NC sports media giant John Kilgo just turned 90. He has a few stories to tell you

DAVIDSON

Unless you are of a certain age, you may not know who John Kilgo is.

Let’s change that today. The man just celebrated his 90th birthday and was a North Carolina sports multimedia legend in his time. Like a smarter, blunter Forrest Gump, Kilgo had an uncanny knack during a 60-year media career for being around the right college basketball team at the right time.

The Charlotte 49ers’ run to the Final Four in 1977?

Kilgo was on the mic as the team’s radio announcer.

Davidson’s run to the Elite Eight in 2008 with a baby-faced Stephen Curry leading the way?

Kilgo called it every step of the way, as the radio voice of the Wildcats.

The co-host for UNC basketball coach Dean Smith’s radio and TV shows for decades?

Kilgo.

The co-author of Smith’s official autobiography, published in 1999?

Kilgo.

The guy who Bonnie Cone — the founder of UNC Charlotte — had to talk into going to college because he hated high school?

Kilgo.

The guy who was hired straight out of college in 1957 by The Charlotte News at $75 a week to become a general-assignment newspaper reporter?

Kilgo, who still proclaims that gig was “the best job I ever had.”

The guy hired by Davidson’s president as the school’s sports information director in the 1960s, primarily to rein in fiery Wildcat head coach Lefty Driesell?

Kilgo — or “Killer,” as Driesell would nickname him, due to Kilgo’s penchant for mixing it up in the coaches’ daily games of no-blood, no-foul pickup basketball. The nickname has stuck for the past 60 years.

“John is a feisty guy,” said Bob McKillop, who coached Davidson’s basketball team for all of the years that Kilgo called the games and many more. “He never let his personal opinions get in the way of the radio broadcast. And he has a lot of personal opinions.”

I’d been wondering about Kilgo lately, and so I called him up recently and asked to visit with him at his home in Davidson. He said to come on. So I went, and Kilgo sat in his favorite green recliner and told me stories.

Kilgo’s mind remains sharp, but his heart is hurting. His wife of 69 years, Patsy, died on July 17, 2025, at age 89. He’s not felt much like getting out since.

“That was tough,” Kilgo said. “It still is. Patsy was the most popular person in my family, by far… She did so much, for everyone. It’s a major adjustment.”

Now Kilgo technically lives alone, although his four children often stop by.

His dog, a 13-year-old pug named Coach, is always around, too. The dog also has his own favorite chair. Killer and Coach: it sounds like the name of a true-crime podcast.

What coach is Coach named for?

“Oh, all of them, I guess,” Kilgo said. “I’ve been around some great ones.”

Early days in Charlotte

Kilgo and Patsy met in college at UNC Charlotte (then called Charlotte College) and started that 69-year marriage by secretly eloping. Where’d they go to get married?

“York, South Carolina,” Kilgo said. “It was sort of like Las Vegas at the time.”

When they finally told John’s mother they were married, she wasn’t pleased. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” she told the young couple. “You won’t finish school, and the marriage won’t last six months.”

That was in 1956. Patsy would eventually win over Kilgo’s mother, and Kilgo would eventually transfer to the University of North Carolina.

Kilgo’s college roommate in Chapel Hill was Pete Brennan, who was a starter on the 1957 UNC basketball team that won the national championship.

Kilgo was a college contemporary with a number of men in Chapel Hill at the time who would make national marks. Future banking superstar Hugh McColl was a friendly rival in pickup basketball games at Woollen Gym (“pesky and a trash-talker on the court, but a real go-getter”). Fellow Charlottean Jim Beatty was in the process of becoming a track star and would eventually become the first man to run a four-minute indoor mile.

In the meantime, Kilgo found his passion in journalism. The Charlotte News (the city’s afternoon newspaper, now defunct) and The Charlotte Observer both offered him jobs when he graduated, each for $75 a week. But Kilgo found The Observer’s interview process and editors to be too tedious and self-important (“They put you through all this psychological crap.”)

So Kilgo took the position with The News instead. He treated the News-Observer newspaper rivalry like it was UNC-Duke. Whenever the topic of The Observer comes up, even 60-plus years later, Kilgo likes to note that he and his former employer beat my current employer on a whole bunch of stories.

Kilgo wasn’t in the sports department then. He was a news reporter, taking a job that opened when Charles Kuralt left The Charlotte News for future fame at CBS. Kilgo interviewed President Richard Nixon and death-row inmates, covered the state legislature and wrote whatever general assignment stories needed writing that day. It turned out he was very good at it.

Pat Stith, an investigative reporter who would win a Pulitzer Prize for The News & Observer in 1996, saw Kilgo in action early at The Charlotte News. Stith wrote once on his blog that Kilgo was “by far, the most dominant breaking news reporter in Charlotte and, it turns out, the best breaking news reporter I ever worked with or against in a 42-year career.”

Getting to know Dean Smith

A notes column Kilgo penned during that time included a couple of paragraphs about a young basketball coach at UNC named Dean Smith, who was having some struggles in the early 1960s and once was hanged in effigy on campus.

As Kilgo puts it now: “These Carolina idiots — rich donors — decided that Dean Smith couldn’t succeed Frank McGuire, that Frank McGuire (who had won the national title in 1957) was too sophisticated and too uptown, for this country boy from Kansas to succeed at Carolina. So they were giving him hell.

“And I wrote a piece that basically said, ‘If you leave him alone, he’s going to become one of the greatest basketball coaches ever. But if you run him off because you’re dumb — well, it was a pretty mean piece.’ And so Coach Smith wrote me a letter after that and said, ‘Next time, you’re in Chapel Hill, let’s have lunch.’”

