Kathy Nelson and the KC Sports Commission keep the metro’s athletic calendar full

The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum is packed with members of the Kansas City press, local politicians and business leaders, who mix among life-size statues of such Negro League greats as Pop Lloyd and Leon Day on March 20. The lights flick off. Two large TVs show the trailer for 42, the new Jackie Robinson biopic.

Harrison Ford, playing Branch Rickey, signs Robinson (the handsome Chadwick Boseman) to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers, making him the first African-American player in Major League Baseball. It feels like an injection of goose bumps.

As Jay-Z’s “Brooklyn (Go Hard)” bumps, outraged white people tell Robinson he doesn’t belong, the color-barrier-breaking infielder slugs a home run, and spectators at last cheer him. The audience applauds as the screens dissolve into an image of Boseman, as Robinson, sliding in the dirt under the slogan, “Before he was a legend, he was a Monarch,” a nod to Robinson’s stint with the Negro Leagues’ Kansas City team.

Then comes the big reveal: The 70-year-old Ford is scheduled to introduce special screenings of 42 at the AMC Barrywoods in Kansas City April 11. The showings are the only ones outside Los Angeles before the film’s April 12 nationwide release. Also in attendance: Boseman; Major League Baseball players; and sportswriter Joe Posnanski, who conducts a Q&A with Bob Kendrick, Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president.

Tickets to the special screenings, ranging from $42 to $1,000, have sold out. The money benefits the Negro Leagues Museum and the Kansas City Sports Commission.

“It’s the job of the Kansas City Sports Commission to interweave athletics with the life of our city and bring athletics to the fore,” says Tom Butch, chairman of the Sports Commission’s executive committee. “And this certainly fulfills that organizational directive.”

The Sports Commission was founded in 1966, aided by Ewing Kauffman, with an early directive to sell Chiefs season tickets and lobby Major League Baseball for a team. The nonprofit relies on private funding, corporate sponsorships, membership dues and entry fees to its 25 annual events, such as numerous 5k runs, the Waddell & Reed Kansas City Marathon, and the WIN for KC Triathlon. The commission is also charged with bringing marquee sporting events to the metro.

Those duties fall on commission president Kathy Nelson, who, with her 10 employees, put in long hours for March Madness. They helped the city host basketball tournaments between March 4 and 24 for the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, the Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletic Association and the Big 12, as well as the NCAA men’s basketball tournament’s KC regional. As those games played out in the Sprint Center and Municipal Auditorium, Nelson and the commission’s staff were busy planning the next event.

The commission’s work isn’t always glamorous; the volunteers and interns do grunt work, shuttling sports-media members among the Sprint Center, Municipal Auditorium and hotels; posting game scores from around the nation in hotel lobbies; giving directions; and serving as bouncers during VIP parties for sponsors and city officials at the Power & Light District’s Shark Bar. During the KC regional, a photo of Ole Miss guard Marshall Henderson drinking in the party district went viral after the Rebels beat the Wisconsin Badgers. (Nelson says Henderson wasn’t at a commission party.)

“You never know if you might be working with a 6-year-old, teaching them volleyball and basketball, or you might be bouncing at one of the VIP parties,” Nelson says. “Or you could easily be driving the KU men’s basketball coach from his hotel to Sprint Center.”

The city’s power brokers acknowledge that the commission’s work is essential to keeping the city’s sports calendar full.

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“They’re the reason people keep coming back,” Mayor Sly James says. “Not to mention that the city is kick-ass.”

The Kansas City Southern Railroad building maintains its old-fashioned sensibilities, with a door attendant and a first-floor model-railroad window display. The Kansas City Sports Commission occupies the fourth floor of the brick building, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

On a late-March Thursday, much of the commission’s headquarters are dark, many of the staffers working outside the office or taking a day off after the busy basketball season. Nelson isn’t. Her office shows the war trophies of a career in sports. There’s a wedding gift from broadcaster Frank Boal, a customized Louisville Slugger autographed by former Chiefs defensive end Neil Smith, who famously celebrated sacking quarterbacks by pantomiming a bat swing. Two regional Emmys for producing Chiefs games sit on another shelf.

Nelson hesitates when asked the year that she won her first Emmy. “You’d think I would know the year, right?” she says, before reading the inscriptions: 2004 and 2005. She previously worked in TV production for more than two decades, holding various positions at WDAF Channel 4 when it was an NBC affiliate. “Fox didn’t even exist,” she says.

At Channel 4, she spent weekends freelancing in broadcast trucks at football games and various college games throughout the area.

“It was even prior to the ESPN era, when sports was fun on TV,” Nelson says. “But no one had caught on to the hot commodity that it is now.”

In the late 1990s, colleagues from her freelance production gigs started work on Metro Sports, the local all-sports cable channel. They wanted her to work with them on building a 24-hour sports station. Nelson wasn’t sold.

“I’m like, ‘Cable is never going to make it,’ ” she says. Metro Sports’ early success changed her mind. In 2000, she was hired to expand the all-sports station’s programming from six hours a day to 24.

While working for Metro Sports, Nelson was also volunteering at Sports Commission events. She also served on the advisory board for the commission’s WIN for KC.

The commission’s then president, Kevin Gray, tried to hire her away from Metro Sports to run the Women’s Intersport Network for Kansas City (WIN for KC).

“I had known Kevin for at least 10 years,” Nelson says. “Our daughters played basketball together. I’d see him on the weekends all the time.”

Gray had been with the nonprofit for 21 years. By August 2010, he had persuaded Nelson to join the commission, which was headquartered in a four-story, red-brick house at 1308 Pennsylvania. Their professional collaboration would be brief.

While watching a Big 12 men’s basketball game at Sprint Center in spring 2011, Gray experienced hip pain. On June 15 — 10 weeks later — he died of cancer.

