Q&A: Rustin Dodd + Kingdom Quarterback DOUBLE giveaway!

Rustin Dodd—friends call him Russ, I’m gonna call him Russ from here on out—and I went to KU around the same time but we became very good friends after school, crossing paths both in Kansas City and NYC. You may know Russ as a former Kansas basketball beatwriter for The Kansas City Star, before leveling up to the Royal beat job and then onto The Athletic. Russ is going to kill me for writing this but his work is thoughtful, dense, detailed and often surprising—he combs through everything at his disposal to paint the most comprehensive portrait. Also, he’s very funny. I love that.

Rustin and one of his longtime friends and former University Daily Kansan colleague, Mark Dent, have a book called Kingdom Quarterback coming out, which is ostensibly a book about Patrick Mahomes. However, Dodd + Dent utilize the angle of Mahomes’ come-up to explore the wider story of Kansas City as a town, a home, a state of mind—it is safe to say that this is the only football book I’ve ever read that also discusses redlining and tenants rights. Hook it to my veins!

Let’s get to the GIVEAWAYS. So, we’re going to do TWO for Kingdom Quarterback.

GIVEAWAY #1

The first three people to send a receipt of their preorder of Kingdom Quarterback will receive a free Charlie Hustle t-shirt in their preferred size. Respond directly to this email and attach/copy your receipt.

GIVEAWAY #2

I’m pumped to announce we’ll ALSO be giving away 3️⃣ signed copies of Kingdom Quarterback which will be shipped to the winners shortly after release—to enter the giveaway, just reply directly to this email with your best address and I’ll pick three winners via random number generator. 

If you wish to enter BOTH giveaways, please indicate this in your reply. No need for two emails.

Kingdom Quarterback will be available on Aug. 22 from Penguin Random House. Pre-order it at the Raven here.

Late last week, Rustin and I connected to chat about the book, Kansas City as a city and as a concept and obviously KU basketball.

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Alright, the book rules, and I absolutely love the approach you and Mark took to telling this story. Can you tell me a little bit about taking that angle, the who/what/when/where/why of it all?

So, the very brief origin story: Mark called me at some point in late 2020. He was living in Texas. I was living in New York. That was the “Run it Back” season during COVID when the Chiefs were rolling up wins and it seemed very, very probable that they would win back-to-back Super Bowls. We both grew up in Overland Park in the 1990s, and it just seemed clear there was this different energy in Kansas City. Things were happening. The 2015 World Series. Downtown coming back. Crossroads poppin’ off. Ted Lasso Season 1. Baldwin hats and Charlie Hustle t-shirts. Patrick Mahomes, etc. Now, this had been a familiar story for a lot of Midwestern cities, of course, but Mark had been doing some reading about Kansas City history, and he had this idea to tap into the story of a possible football dynasty as a parallel for the story of the city itself. 

I thought it was a great idea, and we spent the next few months doing research and reading old history books. But then the Chiefs lost to the Bucs and we took a little time off from the idea. We eventually came back to it during the summer of 2021, and at some point, as we were putting together a book proposal and talking a lot, we realized that the story of J.C. Nichols, the  influential and infamous real estate developer, had to be centered in the story of Kansas City. I understood the basics of the Nichols story—how he used (and pioneered) racially restrictive covenants to systematically segregate his wealthier neighborhoods in the early 20th century, and how those methods filtered to other neighborhoods throughout the city. 

But it was always a little tricky to understand exactly how that story connected to the larger story of “redlining”—or how the federal government had reinforced and exacerbated that segregation by refusing to insure home loans in Black neighborhoods. But we thought that Kansas City’s role in that larger national story was a little under-covered. 

This may be my parochial Kansas City instincts coming out, but it is true that cities like Kansas City just don’t get their stories told to a national audience like other places on the coast. 

The book ultimately became an attempt to tell that story while still writing a book about an INCREDIBLE quarterback that could still be fun.

