How Did This Guy Turn This Guy Into Phillys Most Popular Pitchman?
KAPLAN MET RUNYAN after having his young son offer Runyan’s son cookies in the stands at an Eagles pre-season game in 2000, the year the Runyans arrived in town. He introduced himself to Runyan’s wife, Loretta, and it wasn’t long before he hooked the big guy up with a Chevy. When it turned out Runyan needed treatment for sleep apnea, Kaplan inked a deal with a Main Line oral surgeon who did the procedure in exchange for a plug. “I’m the reason Jon doesn’t have a uvula,” Kaplan says. After that, there was no stopping them. The football player and the marketing man developed a symbiotic relationship, like the sea turtles that guide the great whales through the ocean.
“He’s always, like, ‘If there’s anything you want, I can go out and get a deal for it,’” Runyan says of Kaplan.
Occasionally, they practice together. When Kaplan got Runyan a short-lived gig doing color commentary (for free) for NFL Europa games (the league has been disbanded), Runyan brought DVDs of Eagles games to Kaplan’s house, and they pretended to be broadcasters.
In 2004, the Runyans decided they’d settle in the area rather than move back to Loretta’s native Houston. They started building a giant home in Mount Laurel (it’s almost finished), and Runyan felt a new fire to develop off-field gigs toward a post-playing future. He isn’t planning to retire right away, but you sense a quiet urgency driving him from one media job to the next. He’ll be a free agent in 2009, and 35 years old. NFL teams aren’t sentimental about roster choices, even when a guy hasn’t missed a regular-season game in more than 11 years.
“You never know when it’s gonna end,” he says, as he kills 30 minutes in the Wachovia Center parking lot between his TV and radio shows. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while.”
Life after the game is an abyss that so many active players avoid peering into. The NFL offers them seminars about the tough transition: You’ll need to downsize your life. The divorce rate soars. Active players hear stories about former players. “You only hear the bad ones,” Runyan says.
Runyan grew up in Flint, Michigan, where his family was “middle-class, most of the time,” he says. His father was laid off from the GM plant when he was young, and they went on food stamps. Runyan’s Ford commercial didn’t bother his dad — “It’s all union,” Jon says. “But I was embarrassed the first time I went home with a BMW.”
