There's a few rumors that need to be cleared up, once and for all. A reliable source that wished to remain anonymous (how many times have you heard that?) has provided the following information.
Some people wonder whether Paul Kampe, of the Oakland Press, and a graduate of Oakland University, is related to Greg Kampe, the basketball coach. After all, Paul covers the Grizzlies for the paper, and this might be seen as a conflict of interest. Here's what you don't know. Paul wears several hats for the paper. Besides covering that basketball team, he does a lot of editing cleaning up grammatical errors and misspellings people like me make, writes a couple blogs himself, and is highly involved with the OP morphing into the on-line age.
Paul's into page design, graphics, and a lot of other things.
Back to the original question. Paul's last name has a silent "e". It's "camp". Greg's last name is pronounced "campy". So are they related? Of course. Paul is Greg's grandfather. When you're done reading this nonsense, scroll up a couple blogs and check out Paul's pic. Can you believe that dude's almost 90 years old? But he's in charge of the photos and is a computer wizard. I wish while he was shaving 60 years off his own age, he'd get rid of that puffiness around the eyes in my own pic.
Actually, Paul and Greg are no relation whatsoever, but it was a fun story to tell, and Paul's probably not quite THAT old. Yeah, that's the ticket.
Paula Pasche covers the Detroit Lions. Is it pronounced Pash, or Pashee? My source says it rhymes with "crash", but like her age, weight, true hair color, and how she really feels about going into the Lions' locker room to interview male athletes in various stages of undress, nobody knows for sure. There's classified, there's top secret, there's eyes only, and then there's that woman thing. Good luck with that.
Then there's the boss, sports editor Jeff Kuehn. First, it's not "keen", or "koon", it's "kyoo-in", and there's a lot of things you don't know about him. He ran track and cross-country in high school. Even finished a couple marathons along the way. Impressive stuff. Says he once dunked on Pat Caputo in a basketball game, but never did say how high the rim was. Maybe not so impressive. Jeff once drank beer for 16 straight years while playing a little hockey on the side. Or maybe it was the other way around. Details remain unclear.
At that, the sports thing evidently runs in the family. A son that played hockey for Team USA at two World University Games, a daughter that captained the swim team at Northern Michigan, and another son that was a starting offensive lineman for Birmingham Seaholm for 2 years. That all sounds great, but Jeff has his secrets too, that he doesn't want anybody else to know about, and it's time they were exposed.
That pic you see of him in the Sunday OP sports section? He hasn't looked like that for quite a while. "The Portrait of Dorian Gray" comes to mind. Jeff's kind of a backwards version of that. The pic stays the same, while the real guy -- well, let's just say he's not getting any younger. Beats me why he doesn't update it. Even if the pic was current, Kampe works for him, and he could probably nip-tuck it.
Yet there's a deeper secret about him. Perhaps it's left over from his days of running marathons. People that do that typically carbo-load before the race for lasting nourishment to get them through 26.2 miles of running. Put another way, they scarf down a bunch of food in a short period of time. I suspect Jeff has never quite got past that mentality. Ever hear of Joey Chestnut? He's the guy at the annual 4th of July Nathan's Coney Island hot dog eating contest that can put away about 60 hot dogs, with buns, in 12 minutes. The first 6 or 8 or them last merely seconds, until they're "down the hatch". Jeff's a lot like that with omelets. Put one in front of him, glance at something else, then turn your eyes back, and -- poof -- it's gone. Incredible. Further, it's been rumored that Jeff has been banned from every all-you-can-eat establishment in the tri-county area, because of this reputation, though that's never been substantiated.
For now, hopefully that clears up a few mysteries for you involving the sports staff at the OP, and this is your trusty correspondent signing off.
I have to go find Dick Cheney and see if he'll let me borrow one of his bunkers for a while.
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