Lone Ranger

In context, it is shocking how far and fast his star has fallen and how much it has remade his public persona. All his life McHale had lived his father’s “keep it simple” credo—work hard, be the best you can, have fun—with a neon flourish. In response, he was not so much revered as warmly embraced as a blunt-spoken Iron Ranger with a sense of personalized, small-town integrity. Today, his reputation is so tattered that even casual fans making small talk at a party are quick to criticize him. He’s become “Kevin McFail.”

Having lived a charmed life for more than forty years, McHale wasn’t prepared for this. As the criticism intensified, Eddie Haskell became the Invisible Man. “I think all the negativity the past few years has made him withdraw a bit from public appearances and the news media,” Glen Taylor concedes. “Kevin feels he’s already tried to explain it. We ask him as a team to do some of those appearances and I know it is not easy for him.”

McHale clearly feels defamed. “There are a lot of things that happened around here that [the press] has written about where I could have said, ‘That’s not what happened,’ because I know what happened,” McHale says. “Somebody tells you something to cover their rear ends and you run with it and it’s not true. You can say what you want about me, but I don’t leak deals and I don’t throw other people under the bus.”

So he remains stoic, but recedes further. “The opinion of people who don’t spend hundreds and hundreds of hours doing this [job] don’t matter to me. Everyone was a lot smarter three years ago [when the team was winning]. I was. You were, you guys in the media.”  

But McHale has been vulnerable to criticism for more than three years on a variety of fronts.