Kevin Burkhardt had had enough.
He had logged more than seven years covering high schools for a 1,000-watt radio station at the terminus of a dead-end street in Pompton Lakes, NJ, in a building under the threat of flooding anytime it rained hard for more than a few hours.
But WGHT wasn’t the only thing underwater.
Burkhardt’s career seemed to be, too.
He needed a change. Badly. His high school play-by-play work and sporadic fill-in gigs providing sports updates for WCBS Radio weren’t enough to pay the bills, and he couldn’t get his calls or emails returned when he inquired about other jobs.
“I just got really, really frustrated,” said Burkhardt, the field reporter for Mets telecasts on SNY since 2007 and soon to be the star of all things FOX Sports. “It isn’t about the rejection. It’s about not getting a phone call, a sniff, an email back that says ‘You suck.’ Something.”
So one Sunday early in 2003 he grabbed the newspaper, turned to the want ads and noticed a car dealership looking for help.
Suddenly, it was goodbye Butler vs. Kinnelon. Hello Pine Belt Chevrolet.
“I hadn’t totally given up [on broadcasting], but I guess I just needed a change,” Burkhardt said last month as he sat in an interview room at Citi Field. “I felt like I was just stagnating.”
The change seemed to make all the difference because while he decompressed, spending a year selling used Malibus in Eatontown, NJ, — and becoming the salesman with the No.1 customer-service rating — things began happening in his other career.
“I saw the other side,” he said. “I saw what working a real job was like. … I said, ‘I’ve got to give it a real shot for another couple of years. If I don’t [make] it, at least I could tell myself when I’m 70 years old that I gave it a go and it didn’t work.’ I’d be fine with that. I could not, later in my life, be miserable thinking, ‘Why did I not go for it?’ ”
So go for it, he did. Those fill-in update assignments at WCBS led to similar work at WFAN, which led to a stint as the station’s Jets beat reporter, which opened the door to SNY, where he freelanced as that new network’s Jets guy. That’s when SNY, about to begin its second season, approached him about becoming the field reporter on its Mets telecasts.
Burkhardt said he was shocked when his agent called to tell him he got the job right before Christmas 2006.
“I was like, ‘What? I talked to them one time,’ ’’ Burkhardt said. “I sat down and I thought about it and I said, ‘Life’s about to change.’ ’’
He was right, of course, but if Burkhardt thought things changed when he joined the Mets telecasts it was likely nothing compared to the transition he, his wife Rachel and 7-year-old son Logan will make this fall when his SNY contract expires and they relocate to the Los Angeles area as he joins FOX full-time.
“There is always some trepidation. This is all we’ve ever known — Jersey,” said Burkhardt, who was raised in Bloomfield and now makes his home at the Jersey shore. “Maybe turning 40, I’m kind of looking for a new challenge.”
The network, which hired him last fall to do NFL play-by-play after first talking to him about a college football job, has big things in mind with his new job. In addition to his football duties, Burkhardt will host a few of FOX’s baseball studio shows, do some college football play-by-play and whatever else comes along. He already has begun his baseball duties, jetting back and forth to Los Angeles most weekends.
“Some people you just don’t buy what they’re selling on the air,” said John Entz, FOX’s executive vice president, production. “If you know Kevin, on and off the air he feels like a genuine person. And our boss at FOX, David Hill, has always said television is really people talking to people. So finding someone who is relatable, someone you like and someone you believe is really important.
“To me, those are the qualities Kevin brings to a broadcast.”
Last fall, FOX paired Burkhardt with former NFL safety John Lynch, and they clicked immediately. Their work throughout the regular season earned them a coveted playoff assignment. People noticed.
“We would get texts from high-ranking television people out of nowhere like, ‘Wow. This is the best new crew I’ve seen in years’,’’ said Entz.
Lynch said he remembers the day FOX executives telephoned to say they were moving him away from veteran broadcaster Dick Stockton, with whom he had spent the previous three seasons, and placing him with the new guy.
“It started with, ‘You’ve got to trust us on this.’ I had never heard of him,” Lynch said. “I started Googling Kevin Burkhardt. They really sold him.
“For me, it’s important to really enjoy the guy you’re working with and, right from the start, Kevin and I hit it off. … I expected a talented guy who needed a lot of grooming, and he didn’t miss a beat from Day 1.”
FOX’s gain, of course, is SNY’s loss.
“He deserves this,” said Curt Gowdy Jr., SNY’s executive producer. “He has come from real humble beginnings, in terms of working his way into national prominence.
“That’s what happens in the world of broadcasting. You train people. You hope you can keep them. But when a national stage comes calling, you let them go and wish them all the best.”
On Wednesday, a proud Burkhardt delivered the commencement address at William Paterson University, the Wayne, NJ, the school from which he graduated in 1997.
His simple message to the graduates wasn’t a surprising one coming from someone who spent too many fall Saturdays shivering through high school football broadcasts and nearly chucked it all for the warmth and relative security of a Chevy showroom, but says now he wouldn’t change a thing.
“Dream big,” Burkhardt told them.