Saying goodbye to the great Kirk Bohls plus our 'On Second Thought' podcast | Golden

• Bohls earned a reputation as a great reporter and columnist but it wasn't always easy.
• Bohls and ex Statesman colleague Cedric Golden recorded 340 episodes of the popular On Second Thought podcast along with numerous Longhorn Minute videos that can be found on YouTube.

Kirk Bohls doesn’t hate anything except any talk that centers around him. He’s easily the most unassuming legend you will come across because he’s never making anything about himself. If there is credit coming his way, my longtime partner in crime will always figure out a way to deflect it toward an unsuspecting recipient. 

Kirk is all about the craft and not the credit unless he’s breaking some huge story like Barry Switzer’s cronies spying on Darrell Royal’s football practices in the 1970s or Texas A&M giving football coach Mike Sherman the boot back in the day.

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Taylor’s favorite Duck isn’t about bragging about his accolades like some in our business because he’s too busy doing his job. Too busy telling stories. Too busy devoting his time to numerous charities and helping those less fortunate. Too busy being an usher at his church. 

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And, yes, too busy being a doting husband, father, grandfather and friend to anyone who dares to look past the often-polarizing prose and into the heart of a good man.

In case you haven’t heard, Kirk is taking his well-worn pen to the Houston Chronicle after 51 years of pumping out stories and columns at a feverish pace for the American-Statesman. Some thought he was calling it career after his farewell column, but he still has some tread on those 73-year-old tires. 

Our inner circle never passes up an opportunity to remind of his septuagenarian status though he still approaches the job with the zeal of a sophomore beat writer at the Daily Texan. Like I have told him more times than I care to count, his retirement party and his funeral will be the same weekend. He will rock this thing until the wheels fall off.  

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The birth of our podcast

We taped our 340th and final "On Second Thought" podcast together Wednesday, a massive success that spanned more than seven years. We had discussed doing a pod dating back to 2015 when they started to creep up all over the place.

I will continue to keep the show moving upward, though in a different format with Kirk’s departure. 

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He is admittedly terrible at technology, so I handled the weekly logistics of putting it all together for our producers over the years and the Hall of Fame guests quickly made us a hit. Earl Campbell, Jim Nantz, Brent Musburger, Kirk Herbstreit, Mack Brown, Keith Moreland, Greg Swindell, Verne Lundquist and Barry Switzer all visited more than once. 

We also brought in playing legends from the modern era like Roy Williams, Colt McCoy, Michael Griffin, Drew Stubbs, Rod Babers and Jordan Shipley to name a few. 

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Cherishing 'those stupid videos'

The podcast was a natural progression from the videos we did soon after I got the promotion to columnist in 2006. The videos were dubbed "The Longhorn Minute" and can be found all over the place on YouTube. We did dozens, including spoofs of "Pulp Fiction" and "The Godfather," the latter centering around Kirk being torn on whether to vote for Colt McCoy or Sam Bradford for the 2008 Heisman Trophy. He took a beating over the years from Horns fans who remain incensed that he voted for Reggie Bush over Vince Young for the 2005 Heisman, despite Bush receiving 89% of the vote. I guess they thought Kirk was the electoral college.

After we hired another writer to cover the Texas beat a few years later, one of the administrators over there told him to avoid doing “those stupid videos.”

That was music to our ears. 

Many of our colleagues in the newsroom wondered if two sports columnists were having too much fun in the workplace, and you know what? We were. Some of them even got in on it with guest appearances, including legendary food writer Kitty Crider, who was more interested in Texas' upcoming game against Texas A&M than our incessant questions about preparing a Thanksgiving turkey.

On to the next challenge this fall

As we look ahead to the most anticipated college football season since 2005, Kirk will still be pecking away on that MacBook Air and taking copious, minuscule notes on that ever-present yellow legal pad. There’s something about working with the best that inspires one to be better. For those who watched Noah Lyles, Kenny Bednarek and Bohls’ fellow Taylor alum Fred Kerley run down Christian Coleman in the 100-meters at the U.S. Olympic Trials, it was a reminder that even the best sprinters run better when they are alongside the elite in the sport.

I grew in this business because of great mentors and Kirk was one of the most important because he was so impactful, not just from what he said, but how he went about his business. “Just be yourself and remember, we’re reporters first,” he said more than once.

Being a columnist wasn’t always a picnic.

While covering Texas football with Suzanne Halliburton, aka the Sports Diva, from 2002 to 2005, I noticed the reactions to Kirk’s columns often had a tinge of nastiness to them. He often would hit the speakerphone button on his office line and share the ugliest voicemails. One guy actually called him a mud dolphin, the first (and last) time I heard a person described that way.

The late Gary Cartwright ripped us both for being boring in Texas Monthly, and instead of taking a retaliatory shot at the aging huckster, we did a light-hearted video in response. It was always about prioritizing good journalism with some fun mixed in.

We still laugh about the man who called us both every day and left off-color voicemails for us for a span of three seasons, which got so threatening that our editors started to wonder if we were safe. “Stupid is as stupid does,” was the caller's closing line.

Kirk let the hate roll off him. I guess when you’ve had a Big Gulp-sized soft drink thrown on your person by a supporter of former UT football coach John Mackovic in the stands at DKR after you called for his firing in a column, it gets easier. 

From Kirk’s experiences, and eventually my own, I learned I wouldn’t be able to please all the people all the time. His stuff was constant water cooler chatter for decades because he just couldn’t concern himself with being loved by all. That doesn’t come with the job. Undaunted, he gave eloquent, honest takes on whatever he covered, dotted every I and crossed every T along the way. 

Did his pieces stray past the budgeted length? Hell yeah, with the ease of a drag race car without those parachutes deploying on the back. His weekly Nine Things and One Crazy Prediction morphed from a quick-hitting blog to the sports version of "War and Peace" on Wednesdays. His buddies never passed up a chance to roast him about his long-winded style.

He made the best kind of history here. Kirk made the sports section great, and he'll do great things at the Chronicle. 

I will make it my mission to build upon the great legacy he left here.

Much success in your next venture, old friend. 

And I do mean old.