Jason Whitlock Scores in K.C.

The ink was hardly dry on his contract with the Kansas City Chiefs when new quarterback Elvis Grbac got the warning letter. "Hey, man. Remember me?" it opened ominously. "Black dude, about 6 feet 4, looks like a young Denzel Washington only more muscular?"

Grbac remembered. This was the guy who hounded him in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the fall of '92, the guy who tried to get him benched when he was quarterback of the Rose Bowl champion University of Michigan football team. There was no point in taking the letter to the police, though. They were probably already chuckling over it downtown - along with an unspecified portion of The Kansas City Star's 682,000 daily readers. The "open letter" to Grbac appeared in the left-hand column on D-1 of the Star under the byline and mug shot of twenty-nine-year-old Jason Whitlock, the hip-hop scourge of Kansas City sports commentary.

Since joining the Star in September 1994, Whitlock has alternately enthralled and appalled a readership whose previous definition of "plain speaking" was Harry Truman muttering "S.O.B." under his breath. Within weeks of his hire, Whitlock, the most provocative and controversial sports columnist in mid-America, thumbed his rhetorical nose at legendary quarterback Joe Montana, launched a mock campaign to join the once racially exclusive Kansas City Country Club, and livened a college football rivalry by telling Kansas State fans to show up for a game in their Sunday best - "jeans with fewer than two stains and a nice flannel shirt." To less comic effect, and with no documentation, he subsequently described David Glass, c.e.o. of Kansas City Royals and Wal-Mart, as a "congenital liar" - a taunt provoked by Whitlock's belief that Glass was condescending to him in an interview.

The strident and sometimes personal tone of Whitlock's prose dismays some readers, especially those who grew up with the measured, fair-minded commentary of former Star editor Joe McGuff, who was the paper's sports editor long enough to write his way into the writers' wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Professional golfer Tom Watson, a native Kansas Citian, reads Whitlock with clenched teeth. ABC-TV sports analyst Roger Twibell says Whitlock "sometimes crosses the line." Whitlock haters write the paper, demanding that he be muzzled, and Whitlock victims call the Star's editor, Arthur S. Brisbane, to complain.

Brisbane shifts uncomfortably in his chair: "I don't want to put myself in the role of censorious Church Lady, telling my writers to tone it down," he says. "Jason is popular with readers who think it's time this market got a different kind of voice. He's passionate, intrusive, extremely overbearing - but, at the same time, compelling."

It's the intrusiveness that has Whitlock detractors yelling foul. In 1995, when major league baseball tried to shake off the effects of a long players' strike, Whitlock asked his readers to punish the S.O.B.s - "Stupid Offensive Baseballers" - by boycotting opening day at Kauffman Stadium. The boycott plan horrified civic leaders, who gave Brisbane an earful of history he already knew. Kansas City, one of the smallest big-league markets, has since 1968 said good-bye to the major league A's, the NHL Scouts, the NBA Kings, two soccer franchises, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics headquarters and basketball tournament, and the Big Twelve Conference headquarters. Without fan support, the unprofitable Royals - currently led by Glass - would probably leave Kansas City, and that would be a body blow for the whole community. Whitlock, insisting he was not buckling to pressure, pronounced the Royals sufficiently contrite and called off the boycott.

 Lately, the columnist tried to lend his management skills to the more prosperous Chiefs, who have consistently sold out the 79,000-seat Arrowhead Stadium in the nine years that Carl Peterson has been president and general manager. In a series of columns starting in September 1996, Whitlock urged the Chiefs to sign free-agent quarterback Jeff George, a talented but temperamental player who was let go by the Atlanta Falcons after he threw a sideline tantrum on national television. When the Chiefs passed on George, Whitlock - who has been his close friend since they played on the same high school football team in Indianapolis - raked Peterson with a week-long fusillade of bitter columns.

"Jason was personally hurt and angry," says Peterson, "and I think he lost his objectivity. I didn't particularly like being called a liar and being told I have my head up my ass." Peterson said as much to Brisbane over lunch at the Stadium Club, and Brisbane promised that the Star's football coverage would show balance over all. "It hasn't soured our relationship with the Star," says Peterson, who spends about a half-million advertising dollars a year with the city's print gorilla. Chuckling, he adds, "Their sales people start every conversation with, ‘We apologize for Jason Whitlock - but can we still do some business with you?'"

Indisputably, Whitlock is an equal opportunity basher. As he wrote in a column on March 2 about how today's black athletes rate in comparison with Jackie Robinson: "The modern-day black professional athlete couldn't spell struggle if you spotted him the S-T-R-U-G-G-L and told him the last letter was a vowel. (That might be true for white professional athletes, too, but I'm not dealing with them today.) Money and privilege have so disconnected the overwhelming majority of black professional athletes from the real issues impacting black people that a weekend without pizza is seen as an unforgettable hardship."