A friendship developed. To get to know Smith so early in the coach’s career, Kilgo said, turned out to be one of the most fortuitous moments of his life. Not only did he find a great friend — “Next to my wife, he was the best person I knew” — but Smith also would combine with Kilgo for all sorts of media opportunities: radio, TV and that autobiography.

But Smith didn’t want Kilgo’s protection in print. “I appreciate your support,” he told Kilgo early, “but you don’t have to take up for me. I’m fully willing to go back to high school, where I can coach basketball and teach math.”

The UNC basketball TV highlight shows that ran each week around the state? Smith was lukewarm about them, Kilgo said. The coach got more satisfaction out of the radio shows because he could explain his answers more fully. And Smith liked when radio callers disagreed with him.

“He loved the contrarians,” Kilgo said. “He didn’t want anyone calling up and saying, ‘Coach, we’re so lucky to have you.’ He’d be signaling me to cut those. But he’d get mad if a guy was arguing with him and I cut the call off. ‘Let him talk,’ Coach Smith would say. He enjoyed that.”

7 years with Charlotte 49ers

The radio and TV was only a part-time gig for Kilgo, whose main jobs were always in Charlotte. While Patsy was raising the children, he was constantly commuting the 140 miles to Chapel Hill. After The Charlotte News, he worked in the news department of several radio stations and also dabbled in basketball play-by-play. He called Charlotte 49er basketball games for seven years in the 1970s, coinciding with the team led by coach Lee Rose and star player Cedric “Cornbread” Maxwell that made the Final Four in 1977.

“Lee Rose is, by far, the best coach they’ve ever had,” Kilgo said.

As for Bonnie Cone, who convinced Kilgo to attend college at Charlotte: “I can’t think of a more important person in the history of this city.”

Davidson for $100 a game

In 2000, after Smith had retired and his UNC duties had wound down, Davidson approached Kilgo about calling its basketball games. He was about retirement age by then. And while it sounded interesting to Kilgo and he was a big fan of Davidson coach Bob McKillop, he sure wasn’t going to get rich doing it.

“I got paid $100 a game for the first year,” he chortled. “The second year they paid me $200 a game, so they gave me a big raise.”

I asked McKillop if Kilgo really only got paid $100 a game.

“Oh yeah, that’s probably true,” McKillop said. “Then again, I was only getting paid $125.”

McKillop was joking about his own salary, but not about Kilgo’s. Yet Kilgo grew to love the job, and the Davidson program.

While McKillop always called Kilgo “John,” his assistant coaches called him “Killer.”

“It was a term of respect, the way they used it,” McKillop said. “Almost like a title, like you’d call somebody chancellor or president.”

Once, McKillop remembered, the coach was furious after a game.

“I felt this other team, in our conference, had used some tactics that bordered on being very dirty,” McKillop recalled, “and before I went on the radio show, I said, ‘John, I’m going to bring this up.’”

“Don’t you dare,” Kilgo said, advising McKillop to take a few deep breaths and sleep on it before going public with the accusation.

“He counseled me,” McKillop said. “And I’d been at Davidson 15 or 20 years by then. I’m not an inexperienced guy. But it was incredibly powerful advice, and I took it.”

Kilgo wasn’t always so serious. Once, on a long bus ride home after a Davidson road game, the bus televisions showed the comedy “Tommy Boy,” with Chris Farley and David Spade.

In the front of the bus, Kilgo first started chuckling softly. Then, as the movie went on:

“He was laughing out loud, absolutely hysterical,” McKillop said. “Players who are doing their homework are looking up, wondering what’s going on — John has this loud, attention-grabbing kind of laugh, too. It’s a good thing we had won that game, or it might have gotten a little awkward.”

‘I get antsy quick’

Why did Kilgo take all those long bus rides? He was going to places like Cullowhee and Statesboro, Ga., traveling with a bunch of guys who mostly could be his grandsons.

“I guess I’m always the kind of person who’s got to be doing something,” Kilgo said. “I get antsy quick.”

That, in fact, was the problem with the first time he worked for Davidson. In the 1960s, when Driesell was the coach, Kilgo tired of the long periods of “nothing much to do.”

“Grier Martin (Sr., then Davidson’s president) hired me because Lefty was hollering and screaming and cussing at people,” Kilgo laughed. “He wanted me to calm him down some.”

Kilgo and Driesell eventually became close friends. But Kilgo had been used to the rat-a-tat-tat of constant newspaper deadlines. Now he was just sitting there, watching Driesell and trying to figure out what the next crisis was going to be before it happened.

But 35 years later, Kilgo decided to give Davidson another go. He did the radio job for 18 years, calling all of the Steph Curry era. He once interviewed LeBron James on the Davidson radio network; LeBron had shown up at one of Curry’s NCAA tournament games and came over at halftime.

“They told us we could get LeBron for five minutes,” Kilgo recalled. “But I guess he was enjoying himself. Somebody started nudging me at five minutes, but LeBron was in the middle of answering a question, and I just kept going. He ended up staying for pretty much all of halftime.”

In 2018, at age 82, Kilgo retired. He and Patsy enjoyed their church and their four children, 13 grandchildren and a passel of great-grandchildren. Retirement was an adjustment. Patsy’s death has been a bigger one. Kilgo now mostly stays at his home, other than trips to the grocery store or the doctor. He watches college sports, although he bemoans the mess that NIL money and unlimited transfers have made of it.

His legacy?

“I never in my life have even thought about that,” Kilgo said, rocking slightly forward. “But I guess it would be that I tried to be fair. And the friends I had — I was loyal to them, and they were loyal to me. I guess I get that from Coach Smith a little bit. Loyalty was one of the most important things in his life. And it’s one of the most important things in mine.”