabilities. And I always tell people, you replay that game that you just watched and tomorrow it’ll look completely different because something will happen, happenstance – as a fumble, in hockey a puck that cleans off the post instead of tucking inside the post, so many different things. If I ever write a book about my career as a sports writer, there will be a chapter devoted to all the odd things that happened. I think the best you can hope for in terms of determining the outcome is to do what we now do now because of the betting world. But I’ve been doing this since the 1980s, where I would say, if these two teams played ten times, one team would win seven times, probably, and one would win three. Now what we see on the screen all the time, they’re always talking about probability. Well, that’s how I’ve always viewed it, because there’s never no chance. The 1980 Olympic team proved that there’s never no chance for a team to win. There’s always some chance; David sometimes does defeat Goliath. I think that’s how I’ve always looked at it. If you’re going to speak in declarative sentences in the sports world, you’re always going to be disappointed.

Brian  

That’s a really interesting perspective. It seems challenging, especially for, well, not just for sports writers, but for sports writers covering a particular team or even a particular sport, to keep stories fresh and engaging. I had the term “beat writer” come into my consciousness. It’s the same kind of thing when you’re writing about the same area or the same sport or the same team continually. I’m curious, what do you do to avoid, I’ll say, cookie cutter reporting from game to game or season to season, and to continually capture stories in a unique and compelling way if you’re reporting on… so now you’re covering the Red Wings and the Red Wings play night after night after night. And sure, they travel to different cities and they play different teams, but what do you do as a writer, and what do you do for yourself, frankly, because you’ve been doing it for 50 years, how do you continually capture stories for yourself and for your readers that that make it unique and fresh and compelling?

Kevin  

That’s a great question. I think that’s at the heart of where journalism is today, in terms of trying to do it in such a way. We have so much thrown at us now in terms of sports, like we have all the statistics we need, and now we have advanced statistics, the analytics and so forth so keeping it fresh is a real challenge. I’ve always tried to do it and maybe I do it less so now that I’m older, because there is one other element that gets into it; the drive to get immediate. For immediacy, sometimes getting gets in the way of writing fresh stuff because people do want to know the information now. It becomes very important, if you hear of an injury or a trade, like you can’t say, well, it’s nine o’clock now, I’ll research it and write it up at noon. That’s lost, you’ve lost all your readers by then. There is this need for urgency that gets in the way of the freshness that you’re speaking of. But my way of doing has always been to bring metaphors in outside the world of sports. I remember… it just comes to mind, I was once describing Vyacheslav Kozlov, who was a Red Wings player who took interesting routes to get to the net and I described his skating style as, think of a four year old with a crayon just drawing on a paper. It looks kind of like he’s going this way and that way. Well, that’s how Kozlov looked. When he went to the net he never went in a straight line. It was always back and [forth] sort of thing. I’ve always had that sort of thing where I’ve brought in other sports to try to freshen it up. Like I talk about hockey players that play like linebackers and I’ve talked about other things as well. So you’ve got to find different ways to express what they’re doing out there that isn’t just the same rehashing of the cliches that accompany the sport you’re covering.

Brian  

And that’s actually true of writing in general, right? If we can describe it in a way that people understand  or associate it with something that people understand, then they’re more inclined to shake their head and say oh, yeah, I get that. Anybody who’s been around children knows what that’s like to have a child color with a crayon and have it sort of go here and there and every where. Even for a non-hockey fan, they can understand what it is that you’re describing; Kozlov’s path to the net that way. Kevin, what do you love about the career that you’ve been able to work in for nearly 50 years? 

