Lone Ranger

“The one thing that I’ll always remember was if you ever asked my dad a question, he would always put down whatever he was doing and give you his undivided attention,” says Kevin. “I’d say, ‘Hey dad,’ and”—at this he mimes uncrossing his legs, folding up a newspaper and setting it aside, then leans forward, establishes eye contact and says, “Yes.” Dropping out of character, he continues: “When you give that type of attention to your children it makes them feel very important. And the better you feel about yourself, the easier this world is, because your foundation is pretty much set. The stuff that gets thrown at you, it never shakes you.

“I get a lot of my perspective from my dad too,” McHale adds, getting enthused at the tribute he’s building. “I love basketball, but it’s not curing cancer or something really special. I’d come home from a game feeling pretty good about myself. And my dad would go, ‘Hey, Kev, did you have fun?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Thataboy,’ he’d say. That was it. He kept it pretty simple: Work hard, be the best you can be, and have some fun.”

And so he did. “Back when we were growing up, Hibbing was a small town of about 20,000 people,” says McHale’s childhood friend Joe Ryan. “The mines were operating at capacity, there was a lot of new construction, it was a very robust economy; people were feeling good, feeling positive.” Older neighborhoods were characterized by ethnicity: Brooklyn was the name of the Italian enclave, and McHale’s mother, Josie, who he describes as “a feisty Yugoslavian,” was born and raised with other Yugoslavians in Hibbing’s Latonia neighborhood. But McHale and his siblings grew up in Greenhaven, a cultural polyglot because it was a newer development with fairly cheap housing. “The distinctive thing about my neighborhood was that there were tons of kids, so there was always somebody to play football, or street hockey, or throw apples at cars, which we used to do,” McHale remembers.