By ALAN HOSKINS
Special to The Kansan
A simple layup while shooting baskets has done what rain, snow, a broken clavicle,
broken ribs and even a missed plane flight could not do - keep Kansas City
sportscaster Danny Clinkscale from running at least three miles a day.
For 7,131 days - that's just five months short of 20 years - Clinkscale has run a
minimum of three miles a day.
Then, on Nov. 14 while shooting baskets with Soren Petro in preparation for WHB 810
Radio's Turkey Bowl game, Clinkscale's streak came to a painful end. "I went up for a
layup and my knee exploded," said Clinkscale. "I went down on the ground and my
kneecap was halfway up my thigh."
Ten days later, he underwent surgery to repair a ruptured patella tendon,
considered the most painful and serious of knee injuries. "Its way worse than a torn
ACL, the pain is more severe, the surgery more difficult, the rehab harder and the
layoffs longer," said Clinkscale. "They said the knee probably gave out because of all
the running. I don't know how long I'll be on crutches."
The crutches, however, have not kept Clinkscale from his many duties at WHB 810
including making trips to do play-by-play basketball for UMKC. The voice of the
Kangeroos for the past five years and the voice of the T-Bones in their initial
season, he also does Royals pre-game and post-game shows, hosts a college football
game day show each Saturday and Chiefs' post-game shows in the fall and is a regular
on Kevin Kietzman's "Between the Lines" talk show in the afternoons.
"I couldn't survive without my wife and nurse," says Clinkscale, who is married to
Jane Siemens, an outstanding opera singer and owner of Venice Communications. "She
does everything. I'm basically worthless."
Clinkscale's amazing streak started while he was a student at the University of
Kansas. "I was working in a Stokely-Van Camp factory in Lawrence and had to walk three
miles to work," he remembers. "I had never been a runner. I had played baseball,
basketball and golf but never ran track. For some reason one day after I had finished
work, I felt I had been sprung out of jail and ran all the way home."
While he didn't make it all the way home without stopping, the hook had been set
although the streak didn't start for another four years. By then he was running 50-55
miles a week. "I was running seven, eight miles a day as well as cross training and
lifting weights. I had a tour that measured three miles and just made it a personal
rule that I had to run three miles to make it count."
At the time, he was living in upstate New York where it wasn't unusual for there to
be several feet of snow and temperatures that approached 20 degrees below zero. "When
the snow is pretty deep, you can't go very fast but I always ran in shorts, even in a
foot of snow or 20 below. It didn't make any difference," said Clinkscale, who did
wear a head band or hat.
"I was lucky not to get sick. I did break a clavicle and had to run holding one arm
with the other while running for about a month. Another time I broke some ribs which
made it pretty difficult for a month."
His closest scare, however, was the most improbable. "It was about five years ago
and I was doing the Royals post-game show in Toronto. The team bus was supposed to
leave at 4:45 p.m. and I came down at 4:40 and the bus had gone. They had left me.
They'd got a call if they could get out earlier there was a window to take off.
"The station wanted me back so I booked another flight that wouldn't get in to
Kansas City until after midnight. So I got a cab and had the driver take me to a shoe
store to buy some sneakers and I talked to a lady at the airport who let me leave my
stuff and went out and ran around the airport for about 25 minutes and then got back
just in time to get on the plane. From then on I made up my mind to make sure I made
my run the first thing in the morning."
The son of a TV announcer growing up in the Boston area, Clinkscale had never been
out of New England when he enrolled site-unseen at KU. "It's really a great place to
go to school and I was able to do a lot football and basketball play-by-play."
Graduating in 1983, he went back east where he worked in Worchester, Mass., and
Syracuse, N.Y., before joining KMBZ here in Kansas City in 1996. In 2000, he joined
WHB. "I got fired one day and hired the next day. Coming to WHB was the best thing
that ever happened professionally, that's for sure."
While he has definite plans to resume his exercise program once recovered from the
knee surgery, there will be no new streak. "My wife would probably kill me," he says.