Kevin  

Well, I love the fact that I’m pushing towards 70 – I’m 69 – and yet I’m still able to do it. I still enjoy it. They still pay me to do it. There are very few… like, we’ve reached the point… this is really about society and our culture as well. People say things like, why are you still working? Like I shouldn’t be working, I should be out doing this. But what if you enjoy your work? Isn’t there room for somebody who just likes it, that doesn’t feel like they’re working? I feel the same way – I didn’t know that I would – but I feel the same way about teaching. I didn’t set out to be a teacher, but now that I’m doing it I really enjoy it even though there’s a lot of work involved. It takes me a while to prepare lectures because I have not been doing it my whole life. But I still like it. I like the connection. And I think that’s what I really appreciate, that there are certain jobs where if you get older you can no longer continue to do them, but I can do this job. I’m still doing it, and I’m doing it well enough that they want me around. I’m really, really, really enjoying it. I never want to diminish it, especially [the idea] that it’s not work because it is, it is work. But it doesn’t often feel like work, that I’m going to a game. It would be better if I could convince the NFL and the NHL and all the other sports to play their games maybe starting at 10:30 in the morning, so we could be wrapped up by 1:00 pm and they wouldn’t have to play them always at seven o’clock at night, because I don’t like driving at night as much anymore, but they’re probably not going to do that. But that’s what I like best about it, this job has kept me interested and employed for a half a century. I remember, I got my first job in a college paper, and I went in before the semester had started in my freshman year. I had a student teacher in high school, at Wayne Memorial. I was going to go with the University of Michigan, and she said, you’re making a mistake. Now she had come from Eastern Michigan and she said The Eastern Echo and The Michigan Daily college papers are comparable papers. They’re both very good. The one difference is that there are so many journalism majors at Michigan you won’t get on to The Michigan Daily until you’re a junior. There’s no major for journalism at Eastern – there is now, but there wasn’t then in 1974 – and she said, if you show up and walk into that office before the semester starts, you’ll be their number one writer because they don’t have anybody else. You go in there, she said, and you’ll be running the thing and before you know it you’re a managing editor. Well, I changed. I was going to go to Michigan and I withdrew. You could just, essentially at that point, call up and get into Eastern Michigan without much consternation, and I did, and that’s exactly what I did. I went in August and joined The Eastern Echo. My first assignment was to talk to George Mans, who was a football coach, and I remember he said to me, well, how long have you been with The Echo? And I said, about 20 minutes, because they had hired me and then I had walked over to the field house and had done the preview for the football team. That sold me that this was going to be a great profession. The fact that I went in there and I was able to hand myself in. You’ve got to reach the point when you’re a writer – and I often talk to my students about this as well – you’ve got to quickly get to the point where you realize the worst I’m going to be, even on my worst days, is I’m going to be adequate. Because when you don’t feel that way, if you don’t have the confidence to know that you’re going to be, you’re worried to try stuff; ledes that will work or won’t work? Well, you won’t try it if you’re afraid all the time. You’ve got to reach the point where you’ve got enough confidence that you’re going to put a story out there and never be embarrassed, and then you’ll start to try some things that will earn you a rise in the profession. It’s just a very rewarding profession. You spend a lot of time watching a lot of fun games. And you mentioned that I’ve seen so many different things in my life and interviewed so many great people. I’ve done one on one interviews with Michael Jordan and Al Gore when he was vice president. I’ve interviewed Gerald Ford, the late Gerald Ford, several times, talked to the top athletes and Olympics and so forth, and a lot of movie stars that I’ve crossed paths with because of the sports situation as well. So it’s brought me into places that I never would have been able to get into had I not been a journalist.

Brian  

Well you’ve had a great career and a great life, and I say, just keep writing as long as you can, and as long as some forum will allow you to do that. Kevin, as it happens, as we’re recording this, we’re about to witness a historic event in hockey as Alex Ovechkin closes in on Gretzky’s record for the most career regular season goals. And I think right now, as we’re recording this, he’s 18 goals away from surpassing Gretzky’s 894 goal record, a record by the way, that he’s held since he retired, which has been now almost 25 years. When I think about GOATs in sports, I personally believe Gretzky is the greatest player to ever play the game of hockey. Who do you think is the best player ever in the NHL, and does Ovechkin enter into the debate once he breaks the scoring record?

