JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

With Hammerin’ Hank Aaron’s death this week, the video of him hitting his 715th home run on April 8, 1974, is getting a tremendous number of views.

Watch this, if you will, and then read on.

A friend sent that link to me in an email in which he called attention to legendary baseball announcer Vin Scully’s call of the homer and the ensuing few minutes of bedlam.

But what caught my eye in the video was a young reporter, with a mop of dark hair, holding an old, boxy tape recorder in one hand and an attached microphone in the other. The reporter was one of the first non-players to arrive at home plate just seconds before Aaron planted his foot on it and was engulfed by players and others.

In the video, the reporter alternately looks around, seemingly unfocused, and sweeps his hair aside, as he keeps extending the microphone in Aaron’s general direction. At one point, he gets a few quick words with Aaron’s mother, who is wearing a light blue outfit.

I immediately thought, “That’s Craig Sager.”

Sager, as some of you probably know, made his fame as a sideline reporter for Turner Sports, covering the NBA, mostly on the TNT cable channel. He was known not only as a great interviewer but also for his outlandish outfits, which came in nearly blinding, super rainbow colors.

The reason I recognized him, though, was that before he made it big nationally, he was a sports reporter for KMBC-TV Channel 9. He was in Kansas City from 1978 to 1981. It was here that he met his first wife, Lisa Gabel, while covering a Royals game in 1980.

Craig Sager with a certain Royals’ star, when Sager was a sports reporter with Channel 9.

The couple named their first child Kacy because she was born following the Royals 1985 World Series win. (Note that for later.)

In 1981, CNN hired him in its second year of operation, and Sager stayed with the network (which owns TNT) for the rest of his career.

You may remember that Sager caught a tough break. In 2014, when he was 63 and still in the prime of his career, he was diagnosed with leukemia. He missed the NBA playoffs that year and much of the following season as he underwent two bone marrow transplants.

He returned to work, though, and kept plugging away through the 2016 season. He died in December of that year at age 65.

…Now, it’s a sad story, but that’s not the entire story. It seems that Sager was, well, something less than first class. Additionally, his second wife, Stacy, apparently was right there with him, well beneath the top rung of the human ladder.

Two deeds tell the story. First, Sager cut his three children by first wife Lisa out of his will. He did so despite the fact that Craig Sager Jr. had twice donated bone marrow to his father in an effort to save his life. The two other children by Lisa were Kacy, mentioned above, and Krista.

Second, wife Stacy (with whom Sager had two children) apparently refused to let Craig Jr., Kacy and Krista see Craig Sr. when he was actively dying.

Kacy tweeted this in 2018: “She didn’t even let us say goodbye to him because she wanted to spend his last day of consciousness alone with him. My brother saved his life & she still tried to poison our father against us.”

And what was at the root of the enmity between the oldest three children and Stacy? The seeds could have been planted early on, after Sager reportedly started seeing Stacy before he was divorced from Lisa.

Craig Jr., Kacy and Krista were remarkably accepting — at least publicly — at being cut out of the will. In a Twitter post about the same time as Kacy’s, Craig Jr. said he and his sisters never contested the will…

“because…primarily I expected it & it’s what he wanted. It is what it is. We put our heads down & moved the hell on.”

Kacy Sager

On Friday, the day after Aaron died, Kacy Sager, who followed her father into sports reporting, showed her class once again. She Tweeted this:

“Struggling to put into words the emotions I’ve felt since hearing the news. After all, the biggest moment of Hank Aaron’s career & the one that launched my dad’s were one in (stet) the same. Here’s hoping my dad once again welcomed him home & that he had a better haircut this time.”

She ended the post with this…

: )