Radio Starring Cuba Gooding Jr
Jacqualine Henington
Editor's note: The story below was originally published in the Independent Mail on October 29, 1993. Three years later, James "Radio" Kennedy's story was told again in the Sports Illustrated article "Someone to Lean On" by Gary Smith, which inspired the 2003 film "Radio" starring Cuba Gooding Jr.
As the players erupt in celebration, the man hunched over in the second row of the school bus seems oblivious to it all. His name is James Robert Kennedy, and he is the T.L. Hanna High School football team's unabashed No. 1 fan.
Yet tonight, ast the Yellow Jackets savor their victory over defending Class AAA state champion D.W. Daniel, Mr. Kennedy, better known as Radio, sits in silence. Sipping a Coke an nibbling on a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, he stares down at his feet until the noise momentarily subsides. Then, with a toothless grin spreading across his face, he turns toward the back of the bus.
He has the body of a man, thick arms and legs you'd expect to find on a longshoreman, but he has the mind of a young child. When Radio was 5, he was hit by a car and suffered irreversible brain damage. But that has done nothing to diminish his affection for the Yellow Jackets, nor their affection for him.
When they first found him in the late 1960s near the practice field at old McCants Middle School, the Hanna football coaches thought Radio was afraid to talk. The truth was he barely could, even though he was in his early 20.
At first he kept his distance, but eventually Mr. Jones and the other coaches gained Radio's trust. Maybe it was the passage of time. Maybe it was their sincerity. Then again, maybe it was the Coca-Cola.
Contorting his face, Radio opened his mouth and out spilled a stream of jumbled consonants and vowels. But like a good coach, Mr. Jones rewarded the effort. He handed over the soda and watched with pleasure as Radio gulped it down.
Once Hanna was playing in a preseason scrimmage and had only one bus to make the trip. With no room for excess baggage, the coaches told Radio they would be leaving at 8 a.m. when the team was actually scheduled to leave at 7:15 a.m. Arriving at 6:45 a.m., the coaches discovered a surprise waiting outside their office. Radio.
Jim Fraser was the head coach, and he decided there wasn't enough room to take Radio along for the team's season-opener against Northwestern in Rock Hill, N.C. As the players boarded the bus that afternoon, Radio watched with tears streaming down his face. That night, Hanna lost 27-21.
"When we give out report cards, he has to have one too," said Wayne Jones, the head basketball coach and assistant football coach. "He'll go ask everybody in the office where his report card is until one of us makes it out."
"He'd eaten every single one of them," Mr. Jones said. "At the time we were kind of mad because we didn't have any more sandwiches, and they were supposed to be for the team. But in a week or so it became funny.
It certainly hasn't affected his traditional pregame pursuit of the hot dog. Every Thursday afternoon, when Scott Shannon of WAIM-1230 radio arrives to tape a pregame segment with Harold Jones, Radio intercepts the play-by-play announcer.
When Mr. Ford, the former coach at Clemson University and current coach at the University of Arkansas, visited Hanna he always made a point to see Radio. So when Hanna assistant coach Terry Honeycutt went to Mr. Ford's office at the Jervey Athletic Center several years ago in search of tickets to that weekend's Clemson game, he thought it might be a good idea to bring Radio along.
"I said, 'I'm looking for tickets for Honeycutt.' and the guy looks and he can't find them," Mr. Honeycutt said. "It was a guy I knew and I said, 'Well, they're for me and Radio.' And he says, 'Hell, I got Radio's tickets. You want four on the field or in the stands?"
"I never thought Radio would spot Danny," he said. "But when they came out on the top of the hill, Radio spotted him and got up and yelled and hollered and just went wild. He wasn't yelling for Clemson, he was yelling for Danny."
"Other than Danny Ford, Radio was the most popular person at Clemson that day. We tailgated at every card, and everybody knew him. It was funny. Driving up the highway to the game, people were hollering out their cars. I was hoping they were yelling for me, but they were yelling at Radio."
