[KChiefs1]

Originally Posted by Why Not?

Someone with a subscription to The Athletic may be able to fill in the gaps here but apparently Rustin did an interview with Nick this week where Nick alluded to JW having quit his job at the Star on Nick’s show years ago? Apparently JW calls bullshit on that and the transcripts prove it or something? Maybe I’m way off but that’s what I’m piecing together based on the tweets by Nick and JW.

You grew up in Kansas City in the mid-’90s, so I’m just curious: Did that childhood experience shape why you wanted to become a sports pundit?

Oh yeah, absolutely. I had Chiefs season tickets. I went to almost every home game for years and years and years with my dad. When I was, like, 7 years old, we had seats that were right behind the uprights, and it was my turn to go to a game, and I gave my seat up because of a friend’s birthday party. And the kid who went with my sister caught a missed extra point. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself. That was supposed to be my missed extra-point football.

There are tapes of it somewhere, this is verifiable. Starting at 9 years old, I used to call Bill Grigsby’s postgame show after every single Chiefs game, and I was “Nick the Kid.” That’s what they called me. They wouldn’t make me wait on hold. They’d instantly put me on. And that’s absolutely what inspired me wanting to do talk radio. I was on the radio as a young child.

Who were your guys in the media as a kid? Who were your inspirations in terms of, “These are the guys who I want to be.”

As a little kid, it was the Chiefs’ postgame guys. But other than that, and this is embarrassing, it was talk radio guys, and it wasn’t really local talk radio guys. At the time, the big local talk radio guy was a guy named Kevin Kietzman, and even as a child, I knew he was terrible. So I didn’t gravitate toward him. But I would listen almost every night to Ron Barr on “Sports Overnight America” and try my best to get in on that show. I would change my voice to try to do it.

You seem to really enjoy riding for your hometown. I’m sure it doesn’t read this way to everyone, but as someone from Kansas City, it’s almost funny to see someone being so ridiculously confident about the Chiefs on television.

So I loved LeBron. And I had throughout my career, so I was not going to hide that when I got on television. I was just going to lean into that. And I was like: My favorite football team is the Chiefs, but they’re like never going to be the favorite. So I’m gonna lean into the fact that I’m a Chiefs fan, too, because it’s authentic and then it won’t seem like I just pick the best.

I’m a Chiefs, Royals and LeBron fan. Who can dislike that guy? Then the Royals go to back-to-back World Series, and the Chiefs start a dynasty, and LeBron won’t stop winning. Now the Royals are back to being the Royals again. But every day, I get tweets like: “This guy loves LeBron, Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs. Front-running!”

Man, I never thought it would be a possibility that me being a public Chiefs fan would turn into the audience being: “Yep, the guy just likes the best teams.”

You mention radio. So you were a young kid out of college, doing radio in Kansas City. I have to ask about the Jason Whitlock story. This is something that’s almost been lost because it happened (in 2010) right before Twitter became so dominant. You once hosted a simulcast radio and television show in which Whitlock announced he was leaving the daily newspaper then decided to nuke everybody publicly on the way out.

That happened.

How did that happen?

It’s a long story. I don’t really know how it came to be. Prior to that interview, Jason did not like me at all. After that interview, Jason, a year later, called my radio show uninvited and did 20 minutes basically uninterrupted about how I was pretending to be someone I’m not and how he was sad for me.

Four years (after that), shortly after I got hired by FS1, we had a meeting seemingly where, “Can we bury old hatchets because we work at the same place now?” I foolishly started a sentence seeing if we could find common ground by saying, “If you have respect for me …” and he cut me off and said, “Nick, why would you think I respect you? I don’t respect you. I never told you I respect you.” But somehow, in between all of those interactions, when he was quitting the newspaper, he announced that he was going to do it on my show or a competing show, and that was like a big event in Kansas City media. So I wanted to have him on.

I think it was mostly a train wreck.

It’s wild it happened. What were you thinking as it was?

The agreement was that he would do 60 minutes by himself without commercials. Then 60 minutes of me interviewing him. Then 60 minutes of phone calls. And at the 92-minute mark of him by himself without commercials, either the TV network we were on or the radio station yanked it. He was like, “What happened?” I was like, “Dude, what happened was, you’ve just been ranting for an hour and a half and you got into potential libel. That’s what happened.”

The funniest part was the beginning of the end, according to him, of print journalism wasn’t the internet, wasn’t aggregation, wasn’t technology. It was his resignation from newspapers.

The best thing that came out of this was, via that, Bomani Jones became aware of me. We started interacting on Twitter after that, DM’ing about stuff, and smash cut to right now, he’s one of my best friends in the world. He might as well be my youngest daughter’s godfather, and he and I, in a non-COVID world, watch every football Sunday together. And that friendship started because of the online stream of Jason nuking the Kansas City Star on my radio show.

I think that was like three histrionic resignations ago for Jason. So people lose track.

So how many Super Bowls does Mahomes win?

Listen, they’re going to win Sunday. So then they’re at two. People are like: “Don’t get ahead of yourself.” It’s impossible to get ahead of yourself with this. The guy has lost one playoff game ever, and in that game, he had the lead with 40 seconds left and never got to touch the ball in overtime. I think they are going to win this one, and then at least one of the next three. So then you’re at three in his first six years. Then the team starts to turn over, and we’re not sure how much longer Andy is coaching. I’m gonna set the over-under, as a gambler, at 4 1/2 and take the over. I would be surprised if he does not get to five.

I think if things fall right, he certainly could get to more.

It seems premature to think, but if the Patriots had called heads instead of tails in 2018, Brady is sitting at five and Mahomes right now might be going for three. And if Mahomes had won three, and they were his first three years starting … he’s the greatest player ever. Because they lost that game and Brady ends up getting another ring, now the numbers are stacked against him.