Kevin Bakko

Some of us never fulfill their life’s dream. I’m on the precipice of fulfilling mine. In 1976 I had an unsuccessful tryout with the Denver Broncos of the NFL. This began a lifetime of relationships with team and league officials, and my eventual entrée into the NFL Alumni Association where on several occasions I’ve sat on the Board of Directors for its Houston chapter. Many years later I worked in radio as a Sports-Talk host covering the back-to-back championship seasons of the Broncos in the late 1990’s. Imagine being paid to attend the Super Bowl championships of your favorite team. I’ve been an entrepreneur who owned two successful companies and helped others launch three more. I like to think I have a keen eye for business. I’d like to think so given I have more than thirty years of expertise as a skilled negotiator. My philosophy? “Hire the best person for each position and then get out of their way!” In 1979 a film called The Champ starring Jon Voigt came out. My brother, David, and I had some time to kill before the show and played something new called an arcade video game. The game was football and had circles and triangles representing the players. We’d never seen anything like it. Just as the doors to the theatre were later opening, David turned to me and said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could control a real football team like that game?” To this day I can’t tell you what the movie was about. I sat there for two hours churning over the comment my brother made as we were about to be seated. By the end of 1979 I finished the first draft of a screenplay I titled The Ultimate Game. Over the years I wrote and re-wrote the story a dozen times. In 2010, having recently published my first book, I dusted off the latest screenplay and wrote the story as a novel. It came to life. Suddenly all that I’d been missing had been found. The next step was to write the most recent version of the screenplay. Today, thirty-six years later, the film is in development. A skilled veteran producer named Lyle Howry has taken me under his wing and together he and I are about to create on what I know will be one day deemed the greatest film about pro football ever made.