Best Cotton-Pickin’ Sportswriter In America

 by Larry Carlson   https:// texaslsn.org

Below is the oral history podcast, text, and photos of Kirk Bohls.

My buddy, Kirk, is pretty tough.  He once played the second half of a late ’60s high school football game with a broken neck.  That wasn’t gonna stop the 5-7, 135-pound “monster man” for the proud Taylor Ducks.  Fact is, Kirk Bohls is the most competitive person I’ve known.  Playing sports, covering sports, you name it.  Allow me to recall that some decades ago, Kirk and I were striding away from a tennis court after having dispatched our doubles foes quite handily.  I wanted to shake hands and move on to shade and a cold drink, leaving the victims to marinate in their misery, knowing I wouldn’t crave any chit-chat after a defeat. But KIrk always wanted to genuinely laud opponents for their good play, interview them about their backgrounds and family, whatever. As we at last walked away and through the courtside gate, the warrior spirit re-emerged, out of earshot.   Kirk leaned in and uttered this nugget to me:  ‘Gahh, I love to beat people.” 

We’ve laughed uproariously about that since, and repeated it a few thousand times.  Compassionate Kirk could strip the gears back into cutthroat Kirk, as necessitated. 

It might seem paradoxical but while Kirk is at once uber-aggressive in beating guys in tennis and scooping other writers, he is also the kindest, most caring, most giving person I have ever known. Also the most inquisitive, and not just with sports figures.  With everyone he knows and meets.  He is a family man of great faith and serenity.  Kirk and Vicki will celebrate their golden anniversary next spring and are the parents of  three grown sons, Ryan, John Tyler and Zachary.  

If you’ve followed Texas Longhorn football at any time in oh, say the last half-century, you know Bohls’s name.  He’s the state’s best known sportswriter and one of America’s most respected ones.  Kirk and I have been the best of friends since before Earl Campbell won the Heisman, so if you haven’t yet taken these opening paragraphs as full disclosure of a close, longstanding friendship, please do so now.

Unlike Kirk, I’m known to show bias in my writings.

I can tell you many fun facts about my boy, and I know that some of you have loved hating him over the years.  It’s been a statewide pastime to give Kirk a hard time.  And that was even before he didn’t cast his Heisman ballot for Vince Young in 2005. Personally, I don’t know how he has taken the abuse, by phone, by letters, by e-mail and especially via social media, the shelter of cowards.  Really vile stuff out there.  Kirk has even been featured on a wisecracking sign at El Arroyo.  Was once called “a scoundrel” by a UT football coach who didn’t seem to understand Journalism 101, a subject Kirk even taught for some 13 years at Southwest Texas State (now Texas State)  – all the while toiling at his full-time Austin American Statesman gig.

Earlier this month, prior to our weekly dining session at Dan’s Hamburgers (the tradition calls for each of us to get a cheeseburger, no onions, plus fries and iced tea) Kirk and I sat down at his office at home in Austin.  Surrounded by familiar photos and sports memorabilia, we rolled tape for a History of Longhorn Sports podcast.

I was incapable of keeping the cast brief; nobody in the modern era has had a better front-row and behind-the-scenes look at UT athletics than has Bohls, 73.  He’s covered Longhorn football since the days of Darrell Royal and vividly remembers a gloomy plane ride home from the ’76 opener, a shocking loss to undistinguished Boston College.  Bohls took a seat next to stellar DB and return man Raymond Clayborn, who stared straight ahead and told the young writer, “It’s gonna be a long season.”  Indeed it was, resulting in DKR’s lone non-winning record at The Forty Acres and ending in his resignation and retirement at the age of 52.

Bohls has taken in some fifty Texas-OU streetfights at the Cotton Bowl. His most memorable of all those midway mayhem sessions will surprise most fans when Kirk shares it as part of the TLSN podcast.  He has also provided blanket coverage of more than 20 UT trips to the College World Series.  But in spite of great respect for Texas greats such as Keith Moreland, Spike Owen, Roger Clemens, Greg Swindell, Kirk Dressendorfer, Brooks Kieschnick, Huston Street and Ivan Melendrez, perhaps his favorite interview moment came after an otherwise pedestrian regular season game in 1976.  It seems that a scrappy third baseman named Joe Ayers had broken a bone in one of his legs late in the game.  He never let on, never came out, even if he couldn’t push off to throw.  Kirk just had to ask Ayers, an unsung senior from San Antonio, what he would have done, had one of the opponents bunted that night.  Ayers didn’t blink.  Or hesitate.  “I would’ve thrown him out,” he replied.   

