By Brendan Ulmer
Ulmer Uninterrupted
I am a huge baseball fan. The nerd kind, the charts and graphs kind.
Growing up in Kansas City, some of my earliest conscious memories are of Royals games. I remember watching the Royals play the Cardinals when I was like 6 and being amused that Albert Pujols’ name is pronounced “poo-holes”. I’ve marginally matured since then.
As someone who has watched a thousand or more games commentated on by Rex Hudler, I was thrilled to find out that he was the keynote speaker at the Hutchinson/Reno County Chamber of Commerce Annual Meeting.
I was even more excited that the Chamber granted me a few minutes to sit down and interview him.
Hudler is extremely energetic. This has made him somewhat of an acquired taste among baseball fans. Fans often watch the game for a few hours of zen, or some in-depth technical, or statistics-based commentary, neither of which is Hudler’s forte. I, however, deeply enjoy Rex Hudler, his catchphrases, his enthusiasm, and his penchant for saying something unforgettably funny and/or inappropriate. Even as someone who loves baseball, I will be the first to admit it can often get mundane, so a guy like Rex Hudler is great for keeping my attention.
Interviewing Hudler, he did not disappoint. He gave me a rundown about his long career full of ups and downs. He shared that he considers himself a “successful failure,” which immediately had me thinking about how relative the concept of failure is. He shared that the satisfaction he gets from his nonprofit, Team Up For Down Syndrome, far outweighs the success he’s had from his baseball or commentating career.
Toward the end of the interview, he picked up a FaceTime call from his pastor and spoke to him in the exact cadence he uses when broadcasting.
“I’m sitting here with a young reporter for the Hutchinson’s Tribune,” Hudler told his pastor. “He wants to know what’s better, serving the people through Team Up for Down syndrome, and doing things for others, or baseball, I said ‘Man, doing things for others is WAY better.”
He was just as animated and fun as the guy I’d watched on TV since I was 9. Honestly, I kind of knew he would be. It would be hard to fake the personality of Rex Hudler.
His keynote address was also exactly as I’d expected, wide-ranging, loose and energetic. I’ve described it as the speech equivalent of freestyle jazz.
Some of the audience may have been waiting for the overall message to materialise, but we real Hudler-heads got the Rex we knew and loved.
When I sat down to write the story about the Hutch Chamber Annual Meeting, I felt I was in a bit of a pickle. The two major events of that night were the speeches from Hudler, and Hutch Chamber President and CEO Debra Teufel. I was trying to figure out how to write a story that could be a compilation album of both Hudler’s improvisational style and Teufel, who was absolutely playing the hits.
Ultimately, I decided to focus on Teufel’s address in our coverage of the event, as I felt it was both sharp and timely.
Since I omitted any of his statements from the article, I wanted to write this to give Hudler his flowers and thank him for a lifelong memory.