Farewell, Kansas City

Joe Posnanski: The first day I ever spent in Kansas City was the day I interviewed for the job as sports columnist at The Kansas City Star. The paper's sports editor at the time, a dreamer named Dinn Mann — the grandson of the famed Judge Roy Hofheinz, who built the Astrodome — picked me up at the airport and began to drive us toward downtown.

"What do you think?" he asked roughly three minutes after I had landed. It was a question he would ask me at least 100 more times during the interview. I didn't think anything. I was 29 years old, single, living with a poor credit score and a beige couch that someone had given me years before and that sort of represented my life. Every day I would look at that couch and think, "I've got to get rid of that thing." On one side, springs were popping out. I sat on the other side.

What do you think? I did not have the capacity then to know what I thought. It wasn't just that my life was drifting, I was entirely unaware that my life was drifting. I was plenty happy. I watched sports, and I wrote about sports, and I had good friends, and I had a Skyline Chili restaurant right across the street and a great tennis court a half-mile away, and that all seemed pretty good to me. It was pretty good.

Still, Dinn kept asking, "What do you think?"