Kansas City News Blog

BY DAVID MARTIN

One rode with Reynolds, one vlogs for the Star.

Holly Lawton, The Kansas City Star’s sports editor, says reporter Mike DeArmond was not intoxicated when he filmed a strange video blog after the University of Kansas men’s basketball team won the national championship.

In the segment, DeArmond leers into the camera and sounds a little like a drunk person trying to mask his condition by speaking slowly. A phone number for Alcoholics Anonymous appears on screen at the end of a doctored version of the clip recently posed on YouTube.

DeArmond covers Mizzou athletics. His video blogs typically aspire for something beyond traditional reporting. DeArmond frequently uses props or music to supplement his dispatches. He briefly donned a pig mask for a report after Tigers defensive back Pig Brown hurt his Achilles tendon.

In the KU championship clip, DeArmond purports to capture the mood in Columbia on the night the rival Jayhawks won the NCAA tournament. DeArmond describes the silence that fell upon Shiloh, an off-campus bar. “I will admit that for the Missouri fans, it was depressing,” DeArmond says, sounding and looking not unlike the creepy proctologist who rode in the ambulance with Burt Reynolds in Cannonball Run. “Until next year, oh, praise the mighty Jayhawks.”

Lawton says DeArmond was not drunk when he taped the segment several weeks ago. “He took on a different persona every week in his videos last season, and it was always something wacky,” Lawton writes in an e-mail.

Supporting Lawton’s contention, DeArmond seems to snap out of character at the close of the segment, when he says, “What’s wrong with you, Memphis? You had the game won.”

Still, the YouTube posting should remind The Star's vloggers that, a.) comedy is harder than it looks, and b.) in the KU-MU rivalry, each side is vigilant for opportunities to humiliate the other, be it Bucknell T-shirts or a beat writer’s misguided attempt at humor.