Mike Kennedy

Man, can that guy talk.

I work in radio, but I've never really held dreams of being a play-by-play guy, except that every dreams of just being able to watch baseball and talk about it for a living. But I've always been kind of intimidated by the idea that people who are really good at play-by-play probably just have some natural talent that I don't. I'm not particularly comfortable with extended extemporaneous speaking, and I never really figured that it was the sort of thing you could "learn"-- or at least learn enough to make you really, really good at it.

Kennedy didn't make me feel any more comfortable on that front. He said explicitly that he's always had an ability to form his next thoughts while he was speaking his previous thoughts, and that allows him to keep talking, talking, talking, for hours on end. It's impressive, and he's great at it. And this just confirms for me that, to some extent (and to an extent that probably makes the real difference between good and excellent) this ability is innate. That will not be me.

But I would love to sit in on one of his broadcasts, just to see the process at work. Just to see it happen. I want to see his preparation work its way to audible fruition.

Any who's listened to Kennedy for much time has been impressed by his ridiculous recall of names, dates, statistics, games, and so on. And it's not just the Shockers, his net is cast far wider. I wish we could have gotten a chance to ask him about that. Probably, we would have found out that it's just another natural talent he has. Still, I'd like to know what he has to say about it.

Nice guy, at least to a group of university students. I appreciate that he really seems to feel like this is just something he does and really likes doing, because for a lot of us, he's a huge celebrity. He's been the only voice of the Shockers for essentially my entire life, which means, for people like me, he IS the Shockers. I was glad that he didn't seem to see himself that way.