"He must have said something like, 'This is Sparky Woods from South Carolina. Carolina Gamecocks,' " said Mr. Honeycutt, who was in the coaches' office that day and told Radio to pick up other phone. "Then Radio said, 'Don't like the Carolina Gamecocks.' And he just hung up.
"If you're in a bad mood, you can go talk to Radio and he'll cheer you up," Mr. Honeycutt said. "he doesn't know what a bad mood is. He's always got that smile on his face. It just kind of picks you up a little bit.
Now 46, Radio suffers from high blood pressure. He lives with his mother in a cramped, wooden-framed bungalow near the old McCants Middle School, but she barely has enough strength to take care of herself. Janie Greenlee suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure and heart trouble yet must carry on without much help. Radio's father left the family many years ago.
But for more than two decades, Harold Jones has assumed the role of surrogate father. Every year he takes Radio Christmas presents that include without fail, a new radio. Every six months he takes him to the doctor. Every friday night he takes him home after the game.
He still can't read or write, except for the loops that pass as his name. But he has progressed remarkably in other ways. Barely able to speak when the coaches first met him, Radio now stops talking only to catch his breath. During games he keeps up a near-constant chatter while pacing the sidelines and offering players advice.
"It's not the coaches who blessed Radio. Radio blessed us," he said. "It wasn't the coaches who made him a better person. I think Radio made the people around him better. He's very sensitive. He's very caring."
The 2003 film "Radio," starring Cuba Gooding Jr. in the title role, focuses on Kennedy's relationship with Jones, portrayed by Ed Harris. Launched after a story published by Sports Illustrated, the film takes some dramatic license and compresses decades of time into a single football season, but it's regarded as truthfully telling the story of friendship and a town's acceptance of a man with intellectual disabilities and a warm smile.
"Radio was the heart and soul of T.L. Hanna for over 50 years, and the impact he made in our community can't be overstated," Kyle Newton, a spokesman for Anderson School District 5, said in a statement Sunday morning. "He will be missed, but his legacy will live on in the countless lives he touched."
Everyone who knew Kennedy at school has a story about him that will make you smile, former T.L. Hanna principal Sheila Hilton wrote on a Yellow Jackets Facebook page. Some remember the time he ate a cooler full of sandwiches that had been tucked away on a bus for the football team. Others talk about his ability to name the mascot of every team in South Carolina.
Until recently, the pair had kept up a regular schedule of volunteer work. And even facing health problems, Kennedy led the Hanna football team onto the field at least twice this season by riding in a golf cart.
As long as his health permitted, Kennedy remained a fixture at Hanna and in the community. Just days before Christmas 2016, when he heard that the Salvation Army was struggling to raise money during its holiday kettle campaign, he and Jones stood together in the bitter cold for hours outside Sam's Club on Liberty Highway.
He got his nickname "Radio" because he always carried a transistor radio, said Carolyn Dawkins. She worked in the Belk department store annex in the early 1970s, when Kennedy would come by several times a week to talk high school sports with the store manager, Glenn New, who had kids in school.
"He was without a Harvard degree or Pulitzer Prize or professional sports contract, but his fame surpassed all those accolades," Hilton wrote. "And the story is simple: love and compassion can change lives. It has changed his, and, in return, he has changed ours. And we are better people for having known him."
ANDERSON, S.C. -- James "Radio" Kennedy, the man who was a fixture on the sidelines of a South Carolina high school's football games for decades and whose life inspired a Hollywood movie, has died. He was 73.
News outlets reported that Kennedy, who had developmental disabilities, became famous around the state for his love of the T.L. Hanna High School football team and his regular appearance at games since the 1960s.
The 2003 film Radio, starring Cuba Gooding Jr. in the title role, focused on Kennedy's relationship with Jones, portrayed by Ed Harris. Kennedy got the nickname "Radio" because he always carried a transistor radio, according to Carolyn Dawkins. She worked in a department store annex in the early 1970s when Kennedy would come by several times a week to talk high school sports with the store manager.
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