MSNsportsNET Wrote:MSN Technical Director Dies
By John Antonik for MSNsportsNET.com
May 4, 2008


Longtime MSN Technical Director John McKinney, pictured here with Woody O'Hara and Jack Fleming.
WVU Sports Communications photo

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – John McKinney is the name you always heard on MSN radio broadcasts but was the person you never really knew quite as well as Jack Fleming, Tony Caridi or Woody O’Hara. McKinney was the man responsible for getting the broadcasts on the air.

Sunday morning McKinney died at Monongalia General Hospital of heart failure during surgery. He had been hospitalized since Thursday because of a foot infection.

“At a time like this I’m sort of at a loss for words,” said longtime friend Woody O’Hara. “I can’t think of the right thing to say.”

McKinney was popular with players, coaches and administrators. He began traveling with men’s basketball and football in the late 1970s and continued to do so up until last year when he began scaling back his work. He remained the lead engineer for football broadcasts but relinquished basketball duties to his son, John McKinney, Jr. McKinney also worked in the engineering department for the West Virginia Radio Corporation for many years.

Many involved with WVU athletics remember McKinney being a legendary practical jokester.

“McKinney and (video coordinator) Jim Galusky used to always go at it with (former basketball player) Eric Semisch,” recalled Tony Caridi. “Those guys were always doing something to each other on road trips.”

Caridi remembers McKinney once going into someone’s room and removing the microphone from the person’s telephone and then calling them from the next room. He could hear McKinney’s voice but couldn’t answer. McKinney kept asking him to speak up.

“You could hear this person yelling all the way down the hallway,” Caridi said.

O’Hara also enjoyed having a few laughs and he remembers once putting McKinney on the air during the late stages of a blowout basketball game.

“Boy did they get on me for that,” O’Hara chuckled. “We were running away with the game and I felt a little looney. I was doing the game because Fleming had another engagement or something.

“John was sort of hesitant and sort of surprised.”

Another time O’Hara remembers them having to find their way back to the hotel after the team bus had left them in downtown Milwaukee following a basketball game against Marquette.

“Here we had all these big, old cases and we were pushing them up the street toward the hotel,” O’Hara said. “Somebody from the Marquette sports information office saw us, they must have felt sorry for us, and they gave us a ride.”

O’Hara said there were many times when it was McKinney who saved the broadcast.

“In New York - at the Big East Tournament - Fleming used to record the coach at the hotel (for the pre-game show). Once he went to the game site and left the coach’s interview on his bed. I remember John had to run back and get it,” O’Hara said.

Caridi recalls McKinney usually being asked to come up with some of the most complicated concoctions to make things work.

“He had a case full of wires, cables and connectors and any type of connection - whatever we asked him to do, he would somehow make it happen,” Caridi said.

McKinney was very proud of his affiliation with West Virginia University. He kept a running count of all of the men’s basketball and football games he worked. Serving more 31 years as the broadcast engineer it was well over a thousand.

“He was proud of that and also his son John McKinney, Jr. becoming involved in that as well,” O’Hara said. “He relished in his son’s success.”

O’Hara remembers many times McKinney coming over for a visit and then winding up fixing something that was wrong with his house.

“We would be talking and watching TV and I would mention that I had an electrical problem and he would say, ‘Let me take a look at it.’ The next thing you know he was putting in all types of stuff for me,” O’Hara said. “John was always willing to help and jump in and never accepted money for anything. Out of friendship he liked to treat his friends well.”

Above everything else, John McKinney was a first-rate engineer who wouldn’t let anything on the air that wasn’t first class.

“He paid a lot of attention to detail as that job calls for,” O’Hara said. “In order to come off right he was where it all started.”

“What was on his shoulders was what it took for us to be on the air,” added Caridi.

McKinney was 59.