Joe Ayers is Kirk’s kind of competitor.  

Growing up in Taylor, Bohls, second eldest of four brothers, worked picking cotton every summer.  He built a strong back and a stronger character, competing in football, baseball and tennis and making time to become class valedictorian. Kirk’s father, Leon, had played some football at The University of Texas, en route to a degree.  And the hard-working farmer was head of the school board in Taylor while Kirk’s mom, Lucy Kay, was the All-American homemaker.  All four sons – Kent, Kirk, Randy and Rodney – would also earn degrees from UT.

Starting at UT in the magical fall of 1969, Kirk’s interests revolved around Longhorn football and his political science studies.  Later, he would find great interest in journalism.  He ascended to the paid position of Sports Editor at the Daily Texan.  Later, having interned at the Minneapolis Star, Bohls was hired by American-Statesman sports editor Lou Maysel and, well…

Fifty-one years, thousands of stories and columns, award-winning investigative pieces, Sportswriter of the Year awards (Most recently, Bohls was awarded the Bert McGrane Award in January, as the nation’s top sportswriter) and ESPN TV and radio appearances later, Kirk got a surprise offer this summer that he couldn’t refuse.  The Houston Chronicle came calling, boasting of Texas’s biggest circulation, to include readers of the San Antonio Express-News.  Better circulation, better pay, no move from Austin necessary…it still wasn’t an easy call for Kirk.  He hadn’t thrown his name into the hat as America’s first scribe to hit the portal for a transfer and NIL deals. But the guy who lives off tradition (he never changes his car’s Sirius/XM dial away from the ’60s channel, he frequents the same treasured eating spots in Austin, he favors the same best-selling authors he’s relied upon for decades and he still finds a need to explore more and more movies) was breaking with the only employer he ever had.

Then again, the Statesman had changed national ownership multiple times over the years, pushing it steadily away from real Austin ties.  And Bohls, despite his penchant for customs and heritage, had shown the abiility to negotiate hairpin turns across the years.  Typewriters gave way to better ones, then to clunky, boxy computers, then to sleek laptops; job requirements began to include social media posts and podcasts; access to coaches and players went from carte blanche on a daily basis to very limited and often “zoom only” group interviews; deadlines in “the tech age” were incongruously slashed from midnight down to 6 pm and then settled into the 4 pm slot.  Only 11 am kickoffs could be covered for the next day’s paper.

But Bohls was a chameleon and went with the audibles as they were called.  He’s never been so excited professionally as he is to cover Texas in the SEC.  In our podcast, he sifted through the tea leaves for predictions on the ’24 season’s ground-breaking 12-team playoff, assessed the futures of Quinn Ewers and Arch Manning and voiced great expectations for Jim Schlossnagle at Disch-Falk Field.

A former president of the Football Writers Association of America, a long-time AP Top 25 voter and Heisman voter – yes, it’s true that he cast one of those 933 votes that separated Reggie Bush from UT’s Vince Young –  Bohls is way, way beyond psyched up for all that the SEC will bring to UT and vice versa.  He’s already been a regular guest for college football giants ranging from Paul Finebaum and Greg McElroy, and dozens  of sportswriters from Baton Rouge to Atlanta count Bohls as a friend. They flock to him for inside info, opinions and laughs when he’s at SEC Media Days.  

He’s a popular man.  

But, here’s a memo to all the SEC-area journalists who haven’t been in direct, day-to-day, dog-eat-dog competition with Kirk Bohls till now:

He really, really likes to beat people.  He’s good at it, too.

(TLSN’s Larry Carlson has spent thousands of hours discussing football and philosophy during road trips, tennis tournaments, vacations and lunches with his bosom buddy, Kirk Bohls.  Larry knows scandalous things about Kirk, a devout Barry Manilow fan and a car karaoke man who shamelessly sings along with Richard Harris’s “MacArthur Park.”)