Mahomes is the rare subject that I’ve stepped aside from Jayhawk talk to discuss. For me, it is difficult to process that he plays for the hometown club—it feels like we’re living in a simulation or something. Now that you’ve written the book, how has your opinion of Mahomes changed?

Well, for one, I think he’s actually underrated. We don’t really get into this too deeply in the book, but there are so many advanced stats that show what an outlier he is in the history of football. I think he’s the greatest quarterback who has ever played the position. He may not have the greatest career; we’ll see. But nobody has ever played the position better. 

I think that only explains a little of why he’s so compelling, though. I think there’s a general aesthetic quality to his performance, similar to Steph Curry. He’s the rare athlete who has changed the form. His numbers are unprecedented, but he’s more fun to think about as an artist, removed from any of the conventional sports debates we might have. That may sound a little pretentious, but it’s sort of like what David Foster Wallace wrote about Roger Federer. The joy is in the experience of watching.  

Man, I think the angle you took—to make this a book about football, but also an honest and clear-eyed assessment of a growing city’s racist history—is so illuminating. When did that feel like this was the story you needed to tell?

I mentioned this a little bit, but I think it became clear to us in the summer of 2020 and the months afterward. There was so much energy during the summer protests in 2020, and so much of the energy in Kansas City was directed at the legacy of Nichols. It was interesting, too, that the Country Club Plaza and the J.C. Nichols fountain were sort of the hub of the protests in Kansas City. 

The other thing I should add, of course, is that it wasn’t a new story: Steve Kraske, then of the Kansas City Star, had written a column advocating to change the name of the Nichols fountain three years earlier, and the Nichols story kept coming out in bits and pieces. (Not to mention that newspapers like the Kansas City Call had covered the restrictive covenant story for decades and decades before The Kansas City Star started writing about it.) It just felt like the right time to try to tell the whole thing at once.  

Correct me if I’m wrong but Mahomes declined participation in this book—but I think him speaking at length for this might have made it a worse book, honestly. What are the challenges of not having the subject participate, and what are the opportunities?

Yeah, we didn’t end up doing a direct one-on-one interview. We spent some time with his father, interviewed his grandfather about the Mahomes family history, and spoke to a number of other folks from his inner circle. I also covered both Super Bowls for The Athletic and was present for the “13 seconds” game, this year’s AFC Championship Game, and a few other road games this past season. 

Obviously, you always want to speak to as many people as possible. But there were a couple reasons I enjoyed our process. One, it’s not a traditional biography, and Patrick Mahomes is only 27 years old. It would be dishonest to think you could capture a person in full at that age. Or likewise, to ask a person that age to be reflective in ways that could shape a biography. We wanted to explain the origins of the Mahomes phenomenon, but as I said before, so much of the Mahomes story is about the experience of watching. As much as the book is about how he became the best quarterback in the world, it’s also about what he’s done to Kansas City.  

What was the most surprising thing you discovered or researched?

I think people will really enjoy the Mahomes family history in the book. I don’t want to spoil too much. One of my favorite details from my reporting is still that Chiefs GM Brett Veach got a letter from his daughter (organized by his wife) on the morning of the 2017 draft that said: “Pat No Matter What.” That’s a reference to the Kevin Costner movie Draft Day, and if you haven’t seen it, I really hope this book helps the movie find an audience. 

Another story that I think people will really find fascinating is the planning and building of 71 highway—which was originally called the South Midtown Freeway. At one point, the highway was going to go through the Country Club District. Because of old streetcar lines, Kansas City could have dug down and built a highway that would have gone through Brookside and saved thousands of people from losing their home. We explain why that didn’t happen. 

We grew up as fans of the teams you have covered, and I’ve always admired the distance you’ve been able to create so you can tell the objective story, as much as there is an objective story. I think that is very hard! How do you do it, and is that something you consciously approach in a certain way? 

