\u201cTo Andy\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGo Chiefs!!!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTW#98\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cStrive for Greatness\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAlways put God First\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLove those who love you\u201d<\/p>\n Count Andy in the latter group.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s my favorite by far now,\u201d Andy said.<\/p>\n Jay Radzavicz was raised in upstate New York and had an early fascination with football.<\/p>\n Around the time he was in eighth grade, he remembers a family cross-country drive in a Griswold-esque paneled station wagon highlighted by stops in Columbus, Ohio, and Manhattan, Kansas, just so he could stare at the empty stadiums and imagine them on game days.<\/p>\n He\u2019d become far more acquainted with our area and grew to be a Chiefs fan when he was a football graduate assistant at Central Missouri State and during his 11 years in Pittsburg, Kansas, where he was a reporter, producer and sports director for KOAM-TV.<\/p>\n The imagination and wanderlust for sports stoked in his youth stayed with Radzavicz, who later spent 20 years as a producer with the Golf Channel and now runs his own production company.<\/p>\n So traveling for events has been a big part of family life for Radzavicz, his wife, Maureen (LIV Golf\u2019s director of tournament media operations) and their sons Andy and Asher.<\/p>\n By Jay\u2019s estimate, Andy probably has been to about 40 NFL games by now, including a number in Jacksonville, and several dozen college games.<\/p>\n While the boys have different NFL allegiances (Asher is a Bills guy and secured a glove from Josh Allen on Sunday night), they are aligned when it comes to their favorite college team: Kansas State.<\/p>\n In 2020, Andy was elated to get gloves from one of his idols, Deuce Vaughn, after Kansas State\u2019s 69-31 loss to Texas.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause he\u2019s short (5-foot-5), and I\u2019m short, too,\u201d Andy said. \u201cHe inspired me.\u201d<\/p>\n (For the record, Andy said he wasn\u2019t sure how tall he is right now but was reminded by his father he was about a foot shorter than the other receivers on his team this fall.)<\/p>\n That 2020 game was part of a combo trip to see the Chiefs against the Broncos, one of a number of such travels they set up a couple times a year.<\/p>\n Last week, for instance, Jay and the boys flew here on Thursday after Thanksgiving dinner and took in the Chiefs game on Friday.<\/p>\n Then they drove to Ames, Iowa, for the Kansas State game on Saturday and rather remarkably made the 870-mile drive to Buffalo for the Sunday night game.<\/p>\n The boys had hoped to stop to see Notre Dame Stadium and Toledo\u2019s Glass Bowl on the way. But they had to stay on track to get to Wally World, er, Highmark Stadium, on time.<\/p>\n Andy Radzavicz\u2019s first game at Arrowhead was the 37-31 overtime loss to New England in the 2018 season AFC Championship Game.<\/p>\n \u201cI liked the experience,\u201d he said from the airport in Buffalo on Monday, \u201cand I wanted to be a Chiefs fan.\u201d<\/p>\n At the time, Wharton had just finished his senior year at Division II Missouri S&T, where he thrived in every way after not attracting any Division I offers coming out of University City High outside St. Louis. Wharton, who studied psychology at the school best known for engineering, was both a dominant player and standout young man there.<\/p>\n Andy Ball, then the assistant head coach calling the offense, still raves about Wharton\u2019s tremendous athleticism, phenomenal \u201cmotor\u201d and the selfless and deeply caring teammate he was.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s such a humble good guy \u2026\u201d said Ball, the school\u2019s head coach since 2022. \u201cIf you know him, you\u2019ve got to root for him.\u201d<\/p>\n All the more so, or at least all the more so for more people, as Wharton\u2019s career has rebooted after he missed most of the 2022 season with a torn ACL and was working his way back in 2023.<\/p>\n And after making that vital postgame play that suddenly made him national news in about every media outlet imaginable.<\/p>\n When it happened, Jay was some 30 or so yards away to give Andy room to converge among a group of kids as he so often does to get autographs, a high-five or a glove.<\/p>\n (Or baseballs, for that matter: The boys have a bin full from MLB games).<\/p>\n By now, Andy knows how to handle himself.<\/p>\n But this time, something was different as he went down the stands to \u201ctry to meet all the Chiefs players\u201d and leaned in to call out to Wharton and running back Carson Steele:<\/p>\n He thought one railing was extending right into another.<\/p>\n Only when he leaned his hip into it did he discover they didn\u2019t connect.<\/p>\n \u201cI just, like, got off-balance,\u201d Andy said, \u201cand I just toppled over.\u201d<\/p>\n It was so sudden he almost didn\u2019t have time to be really scared of what it would have been like to land on his head.<\/p>\n For that matter, by the time Wharton was handing him back up he was worrying about something else: whether he was going to be in trouble for falling on the field.<\/p>\n It all happened so fast that Jay didn\u2019t really realize the gravity of it until the TikTok video emerged in the next day or so.<\/p>\n Next thing you know, it\u2019s featured on \u201cThe Pat McAfee Show\u201d and \u201cToday\u201d and \u201cInside Edition\u201d and \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cIt just kind of snowballed from there,\u201d Jay said.<\/p>\n All because a potential tragedy was averted by \u201ca good guy in a good position.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fifth-year defensive tackle Tershawn Wharton has surged forward this season. He\u2019s started more games (seven) than in the rest of his career combined (three), and he produced… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":16993,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nfl"],"yoast_head":"\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>
Holiday roads<\/h3>\n
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\u2018You\u2019ve got to root for him\u2019<\/h3>\n
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