Big Sexy

From the moment he took the call from Wolverine Willie, Jason Whitlock's substantial finger should have been poised to hang up. Only a couple of weeks earlier, Willie, a frequent caller to sports-talk radio shows, had been banned from Jim Rome's Jungle for one of his signature parody songs. Rome and many of his followers thought the tune was anti-Semetic, and the host gave Willie the boot.

Even if Whitlock hadn't known Willie's reputation, the Kansas City Star columnist should have been wary when the frequent caller to his afternoon radio show, The Doghouse, began singing in a redneck drawl to the tune of Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line."

"I keep my zipper wide open all the time," Willie sang. "Arrested for performing an indecent crime."

Another host might have cut off Willie at that moment. For the local horde that finds Kansas City sports-talk radio so absorbing, there was no question who was being attacked in Willie's joke.

The target was Kevin Kietzman, Whitlock's former colleague and boss at WHB 810. And Willie's song was just the latest version of an urban legend that Whitlock himself had helped perpetuate -- that late one night, Prairie Village police stopped Kietzman while he was driving home from an 810 function and caught him, literally, with his pants down.

In the version spread by Whitlock and his listeners, Kietzman, caught in a compromising position with a young coworker, barged out of his car with his pants around his ankles and berated police, asking them repeatedly whether they knew who he was.

"My family's broken and in a state of disgrace, 'cause I left a stain on some poor girl's face," Willie crooned.

Whitlock roared with laughter.

Problem is, the story's not true.

On the night of January 10, 2002, Prairie Village police did indeed pull Kietzman over. But that's about all that the song -- and the other stories -- have right.

"He was not in any act," says Lt. Wes Jordan of the Prairie Village Police Department. "He wasn't naked. His pants weren't around his ankles. He was given a field sobriety test to be sure he was OK, and he was."

Kietzman drove off without even getting a ticket.

But in Willie's song, Kietzman ends up passing out at a casino. Willie's tune finishes on a strange note, suggesting that Whitlock himself has taken advantage of Kietzman's subsequent marital split-up by moving into the Kietzmans' bed.

Whitlock's reaction?

Chuckling hard, he asked Willie to sing the song again. So Willie gave his first-ever encore performance.

On a more recent afternoon, Whitlock erupted in paroxysms of laughter again when another caller told an elaborate joke about Kietzman that eventually implied that his rival host was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the owner of the world's smallest penis.

An hour later, Whitlock was still chuckling. "We've got to have him tell that joke again," he said.

Sometimes, listening to Whitlock's afternoon radio show, it's hard to reconcile the program's oafish and tired routines -- fart jokes and blow-job references -- with the man who has made himself one of the most recognizable faces in Kansas City.

The former college football player who has transformed himself into a nationally known columnist today finds himself in an enviable position. Influential sportswriter. Daily radio host. Frequent guest on national television shows. Sought-after endorser of local charity events.

But after helping to transform a staid sports section into a caustic battlefield through righteous name-calling and smart blame-placing, Whitlock's writing recently has grown flabby as his various radio feuds have taken up more of his time. Which got two sports-obsessed writers to wonder about Whitlock: How did a sports columnist become one of Kansas City's biggest celebrities?

"There are few writers who own a town," says Denver Post columnist Woody Paige. "Royko owned Chicago; Jim Murray, Los Angeles; Mitch Albom, Detroit. Jason, it seems, has developed an incredible following in Kansas City." Thanks to that following, Whitlock earns hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary and writes an additional column for ESPN.com. Besides the radio gig, there are the regular appearances on ESPN's The Sports Reporters and numerous references to his work on the network's Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption.

With that kind of success, it's reasonable to assume that some sort of satisfaction would set in and convince Whitlock that he's above petty feuds like the one with Kietzman (which Kietzman largely ignores).

But the man apparently can't help himself. In a Star story about sports radio in Kansas City, Whitlock told his coworker Wright Thompson, "I'm a paranoid black man who always thinks he's one mistake away from having everything taken from me."

People who know him well told us repeatedly that, despite his success, Whitlock isn't at ease with himself. Despite evidence to the contrary, Whitlock tells others that he's less admired than hunted. And that insecurity apparently started when he was a boy.

Whitlock grew up in suburban Indianapolis -- not exactly Compton, but the boy apparently wasn't taking any chances. In a 2001 profile for KU's student newspaper, The University Daily Kansan, Brandon Stinnett describes a ten-year-old Whitlock, home alone, grasping a knife for safety against possible intruders as he watches television and waits for his older brother to arrive. "Jason was always kind of scared of everything," Whitlock's mother, Joyce, told Stinnett.