Courtesy Des Moines Register

(November 2, 2009) Keith Murphy tilts back a large missile of Rockstar Energy Drink, laced with caffeine and B vitamins.

It's a late Friday morning, deep into an improbable, perhaps historic football season, and the WHO-TV sports director's laptop is perched by his living room chair. He has blogged and tweeted for breakfast. The flat screen flashes ESPN. A note pad is scribbled with items for his 2 p.m. radio sports talk show. The electrician is knocking on the door because every time his wife turns on the hair dryer in their old, pleasantly worn west-side Des Moines home, half the house goes dark. The yard needs to be raked.

He's due at the TV station before he leads the two-hour KNXO radio show, before he puts together his 6 p.m. TV report, before he scurries home for dinner at a table surrounded by six kids, before he prepares and delivers the 9 and 10 p.m. sports news, before he returns home to tweet for his Twitter followers ...

"I may be too excited about college football. It's 1:15 a.m. and I really just want to stay up and get it started. Christmas for adults."

... Before he prepares for a weekend as emcee of a charity event, before his Sunday night local TV talk show, "SoundOFF with Keith Murphy."

Murphy may need more Rockstar to survive. And a priest to drive the sports out of his body.

Obsession purging happened to him before. Vomiting was nearly involved.

 

The Iowa Hawkeyes football team is 8-0 and in the hunt for a national championship. The state's citizens are in Stage III mania.

Murphy, 45, the face of sports for many in Central Iowa, takes a break from ESPN to lead a tour of his home a day before the state goes bonkers with Iowa and Iowa State wins.

Bedrooms are crammed with bunk beds. An add-on is a giant kids' lounge. A hallway closet is converted to a makeshift vanity where his artist wife, Jenny, can get ready.

The couple's boys, ages 5 to 16, were blended two years ago in numbers sufficient for a six-man football team. That can give a man perspective.

Four years ago, divorced with four boys, he had faced a low point with no late-game rally predicted.

"When children are involved, you sit up at night worrying how they are processing all this," Murphy said.

His personal ad, he said, would have been dismal: "Man in 40s with four boys who works nights and absolutely loves sports seeks companionship."

His parents were up from Florida, and they went to eat at Star Bar. Jenny sat at an adjacent table with her aunts and mom, Des Moines City Council member Christine Hensley.

"We all knew who he was," Jenny said of the trim man with short-cropped hair. "My aunts are loud and outgoing and were teasing him. He probably wanted to hide."

Instead, it led to dates, then marriage, her two joining his four. The late-game rally was on.

The night he married, Murphy had an overwhelming feeling, the best of his life, even better than a touchdown as a kid: "Everything was going to be all right," he said.

Sports are mere ballgames compared to that.

 

His marriage was the second of life's perspective moments.

In the first, Murphy was standing outside a murder scene in Gainesville, Fla., in 1990, covering a story of a serial killer who was victimizing co-eds. This was murder No. 5.

How he got to that point was improbable for a boy clearly obsessed with sports. He played them all in high school in central Florida. He was so over the top, he acknowledges today, that he was less than kind - telling his mom to take a boy home after he tired during Murphy's one-on-one basketball drilling - and now apologizes to former classmates on Facebook for his behavior.

"I was too serious as a kid," he said. "Sports was my life."

He was smacked in college football practice at Valdosta State University in Georgia, causing a career-ending concussion and neck surgery as a adult, but it didn't stop him.

If he couldn't play it, he wanted to cover it. He landed a sports anchor job at a local TV station in 1985, even before graduating, and threw himself into it. His grades suffered. His blue-collar parents, a mother who worked in a factory and dad in retail sales, had never gone to college but helped pay for his. They urged him to finish school. He did, with many late nights.

"It always stuck with me that if I was determined enough to finish something, I could," he said. "It's my proudest accomplishment."

But when the only jobs to move up in television were in news, he took them, which led to standing at a murder scene, with news trucks lined up for blocks.

"It was a big story, and all the reporters were amped up," he said. "All I wanted to do was vomit.

"So I came to a conclusion - it was really an epiphany."

He wanted back in sports - anywhere he could find a job, which was WOI-TV in Ames. And he wanted to believe sports were not life and death.

Murphy emerged with a new ease - a quick wit, a raised eyebrow, a well-timed pause - that eventually led him to WHO-TV by 1996.

The reserve tackle's groin injury is less his report than a dry joke.

After Jim Zabel's "Beat the Bear" sports program ended 13 years ago, Murphy's SoundOFF took its place, eventually adding Andy Fales as a grumpy sidekick on Sundays after the local news.

"He's fallen into the role of the level-headed straight man," Fales said. "I've taken the part of the opinionated, brash, raving jerk.

"But Keith is more opinionated than he lets on. Much of my material comes out of his opinions."

It's become local TV legend how ESPN pursued his talents in 1999. He told the nation's premier sports network no.

He'd found a home in Iowa, he said, and wanted to put down roots, to cover teams in his backyard, not all over the world.

"Keith is the face of this station," said Rod Peterson, WHO-TV news director.

He also said Murphy's personality, kind and funny, even on deadline, matches his on-air demeanor. Murphy claims he is shy and plays outgoing only on air.

But watching him work the microphone at the radio station, Murphy is nothing if not an adept conversationalist. There are discussions on how many years have passed since he needed to blow-dry his hair. He pitches lead-ins to Fales on the pitfalls of visiting parents.

Some die-hards occasionally complain there isn't enough sports in his sports talk. But he approaches the job, he said, like he's amid a group of guys sitting at a bar.

"Sports for men is just the home base," Murphy said. "You start with it, then go to women or movies, then back to sports, then to your job and back to sports."

Murphy says he puts the pressure on himself to please the audience. In an age of expanding mediums, the Web, radio and TV, it's around the clock. He also wants, as he writes on his Facebook page, to become a better man. The man with perspective.

"When a team is unbeaten everything changes, from football as a way to socialize, to, 'Can we win it all?' "

So last Sunday morning, his day off - well, except for SoundOFF - he tweeted that he watched a replay of the Iowa-Michigan State game.

"Even though I know what's coming, I'm tense the entire time."

Some seasons, nothing can exorcise the sports demon.

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