Lone Ranger

It is fair to say Kevin McHale has disdain, even contempt, for the idea of celebrity. “There is a difference between people thinking they know me and people actually knowing me. And that is a difference I am going to keep,” he declares, explaining why he is denying access to his wife, mother, and five children (the youngest now teenagers), and why he won’t consent to be interviewed at his home in North Oaks, or while hunting, fishing, playing golf, going to his cabin, or visiting the touchstones of his youth in Hibbing.

Instead, we’re on the basketball courts of the health club side of the Target Center, where McHale and other members of the Wolves’ brain trust are working out a half-dozen or so prospects every day to determine who to select in the seventh pick in the NBA draft the following week. “And I wouldn’t even be [interacting with you] this much if these numb-nuts hadn’t talked me into it,” McHale crows good-naturedly, nodding toward a sheepish member of the Wolves’ media relations crew. “I want this over and done in one visit. I know you are trying to turn this into This Is Your Life. But I already know my life, so I’m not really comfortable with that.” He’s only half-kidding.

But as McHale would readily concede, there’s no great secret to what makes him tick. “My father was the biggest influence on my life, by far,” he says of Paul McHale, who toiled in the mines for U.S. Steel for forty-two years and never missed a day of work. “If it was forty-below or there was two feet of snow, Kevin and I knew we had to shovel out and get the car ready for him in the morning,” John says. “If he was on the night shift, we had to be quiet during the day. He never talked about never missing a day; he just always got up and went.”

McHale pere quit school in the ninth grade but at home, you could usually find him in his chair, where he read one newspaper in the morning and a different one in the evening. If John or Kevin or their two younger sisters wanted to go outside and play catch, he’d comply, but he never asked them; never pushed.