There's one thing Whitlock's fans and detractors can agree on: he's big. Huge. In shorts and a tee shirt, he fills the doorway of his townhouse in suburban Overland Park, Kansas. He could pass for an NFL offensive tackle. Unmarried, he lives alone in the style of a rookie pro - with big furniture, bare walls, and a giant boom box in front of a cold fireplace.

His father owns an inner-city bar in Indianapolis, and his mother was a factory worker at Western Electric. Whitlock credits his dad's love of sports pages for his own fascination with newspapering. "I grew up reading the Indianapolis columnists, and they were horrible," he recalls. "I hated those guys and thought I could do better."

He didn't try until he was a fifth-year senior on a football scholarship at Ball State University. Grappling with the fact that he wasn't an NFL prospect - "I was what they call a ‘locker-room lawyer,' and my first line coach hated my guts" - he quit football, dropped his accounting major, and signed up to write for the student newspaper.

Whitlock's first job out of college was as a part-time sports writer at the Bloomington, Indiana, Herald-Times. Eleven months later, he caught on full-time with the Rock Hill bureau of The Charlotte Observer, covering high school, rec league, and peewee sports. He crashed the main section by reporting on rap and R&B music, and those clips caught the eye of the Ann Arbor News, which hired him to cover University of Michigan basketball and football. Ann Arbor is where Whitlock joined his natural outspokenness to the rhetorical techniques of his favorite writer, Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko - "trying to mimic as much as I could while still being myself."

Whitlock's first column for the Star appeared on October 2, 1994. He wrote, "It's always best to start a relationship by discussing pertinent information . . . so I must tell you that I have been tested for rudeness, negativity, cheapshottivity, cynicism, and the ability to jump off slow-moving bandwagons. And according to my doctor, the results are positive."

Whitlock is also like many of the athletes he covers - young, black, newly affluent, and painfully conscious of class distinctions. When he drops the tough-guy pose, it's usually to provide insight into black family life or to open a window on the urban street scene, where ebonics is not a controversy but a currency. In a column the morning of this year's NCAA basketball final, he moved readers with the story of Mike Bibby, the University of Arizona standout whose basketball-star father ignored him as a child. "Nights like tonight are made for father and son," Whitlock wrote. "That is no knock on motherhood. A mother's love for a son is totally unconditional. In America, where so many fathers dream of rearing sons as athletically gifted as Mike Bibby, nights like tonight - win or lose, goat or hero - leave indelible marks on a father-son relationship in much the same fashion as a wedding does a mother-daughter relationship."

The flip side of Whitlock's authenticity is his tendency to overreact if he thinks he's been "dissed." When KMBZ radio's Don Fortune blithely dismissed the Royals boycott as a stunt, he says Whitlock phoned the show, called Fortune names, hung up - and called back twenty minutes later with more insults. When Peterson went on Fortune's show in February to defend his handling of the Jeff George matter, Whitlock's column blasted the Chiefs' boss for "playing kissy-face with a no-backboned jacks player whose football expertise comes from his high school experience as a powder-puff cheerleader." Another radio voice, KCFX's Bob Gretz, sided with the Chiefs and found himself labeled a "media puppet" in the Star, his former employer. "Most of you already know that Gretz is a joke," wrote Whitlock, "and that it would take a sledgehammer, two crowbars, a flame thrower, mace, and a stick of dynamite to remove his lips from Peterson's backside."

These and other personal jabs have cost Whitlock some respect among his Star colleagues - one sportswriter denounced him at a staff meeting - but boosted his standing with what editor Brisbane calls "our young, alienated, anti-establishment readers." "It's not about breaking news any more," worries Bob Moore, the Chiefs' public relations director. "It's about breaking chops."

Whitlock sees it differently. "Black people call it ‘playing the dozens,'" he says of his name-calling. His biggest regret? A column in which he imagined O.J. Simpson calling Chiefs running back Marcus Allen (a rumored lover of Nicole Simpson) from jail. "It was funny, but it wasn't appropriate for the paper," says Whitlock. "It was like telling a dirty joke in church."

What amazes Star watchers is that such broad material has gotten past Art Brisbane, a former Star columnist himself and a respected reporter at The Washington Post. Says a former newsman: "He seems to let Jason run wild."

Brisbane insists that Whitlock, who is in year one of a three-year contract, is subject to the same ethical standards and professional expectations as other staffers. There is, he adds, only one Jason Whitlock at the Star, which is unfailingly civil in its news and editorial sections.

Whitlock says he'll keep writing for the homeboys in the 'hood, the rebels, and the seventy-year-old widows "who seem to love me for reasons I can't explain." The real test for the Star's management will come when Whitlock decides to press his ambition to leave sports and write a Royko-style, general-interest column.

Meanwhile, he says, "Some people are trying to talk me out of applying for membership at the Kansas City Country Club. They say the KC Country Club caters to an uptight crowd. I say I'll have that crowd dancing to Snoop Dogg by the Christmas party."

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