Hot Rod: The man behind the voice

The nights are the worst. The onset of darkness fills Rodney "Hot Rod" Hundley with a sense of dread, all those long empty hours stretching out ahead of him.

He never sleeps through the night; he tosses and turns, reads, surfs the cable shows, gets up hourly with that darn prostate problem, and then once the dark begins its slow fade to light he sleeps soundly, and this is the way it has been for 68 years. Most days he sleeps till 11 a.m.

"I hate the night," he says flatly.

But that isn't quite right, either. Hot Rod Hundley was born to the night, to parties and women and bars and life after dark. It's not just the darkness, it's the emptiness, the loneliness, the nothingness of facing his own four walls and the quiet with all that nervous energy thrumming through his body. Maybe it's as simple as this: It's too much like those nights he cried himself to sleep in his hotel-room home as the teenage basketball phenom who was adored by everybody and loved by no one.

He prefers a crowded room or a packed arena where there is noise and people to get lost in. It's later, at home, when he confronts the loneliness — loneliness he created — that the emptiness is overwhelming. But whose fault is that?

He's got a wife he hasn't lived with for 29 years who is still waiting for him to come home, and three beautiful daughters who grew up without him. Worn down by all the women in Rod's life and the long absences, his wife told him, "You go on and do your thing. I'm not going anywhere."

"And that's what I've been doing," he says, sadly.

He lives alone; she lives alone. He is lonely; she is lonely.

Hundley has been alone his whole life. Nobody knows the pain he's in because to the world he is the happy-go-lucky party boy, the lady's man, the star, the silver-tongued charmer, the court clown, but then you catch him at a certain moment and suddenly you see vulnerability and sadness in his eyes, and he's telling you he is haunted by the life he has lived. Not the life you've seen on TV and the basketball court; the other one.

He is every bit Butch Hundley's son. Abandoned by his father, he has become his father.

The only constant in his life — the only real source of love he could count on in his youth — has been basketball. Basketball made him an all-American, a first-round draft, an all-star. It made him everybody's buddy. It made him feel loved. It made him Hot Rod.