That’s actually a really interesting question. But it’s actually a little ironic, because … 

When I was growing up, my two favorite sports things in the world were KU basketball and the Royals. I enjoyed the Chiefs, and Martyball and Dick Vermeil were fun, but I was always a college hoops and baseball person. It just so happened that those were the two teams I came to cover professionally right at the start of my career, so I basically lost all fandom. I just kind of stopped caring about sports in that way. There was even a time where it felt weird to wear old KU shorts. I just never did. Maybe the whole dispassionate neutrality thing is a high-minded thing journalists tell themselves, especially in something relatively low-stakes like sports, but coming up in the old-school newspaper newsroom, I took it really seriously. 

But I actually never covered the Chiefs on a day-to-day level, and when Mahomes came along in 2018 and I moved to New York, I actually enjoyed that I could watch a team that I’d never covered on an intimate level. My “fandom”, if you could call it that, was not tainted at all, and I could enjoy the games with other Kansas City people in New York. It was a nice connection to back home. 

I’ve written a lot of conventional stories about the Chiefs over the last five years for The Athletic, too, and I still kind of feel obligated to adhere to that old-school, objective, newspaper culture I was raised in. But I actually think this book benefitted from some of the distance we had from the football stuff.

I learned from covering teams that sometimes you can be too close and miss the most interesting things. In other words, we wanted to report the book like journalists, and we ultimately talked to more than 100 people for direct interviews. But we wanted to write it from the perspective of someone watching the whole phenomenon from 30,000 feet — and that included understanding the experience of watching Mahomes like a fan might. I don’t know if that makes sense. But that’s how I thought about it.  

I think it is safe to say we are KU basketball megafans and longtime admirers of the Lawrence townie vibe. If you had to involve KU basketball in the story somehow, how would you do it? Is there a KU basketball chapter for the paperback?

Amazingly, J.C. Nichols was very involved on campus at KU, including working in various administration capacities with the football team. During my research I kept looking for evidence that Nichols and James Naismith knew each other. (And I had this crazy thought like: Was J.C. Nichols one of Phog Allen’s earliest “boosters”?)  It’s possible Nichols and Naismith crossed paths, on some level, but I couldn’t find anything linking them together. 

But I definitely feel like there’s still an untold story of what exactly Gradey Dick and Travis Kelce were doing together all night at the Hawk and Wheel back in February.   

Now that I’ve fully landed the plane on the KU transition, what are you looking forward to most about the next KU season? 

Two words: Elmarko Jackson. 

I’m joking a little bit. But I am curious to see how the guard rotation shakes out. It seems like KU will need Jackson or Arterio Morris to be a secondary playmaker and offensive option alongside Dajuan Harris in the backcourt, even if they’re both coming off the bench. 

To me, though, the wild card in the whole thing is KJ Adams. He was so awesome last year, but a lot of that was because he was such a matchup nightmare at the five. If he can figure out a way to be an adequate small-ball/Swiss Army Knife four-man alongside Hunter Dickinson—and retain some of that matchup nightmare stuff—KU is going to destroy some teams. 

Is there an era of KU basketball or Lawrence that you think could fit into a similar analysis as Kingdom Quarterback? I’m obviously obsessed with the era of 1. The Outhouse existing and 2. Larry Brown and his basketball illuminati being on campus with the prodigy Danny Manning. 

I once worked on a story about that era at The Athletic. The Pop stories are amazing. I feel like people have been worried about downtown Lawrence becoming too corporate since we were kids in the 90s. I’m totally workshopping in the moment here, so just got with it, but I do think you might be onto something.

College basketball definitely felt less corporate and more pure back in the 1980s, and I don’t even mean the amateurism stuff. But like … Allen Fieldhouse still had an indoor track in the lower concourse! Larry Brown would bartend on the weekends. I wonder if there’s an interesting dual narrative story to be done about a 1980s college basketball program (Kansas?!) that also tells the story of the last era before college towns themselves changed so much. Ehhhh … we’ll work on that. Might need refining. 

Kingdom Quarterback will be available on Aug. 22 from Penguin Random House. Pre-order it at the Raven here.