Kit Klingelhoffer is retiring after a distinguished 42-year career in media relations and game management at Indiana University. Here are columns written in his honor - along with his Q&A which was posted on Indiana's athletics website.
Photos courtesy of iuhoosiers.com
see online:
A Couple of Generations of Hoosiers Wish a Retiree Well
by Brad Wolverton via
www.chronicle.com I Sept. 4, 2012
The guy who gave me my first job covering college sports retired on Friday, 42 years after he was hired in Indiana University’s athletic department.
Kit Klingelhoffer, the longtime sports-information director, who most recently handled game management for the Hoosiers, is leaving the only job he’s ever known. If he’s anything like the person I remember from 20 or so years ago, he’ll never really leave IU.
Indiana was on my short list of colleges even before I set foot in Bloomington. But it was my visit with Angela Manolakas, a student assistant in the sports-information office who went to my high school in suburban Cincinnati, that helped seal my decision.
She showed me around the campus and then walked me through Assembly Hall, the hallowed building where the then-defending national-champion men’s basketball team played. She introduced me to Kit and to Eric Ruden, the assistant SID, who worked most closely with Bob Knight. Knight was as dominant a figure as anyone in sports at the time—and, like anyone who was interested in college basketball—I was fixated on what his program looked like up close.
Thanks to Kit and Eric, I got a firsthand look at it over the next three years. They hired me to work basketball and football games, write player bios and profiles across lots of sports, and interact with the parade of national sportswriters who came to cover the colorful and tempestuous coach.
The first time I saw Coach Knight in person was the fall of my freshman year, when I rode the elevator with him in Memorial Stadium before a football game. He was a bear of a man, and the crowd literally parted when he entered the room. He was both the warmest and most generous person you could meet—always chatting up the little people, and donating millions to Indiana’s library—and one of the most obstinate, foul-mouthed people I’ve ever come across. I can still remember the sound of his rants echoing through the halls of the basketball building during afternoon practices.
The consummate gentleman, Klingelhoffer will only say nice things about Knight now, but he reportedly endured his share of abuse from the coach. Like any good SID, though, he kept his head down and did his best work behind the scenes. He can rattle off historical stats from memory and work a room with ease. As the athletics department grew from a few dozen to more than 200 staff members during his time, Kit found common ground with many of them. Some of the program’s more recent hires say they’re indebted to him for how much he’s shared.
I was a few levels below him, so we didn’t often get a chance to interact. But I appreciated how much he did for me. He knew I wasn’t going to be a lifer in sports information, but he kept me on for three years, helping me pay my way through college until I moved on to the student paper.
From what I saw, Kit gave talented people lots of rope and many did great things with it. Under him, Indiana’s sports-information office turned out a cast of folks who would go on to reach the top level of the game, including Eric Shanks, co-president and COO of Fox Sports. Angela Manolakas is a former assistant vice president at the NFL Players Association, and Eric Ruden is deputy director of athletics at Navy.
Andy Graham, the respected chronicler of Indiana athletics for the
Bloomington Herald-Times, wrote a nice send-off to my former boss last week:
Many characteristics make Kit Klingelhoffer a consummate Indiana University man, not the least of which is that there are very few people on the planet who more fervently want to beat Purdue.
“Every day of the year,” Klingelhoffer acknowledged Tuesday afternoon with a smile.
Don Fischer, longtime radio voice for IU athletics, said, “I can absolutely confirm that. So can the dashboard in one of my cars.”
Nothing better than beating Purdue for Klingelhoffer
by Andy Graham, Bloomington Herald-Times
Many characteristics make Kit Klingelhoffer a consummate Indiana University man, not the least of which is that there are very few people on the planet who more fervently want to beat Purdue.
"Every day of the year," he acknowledged Tuesday afternoon with a smile.
Don Fischer, long-time radio voice for IU athletics, said, "I can absolutely confirm that. So can the dashboard in one of my cars."
But if passion for IU has fueled Klingelhoffer's 42-year tenure in the school's athletic administration and media relations office -- which began when he was still an undergraduate and ends with his retirement Friday -- so has professionalism.
"Kit began as Tom Miller's assistant in the sports information department," Fischer recalled. "Tom was the consummate professional, a wonderful man, and Kit learned from him. Things were a little different then, when sports information directors probably spent more time actually developing personal as well as working relationships with media guys and, literally, when I walked in the door, not a week had gone by before we were friends.
"We've remained close friends, if not seeing each other as much the past 10 years since he left media relations for administration. But I just think the world of him. I felt he was as good at his job as anybody ever was, and I'll always think that."
Klingelhoffer has always felt very fortunate in how he acquired that job.
"About five things had to happen -- boom, boom, boom, boom, boom -- or else I'd have just been going through business (school job) placement," Klingelhoffer said.
When Klingelhoffer was an IU sophomore, folks in and around his home town of Aurora decided to form a Dearborn County IU alumni association. His mom and dad, both alums, decided to attend the organizational meeting. The guest speaker was Aurora native Miller, who had known the Klingelhoffers in high school. They reintroduced themselves to Miller and mentioned their son was at IU and a big fan of athletics. Miller responded that he hired a student assistant every year, and would their son be interested?
And even after Klingelhoffer became Miller's student assistant, other things had to break his way. Miller's only full-time assistant got the head SID job at Western Michigan. The replacement Miller hired, a Californian, wasn't really happy in Bloomington.
Miller, who once turned down a chance to join Bo McMillin with the Detroit Lions because he loved IU and Bloomington too dearly, recognized a kindred spirit in Klingelhoffer. Though Klingelhoffer had a semester of school to finish, Miller hired him full-time and helped make it work. For Klingelhoffer, it was a dream job from the start.
"The first big sporting event I worked on, outside a regular football or basketball game, was when we hosted the NCAA swimming championships in 1969, and I was kind of awestruck," Klingelhoffer said. "It was the second of our six consecutive NCAA swimming titles and Mark Spitz's freshman year. That was a huge thrill. Here I was, a junior in college, working with world-class athletes."
And working with world-class coaches.
"You could make a case, in the 1970s," he said, "that on the same IU staff we arguably had the best basketball coach in the country in Bob Knight, the best swimming coach in the country in Doc Counsilman, the best diving coach in Hobie Billingsley, the best soccer coach in Jerry Yeagley, at least a top-five track coach in Sam Bell, and Lin Loring was just coming on the scene in women's tennis. And so on.