Three years after leaving ESPN and declining a large pay cut, Kenny Mayne is still making people laugh as he mixes sports commentary with his dry humor. His platform just looks a little different.
Mayne spoke with the Deseret News this week to promote his latest project, “Kenny Mayne’s Wiffle Ball,” a comedy documentary that revisits the beginning of Mayne’s journalism career.
In 1989 while working for KSTW-TV in Seattle, Mayne challenged Ken Griffey Jr., who was a rookie for the Seattle Mariners at the time, to a wiffle ball throwing contest.
For the past 35 years, Mayne has claimed that he threw the ball faster than Griffey. He set out to prove it in the documentary, which is available to watch on Fubo TV.
“Kenny Mayne’s Wiffle Ball” follows Mayne’s effort to confirm his victory, including the problems he ran into along the way. The biggest was figuring out how to watch his only piece of evidence, a Betacam SP tape.
Why should you watch “Wiffle Ball?”
“Well, hopefully they want 30 minutes of escape entertainment, and then obviously, the draw of seeing a young Ken Griffey (Jr.) throwing wiffle balls is kind of silly all by itself. But it was made just kind of on a whim,” Mayne said. “No one else has a movie about Ken Griffey throwing wiffle balls or me.”
Incorporating humor in sports broadcasting
The fact that the documentary is a comedy shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who watched Mayne during his 27-year stint on ESPN.
The longtime broadcaster was known for his humor.
“I think it’s just the way I am. Like I’ve always said, I take serious things seriously and less so, less seriously,” he said.
Mayne thought “it was the right thing to throw in your personality a little bit” into his “SportsCenter” highlight readings.
He’d try to get a laugh out of his audience and think “what’s the most absurd thing I can say right now,” which he admits could get “you in trouble in other circumstances, but later had an application in sports TV.”
“I ended up in a career that was the same behavior that got me sent out in the hall in grade school,” he said.
Mayne’s humor extended beyond “SportsCenter” into other ESPN projects, including the network’s first web series, “Mayne Street,” and later “Kenny Mayne’s Wider World of Sports.”
In “Mayne Street,” Mayne played a fictionalized version of himself. The three to five minute shorts featured the misadventures of his fictionalized TV crew. Mayne was joined by Aubrey Plaza before her iconic “Parks and Recreation” role, as well as actors Alison Becker and Jon Glaser, who’d also later appear in “Parks and Recreation.”
“We caught all those big — later — big stars, Aubrey in particular, before they were known. They’d barely done anything nationally,” he said. “(Plaza’s) been good to me through the years. She’s shown up on ‘SportsCenter’ a few times, and we trade out favors — she has more to give, I’m sure.”
When life wasn’t funny anymore
But being funny wasn’t always easy for Mayne.
Early in his ESPN career, Mayne lost his twin sons. Creighton was a stillborn, and Connor lived to six months before passing on Nov. 23, 1996. After Connor’s death, he remembers “precisely thinking, ‘How can anything ever be funny again?’”
He wanted to be secluded because of the pain. But then he thought of Connor.
He recalls wondering, “Would your son, who you just lost, want you to be miserable the rest of your life? Probably not, right?”
“That doesn’t honor him very well, so I just kind of walked through it,” Mayne said.
He knows it’s cliché but he decided to take it day by day after that. Thinking that “others have suffered worse” also helped Mayne.
“There’s always somebody who’s dealing with something tougher than whatever you’re dealing with. You just try to make it make sense, but it’s almost impossible to fully explain if you haven’t been through it. And I also know I wouldn’t wish anything like that on anybody else. So you’re sort of a member of a club you don’t want to belong to,” he said.
Life after ESPN
Since leaving ESPN, Mayne has continued to collaborate with athletes on TV — like in his Caesars Sportsbook commercials with the Manning brothers — and through his organization, Run Freely, which aims to give back to veterans.
Run Freely grew out of Mayne’s experience with an ankle injury he suffered while playing college football for UNLV. Even decades later, the pain still plagued him. He eventually lost mobility in his ankle.
Then, in 2017 in Gig Harbor, Washington, Mayne was fitted with a device called the ExoSym. The device didn’t fix Mayne’s ankle, but it relieved the pressure.
“Day one (with the ExoSym), I got on the treadmill and was sprinting and couldn’t believe my gift. I remember crying for an hour or two, like it was overwhelming. Didn’t feel like I deserved it. I’d gone through all these years of pain and it’s just hard to describe unless you’ve been stuck in that situation,” he said.
In 2018, he and his wife, Gretchen, started Run Freely to raise money to pay for veterans suffering from their own debilitating pain to be outfitted with an ExoSym.
“This one, again, isn’t a fix of the injury. It’s a fix of the situation, and it totally changes their lives. I’ve had so many letters afterward, you know, ‘I got back in the workforce, or I got to play with my kids again, or I went back to running,’ and, all these different beautiful stories,” he said.
The devices cost roughly $8,000 to $9,000 each, and that’s with the discount Mayne receives.
Mayne has teamed up with Joe Montana, Michael Penix Jr., Dale Earnhardt Jr., Steve Kerr, Jerry Rice, Gary Payton and Jamal Crawford, Lenny Wilkens and Steve Largent for short fundraising events.
Earlier this year, Run Freely hosted a 15-minute event with Montana. Donors paid $1,500 to catch a pass from Montana in a Las Vegas restaurant. Afterward, they got to shake the Hall of Famer’s hand and keep the ball they caught and Montana signed.
“That money immediately was enough to buy the next device for the next veteran, so we’re doing good. A dollar at a time, one veteran at a time,” Mayne said.
Mayne and Run Freely outfitted their latest veteran with an ExoSym just last week, “and now the cash fund is pretty much down to nothing again,” he said.
“But we’ll tell the story again, and we’ll have another event, or some nice person will just write a check for $5,000 or whatever. It’s happened all sorts of different ways,” Mayne said. “We’re hopeful that a whole bunch of people see the good in it.”