Kevin  

That is another just great question. Ovechkin, we talked before too, about how one of the things I like about sports is that it often surprises us, the results. We say things that we shouldn’t. We say things like it’s a record that’ll never be broken. One of the records that we’ve said that about was Gretzky, because, I mean, this is a guy when getting 100 points was considered incredible, he got 215, Wayne Gretzky did. He had 92 goals one year, like he was just incredible in the 80s, he was so much better than everyone else that we did say that record will never be broken. But along came Alex Ovechkin, and what is sometimes lost about Ovechkin is that he was scoring 50 goals continuously, 50 plus goals, at a time when scoring goals was really hard. Like Wayne Gretzky, he did all that, he was better than everyone else. But there are a lot of people that were; it was the wide open 1980s and early 90s when he was scoring those goals. There were other players, including Steve Yzerman who topped 150 points as well. So there were guys getting a lot of points. Nobody was doing the kind of scoring that Ovechkin did when he did it. This was a defensive league then, he was doing it at a time when kids were coming up having gone to defensive school every summer for ten and 12 years. Even Pee Wee seven year olds were playing the neutral zone trap, like it was very, very difficult. I think Ovechkin – and a lot of this is because he’s Russian and we don’t know him as well early in his career, for a lot of years – he was hard to understand, his accent was thick. He didn’t enjoy the interview process, so we didn’t know a lot about him. But I think he’s going to be one of those players we’re going to appreciate a lot more when he’s retired, once we think about what we saw. Again, he played in Washington, not a high profile team, it’s not the Maple Leafs, it’s not the Rangers, it’s not the Bruins, it’s not the Red Wings. It was the Washington Capitals. Took him a long time to win a cup, and so for all those reasons, I just don’t think he has really gotten what he’s deserved for what he’s accomplished, and what he’s accomplished is amazing. For him to have beat a record that most of us thought would never be broken and he did. He’s going to do it, there’s no doubt about it. Wayne Gretzky knew for a while that it was going to happen, and even though he’s very gracious about it – because that’s who Wayne is – it’s got to sting a little bit, like you said, a lot of people believe he’s the greatest. I think it’s Gordie Howe but I’m biased. I grew up in Detroit. I saw him play in the WHA, I just think he added a physical element to the other guys. But really, if you ask me my professional opinion, what I would say is there were really four players that have changed the game. There was Gretzky, who was the first creative, intellectual player who utilized like the net like it was a player. He used the net as to set a pick so he could score more goals and he could pass from behind there. There was Bobby Orr, who was the most spectacular player in NHL history. Mario Lemieux was by far the greatest goal scorer. I would say in my 30 some years of covering the league, nobody was better on a break-away than Mario Lemieux. But who I thought was second? Steve Yzerman, Detroit Red Wings. People forget about that, because he became a two way player but when he first came in the league, he was next to Mario. He was the second best player on the break-away. And then there’s Gordie Howe, who added a physical element. He was an intimidating force. So there were those four players. Now I would like to add Ovechkin to that, because – I still think Mario was a better goal scorer just because he could score so many different ways – Alex Ovechkin, what makes him so incredible is he scored most of those goals from the same spot. He set up on the left wing circle, the puck would come across to him and Marc-André Fleury, who’s retiring this year, said to me one time, we all know where he’s going to be. We all know how hard that shot is. We’re all ready for it, and it’s still just flies by us. Again, I think that’s the other thing about him that makes him so great. He says, yeah, go ahead and stop me, you can’t; and nobody has. So I don’t know that he’ll ever break into that top four in terms of the way we view him and I think it’s for a lot of reasons, starting with the fact that, like I said, he was Russian and early in his career we didn’t truly understand him. I don’t think it helps him either, that he’s friends with Putin which suddenly became an issue, and he didn’t win till late in his career. He finally won, which was important, but all those issues [aside] I think it’s a fun story, and I do think the people in the game do appreciate him. They know that Ovechkin is special and he’s a special player.

Brian  

Whether you like him or don’t like him, or he’s Russian, or not a Canadian or American, or whatever he is, you certainly as an… so I’m a student of excellence, and as an admirer of excellence, you have to appreciate what he’s done. And even Gretzky, I think, has appreciation for that. He might not like it, but I mean, on the other hand, for Wayne, I think he’ll have, what? 56 other NHL records. When all is said and done, he’ll still have a few that maybe don’t get broken. Kevin, as you know, our show is called LifeExcellence and I’m curious, what does excellence mean to you?

Kevin  

Now, at the late stages of my career, we talk about it a lot. I’m part of three Hall of Fame selection committees and the US Hockey Hall of Fame and two journalism Halls of Fame and we talk about excellence as well. That it’s not… if you want to be the best of the best you’ve got to be extraordinary, excellent as well. I think that what sports has taught us is that it’s not as simple as who’s good, who’s bad, and who’s average. There are other layers to being a good player. Excellence is, in my opinion, a category that very few players make. The pyramid, of course, just keeps going up like this, and you start at the bottom, when you’re a little league player you’re a decent ball player and you go up, and maybe you could play in high school, and then some of those players go to college, and soon you get to the end; then it’s a really small sample. But that small sample then leaves room for maybe 10, 20 players at the top that have the excellence of the game. In baseball we’ve really got it down. With all the players that are required to hold a major league season, only a fraction will make it to the Hall of Fame, and those are the players that have excellence. I think that’s the case in any profession as well. I can identify the writers and that I’ve met who I think have an excellence about them that never wavered.

