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ESPN icon is not a comic -- usually -- but he found his way to the Vegas Strip

John Katsilometes, Las Vegas Review-Journal on

Published in Entertainment News

LAS VEGAS — You know Kenny Mayne is a genuine Wiffle Ball enthusiast when he reminds you how to spell out the brand, “That’s W-I-F-F-L-E.”

Got it. We’ll get the H outta here.

“I’m here to stand up for the Wiffle Ball people,” Mayne says.

Mayne is the former ESPN broadcaster, contestant ever-so-briefly on “Dancing With The Stars” and UNLV grad who had a headline performance at Jimmy Kimmel’s Comedy Club Monday.

“Wiffle Ball,” Mayne’s autobiographical documentary, is to be screened. The man whose memoir is titled “An Incomplete and Inaccurate History of Sport” is a funny person. But he’s not exactly a stand-up comic — yet.

“After I dreamed up this dumb idea, I tell my wife, and she’s like, ‘So, you’re basically soft-rolling a comedy career. Is that what we’re doing now?’” Mayne says. “I’ve been doing comedy in one way or the other for a long time, actually, just, we just didn’t call it that.”

“Wiffle Ball” is a reference a slice of lore from Mayne’s days as a young broadcaster in Seattle. Mayne challenged then-rookie Mariners sensation Ken Griffey Jr. to a contest to see who could throw a Wiffle Ball the fastest.

“They had a radar machine or a speed gun, whatever you call it, at the (Pacific) Science Center, and we threw for 10 or 15 minutes,” Mayne reminisces. “It was just funny that it happened, ‘Wow, I threw Wiffle Balls against Ken Griffey.’ That’s like saying I shot 3-pointers against Steph Curry.”

Video from the event took some unearthing, and there is a dispute about who registered the fastest throw (Mayne, of course, claims he did). But what aired at the time were what Mayne says were “questions that were so bad I can’t believe we showed them on TV.”

“I finally found the tape and just said, ‘I’m gonna make a really stupid kind of comedy documentary about a day in the life, essentially, and sort of a love letter to my childhood and Wiffle Ball and my friends,”’ Mayne says. “It’s a little bit of everything.”

That includes his time at UNLV, when Mayne was a backup QB to the great Sam King in 1980. There was a time he was ahead of Randall Cunningham on the Rebels’ depth chart. Mayne was a senior, Cunningham a freshman.

 

Mayne’s career with the Rebels was cut short when he suffered a fractured right fibula and torn ligaments in a 32-9 loss at Oregon in October 1980. Mayne later said he remembered little about the event, other than an assistant coach giving him a scotch and water on the flight home. As Mayne later conveyed in a piece for ESPN.com, “Hey, we’re UNLV, that’s how we roll.”

Mayne has delved outside of his role as a prominent broadcaster, becoming a star at ESPN from 1994-2021. He and fellow sports personality Dan Patrick were cast in Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s 1998 satire “BASEketball.” The two announced the BASEketball playoffs.

In 2006, Mayne appeared in just the second season of “DWTS,” paired with dance pro Andrea Hale. The pair were the first contestants eliminated after a clunky cha-cha.

Mayne didn’t feel qualified to be on the show, in terms of dance acumen or star power. But he took it anyway, as a lark.

“I get this call, ‘Hey, they’re asking if you want to be one of the people on ‘Dancing With the Stars,’ and I’m like, well, who is the star?” Mayne says. “Am I dancing with Jessica Lange? They were basically trying to cast a wide net.”

Drew Lachey of 98 Degrees and Cheryl Burke won that season’s championship. NFL legend Jerry Rice and Anna Trebunskaya finished second, and WWE wrestler Stacy Keibler and Tony Dovolani (who years later would later be stunt-cast for a guest role in Chippendales at the Rio) were third.

Mayne, Rice and the late, legendary judge Len Goodman turned Mayne’s ill-fated performance into a long-running joke.

“We ended up doing this little comedy bit for seven years or something, where we’d come on every season and do a funny little three- to five-minute fake ‘Sports Center,’” Mayne says. “We called it ‘Dance Center,’ and, you know, just clowned around. It was a great relationship.”

That is totally on-brand. With Kenny Mayne, it always comes back to the funny

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