In memory of a starstruck sportswriter

Editor's Note: Mike Kluck was a sports reporter, editor and columnist for the Daily Nebraskan in the 1980s and from 1995-1998.

When you live halfway across the country from your hometown, you start doing things to keep up with home you never did when you lived there. Like reading obituary notices in the hometown paper online.

I'm 25, and I read about 89-year-old grandmothers to someone I don't know who passed on last Tuesday just because it's home. Births, anniversaries, honor roll - I read all of it and don't know a soul.

But I still read.

I'm not alone. My fiancee, who, like me, hasn't lived in Nebraska since we graduated in 1997, checks her hometown obit notices every day, because she's lucky enough to have grown up in a Nebraska town that has a daily newspaper.

On Tuesday, she found an obit of someone we both knew.

Mike Kluck.

Mike was a friend; a sportswriter at the Daily Nebraskan in our heyday of toiling in the basement of the Union in the mid-1990s.

He was, to say the least, a non-traditional student in every sense of the word. A big, 30-year old guy, who came back for his journalism degree after a stint as a junior-high teacher didn't work out, kind of sticks out at the Daily Nebraskan.

He had a strange kind of sense of humor you never could describe. He was the only student I knew who made a habit of hitting the casinos on weekends. And the man ate worse than any freshman could dream.

Mike died of a heart attack last Tuesday morning at 34. He was driving home from covering the Chiefs' Monday night game in Kansas City when he slumped over the wheel. Who he was writing for I don't know, but that never mattered to Mike, so long as he was at the game.

You probably have never heard of Mike Kluck, but big Mike is a small wrinkle in the history of Nebraska and the university. It's a story you haven't heard.

In December of 1997, the rumors about Tom Osborne retiring were rampant. Osborne had been coach for 25 years, and he let on, from time to time, that he wasn't going to be coaching until the end.

The day before he retired, Osborne said this: "The thing you need to know about my retirement is the first thing I will do is talk to the assistant coaches, and then I'll talk to the players, and then I'll talk to (the media). So once that happens - it's kind of like when the stars and the moons line up."

The sports reporters gathered to hear Osborne's words, chuckled and went on about their business.

At the DN office, later that night, a couple of us were talking about what Osborne had said, when someone I can't remember said it was heard in an astronomy class that, yes, the planets were aligned right now.

This was a rare occurrence, happening only once every 15 years or so.

A quick call - this was late, probably 10 p.m. - to that student's professor confirmed it.

And Mike Kluck, our fearless sports editor, called the most revered human in the state of Nebraska at 11 p.m. at home to tell him we think we figured out his riddle. Mike asked him if he was retiring.

Osborne is not typically kind to reporters calling him at home and waking him up. Whole newspapers in Nebraska won't do that for fear their press passes will disappear. Osborne merely chuckled and gave some non-denial denial to Mike.

The next day, Osborne retired.

The first sentence out of Osborne's mouth in his retirement speech was about Mike Kluck and his late-night phone call.

There, in the room, I witnessed a man, with all his problems and all his goodness, experience a moment of fleeting glory. A moment so treasured by him.

One he would have shared with everyone, had he not been taken from us so early.

It was all a Nebraska sportswriter could want: to cling to just one tiny piece of an earth-shattering event in the history of the Huskers.

I remember Mike for a lot of things, but it is in that moment of his personal glory that I will always and forever see him in my memories.

I think another former colleague said it best: May Mike be welcomed into that Great Press Box in the Sky.