Brian  

That’s great, and I appreciate you sharing that. Kevin, you’ve written more than 25 sports books and I definitely want to ask you a question about the books you’ve written, because you’ve been so prolific in addition to the writing that you’ve done, the newspaper writing that you’ve done for 50 years, and a lot of those books have highlighted the sport of hockey and those who played it, and of course, you’ve diverted occasionally into other sports like baseball and football. Detroit is such a great sports town, like we’ve talked and I’m sure that made a little bit easier to find material for at least some of your books and articles. You mentioned Gordie Howe, and I want to ask you about Gordie. One of your books is “Mr. And Mrs. Hockey:  A Tribute to the Sport’s Greatest Couple.” Tell us what it meant to you to write a book about Gordie and Colleen Howe and the impact they had, not only on hockey in Detroit, but throughout the league.

Kevin  

Well, I really enjoyed that book just because of the uniqueness. I mean, Colleen Howe… because and we now know this is the case, women – oftentimes we’ve heard the stereotype – they would describe women as pushy, when really they were just doing the job. She acted as an agent, and not just for Gordie. You talk to Glen Hall – who’s still alive, by the way – he talks about how Colleen Howe changed the memorabilia and the autograph world for everybody at a time when the hockey players were not making great salaries, they still needed jobs in the off season. Colleen was the first to say, hey, if you want my husband’s time, you’re going to have to pay for it. If he’s going to come and sign autographs he’ll do some for charity – trust me, Gordie Howe did plenty of charity work – if you want him to sign hockey cards or photos that you’re going to make money out of, there’s going to be a price for that and we’re going to set that. Glenn Hall told me that he’d get a call from Colleen saying, I’m going to bring a bunch of people in to sign autographs, Glen, do you want to come along? We’re going to get about – whatever it was – $5 or $10 per autograph for the guys. He really appreciated that. I think she was well ahead of her time. I mean, she… Howard Baldwin, when Gordie signed in the World Hockey Association, talked about how difficult the negotiations were with Colleen, like she knew and understood Gordie’s value, and that was important. Sometimes it gets me in trouble on radio shows when I say that I’ve never been offended by how much money athletes make because they’re the show. They’re the workforce, they’re the employees. They’re not the employer. They can’t play for anyone they want. There are a lot of rules, a lot of hoops they’ve got to jump through in order to do it, they have to give up the privacy in order to get that. So I really respected Colleen and what she did for the hockey world. Not everybody loved her because she was tough. She could be hard to deal with. But I’ve heard many stories about her from people who knew her about how she stood up. If there was a player not treating their wife correctly it was Colleen who had something to say to him. And of course, Gordie loved her without a doubt. When she developed a form of dementia, he stayed with her right to the bitter end. He did not want her in a home where they have others take care of you, he wanted to be a part of it. Theirs was an incredible love story. They met at a bowling alley – what’s more romantic than that? Anyway, I did appreciate that book as well, and I’ve always appreciated the fact that I’ve gotten to do a wide range. I ended up going to my publisher – I used one publisher for, I would say, 60% of my books – and I told him I’d like to do a book on Willie Horton in Detroit. This was the guy that during the riots in 1968 went out in uniform and stood on a tank and tried to get the people not to riot and so forth. And he said, well, that sounds like a great story; how long have you known Willie? And I said, I don’t know him at all. He said, well, why do you want to do a book? I said, because I just know that it’ll be a great story, and I’ve seen him around enough to know that he would be a good guy. I really enjoyed that book. Actually, I did a couple with Willie Horton and I enjoyed those. It was just great to learn his side of the story and what he went through. I learned about the layers of racism that was involved in the early 60s that I didn’t know existed. We knew that Hank Aaron got death threats when he was chasing down Babe Ruth’s record, but Willie Horton, he couldn’t even stay in the same hotels with the other Tiger players. When he first got to the organization he had a great story about Mickey Stanley, a white player, saying, well, let me off too, it’s a black hotel and I’ll stay with Willie. And of course, the black hotel didn’t want to let him in because he said, they won’t be happy with me if I let a white player stay in a black hotel. I’ve had the great fortune to be able to talk to a lot of different people in a lot of different sports and it kept it fresh for me that I’ve been able to do that.

Brian  

Kevin, this has been great, and I really appreciate our conversation. Thank you so much for being on the show. I’m very grateful for your time today. (Kevin:  My pleasure.) Thanks for tuning in to LifeExcellence. Please support the show by subscribing, sharing it with others, posting about today’s show with sports journalist Kevin Allen on social media and leaving a rating and review. You can also learn more about me at BrianBartes.com. Until next time, dream big dreams and make each day your masterpiece.