“Losing a family member is what it was,” Nelson says. “You know, you have your daytime spouse. Kevin was one of our daytime kind of spouses.”

As news of Gray’s death spread, Kansas Citians started dropping by the house to pay their respects.

“They wouldn’t necessarily come in, but they’d sit on the steps of the house,” she says. “Some people would cry. Other people would just want to show their support.”

Weeks after Gray’s death, the commission’s board of directors assembled a committee to conduct a national search. The hunt dragged on for a few months. The commission interviewed businesspeople, coaches and lawyers. Finally, Pete Ciacco, the board’s immediate past chairman, suggested Nelson for the job.

“I think maybe in her mind, she thought she was a still a bit of a rookie with our organization,” he says. “But I suggested that she throw her name into the ring.”

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Ciacco says Nelson’s career prepared her well for the role. “One day, she’s on television or making a presentation to a couple thousand people,” he says. “The next day she may be handing out numbers at an event or a race. She just has to be prepared for about anything.”

But the idea of taking her friend’s job made Nelson uncomfortable.

“He’s a legacy here,” she says. “How do you replace that?”

Nelson decided that the commission’s work was worth carrying on.

“He was only 51,” she says. “He had another 10 years of making this community the best place to live in the country. And now I have to step into that shadow. It was a little overwhelming.”

Nelson was hired as president in November 2011. But she refused to move into Gray’s famously messy work space. She worked in the house’s second-floor playroom instead of on the first floor.

“We gave his family some time, and they cleared out his office,” Nelson says. “Then it was even more emotional because that office was empty. When that was gone, that’s when I think it hit home for everyone.”

Nelson took over the office a month after she took the job.

“I can’t ever replace Kevin,” she says. “Nobody can. But I can help this position, and I can help this organization, and I can help our city.”

Bidding wars among cities for the country’s biggest sporting events are cutthroat and can take years of groundwork. Kansas City was bidding on an NCAA men’s basketball regional before the Sprint Center opened in October 2007. To land events of this caliber, the city and the Sports Commission work in concert with the Convention & Visitors Association and the Sprint Center, says arena spokeswoman Shani Tate.

“Kathy and her team do a great job in terms of relationship building for a lot of the behind-the-scenes [tasks] that people really don’t see,” Tate says. “By the time the teams hit the court, there’s so many hours of work that have gone into it. It really is the well-oiled machine.”

The rewards are in the millions: Nelson estimates that the five days of Big 12 men’s basketball every year pumps between $12 million and $15 million into the metro.

Nelson isn’t satisfied with just one Division 1 conference tournament calling Kansas City home. She wants more.

“We’d love to host the Missouri Valley [Conference men’s basketball] tournament and take that away from St. Louis,” she says.

Not only does she have designs on a tournament named after its host city — Arch Madness — but she also wants to fill Kansas City’s black-and-gold void. “We’re working to get the University of Missouri back in Kansas City,” she says.

The Tigers’ leaving the Big 12 for the SEC ended one of the city’s biggest sporting events — Mizzou’s annual Border War with the University of Kansas at Arrowhead Stadium — and put in question the Big 12 tournament’s future in Kansas City. (The commission helped secure the tournament through 2016, despite the conference no longer having a member institution in the host state.)

“Whether it’s football, basketball, whatever that looks like,” she says. “I talk to [Mizzou athletic director] Mike Alden all the time, and he knows if he wants Kansas City, he’s got to call Kathy.”

The commission is also targeting several other events this year, including NCAA volleyball, basketball and wrestling; Olympic trials; and various high school state championships. The commission is also working on returning college football to Arrowhead.

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“Some of them I can’t name,” she says, noting that she bumped into representatives of the St. Louis Sports Commission at a recent NCAA Wrestling Championship in Des Moines, Iowa, “because I don’t want St. Louis to try to grab it from us.”

But don’t look to Nelson for answers on whether the Sprint Center will ever get a pro basketball or hockey franchise. That’s out of the Sports Commission’s jurisdiction, she says.

“Those talks go on at a different level that don’t involve us at this point,” she says. “Those are more types of talks that go on at an AEG-type level.”

Mayor James says his office depends on the Sports Commission’s attention to detail to impress visiting fans, teams and officials, and to persuade them to keep — and bring — their events to KC.

“It’s the difference between first-class treatment and helter-skelter treatment,” James says. “They bring first-class coordination and treatment to every event.”

The commission works largely in secret until leagues or universities finally announce their commitment to future tournament-host cities and game sites. The commission’s anonymous nature makes fundraising difficult, Nelson says.

“At times, I get frustrated that it’s hard to raise money,” she says, before giving an impromptu pitch. “Don’t you get it? If you want Kansas City to be a thriving community, and you want your kids to have great baseball fields, and you want the Big 12 to continue to be here, you’ve got to continue to support us financially.”

But James sees the commission’s lack of limelight as an advantage. “One thing that I do know is that you can get a whole hell of a lot more done if you’re not wrapped up in who gets the credit,” he says. “They get a lot done because they don’t go out looking to say, ‘Hey, look at us! Look at us!’ “

Before Nelson can focus on poaching events for Kansas City, she has to finalize the 42 screenings. Operating under the radar makes these high-profile fundraisers extra important to the commission’s future. So Nelson must make sure that the event goes off without a hitch. With movie stars and pro baseball players slated to walk the red carpet at the screenings, the commission needs to figure out who will provide the security details.

“Who are the bouncers on the red carpet?” she says. “My interns are the bouncers. That’s easy. They know what to do.”

On to the next issue.

“I have to rent a bar,” she says. “I don’t know how to do that yet, but I’ll know that by the end of the day.”