Beyond the Booth: Documentary on legendary sportscaster Art Hains details 3-year recovery from West Nile virus

Dena Hildebrand: Hains' story is one of motivation and faith.

After more than four decades as the longtime voice for roughly 3,000 radio broadcasts of the Missouri State Bears, Art Hains is about to be on the big screen as the subject of a documentary.

“Voice Unbroken” details the sports broadcaster’s career and his determination to return to work after contracting West Nile virus in 2022. The virus left him paralyzed and fighting for his life. The documentary by filmmaker Dena Hildebrand is set to have its premiere Oct. 30 at Alamo Drafthouse Springfield.

Hains, 69, who retired from the broadcast booth in September, announced last fall that the 2024-25 season would be his last one calling games for MSU. He also retired this year after 16 years of broadcasting work with the Kansas City Chiefs. As the primary play-by-play voice for baseball, football and men’s basketball, Hains called home games for the university after returning to the air in fall 2023. Recovering from the life-threatening virus forced him to miss most of the 2022-23 season after he became ill in September 2022 following a road game against the University of Arkansas.

Hains has received a great deal of public attention in the past: He was inducted into the Springfield Area Sports Hall of Fame in 2003, the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2017 and the Missouri State Athletics Hall of Fame in 2022, according to the MSU website. He received the John Sanders Spirit of The Valley Award in 2023. But he said being the subject of a documentary was a new experience for him.

“Yeah, this’ll be a one and done, but it is a great thrill to have this being done – an honor, really,” he said, adding this month’s premiere will be his first time to see the final cut of the film.

Hildebrand, founder of Butterfly Road Productions LLC, said “Voice Unbroken” serves as her first feature-length documentary since she founded her production company in 2018. A resident of Kansas City for most of the past 35 years, Hildebrand was born and raised in Springfield and graduated from Glendale High School in 1977. She still has connections to the Queen City, as her sister, two nephews and various cousins live in Springfield.

Making a connection
It was one of those cousins, Ross Murray, president of commercial real estate firm R.B. Murray Co., who told Hildebrand that Hains and his career and medical battle would make for a great story.

“I get so many people coming up and saying, ‘Oh, I have a great story for you to do. I have a great documentary for you to do.’ And there’s a lot of good stories out there, but creatively as a director and a producer, I kind of just know when I hear it,” she said.

Hildebrand said she first met Hains and his wife, Lisa, through a mutual friend at a screening last year at Moxie Cinema of two of her documentaries, “Small Town Girl, Big Heart: Abby’s Courage” and “Mildred’s Escape: A WWII Survival Story.” But it wasn’t until after Murray’s suggestion that she realized the potential to feature Hains in what would become her next film.

Hains said he’s a fan of her work, noting he even recently saw “Small Town Girl, Big Heart” a second time this summer at a film festival at Evangel University.

“She’s a really good storyteller,” he said.

Hildebrand said all her films have involved people overcoming tragedy or challenges.

“It’s all about their inspirations and motivations to survive and not give up,” she said. “A lot of it’s focused on their faith as well. I want to tell an inspirational story. I feel like that’s my passion and that’s my calling.”

Getting Hains on board was quick, Hildebrand said.

“When I called him, he was all in,” she said. “He was excited about it.”

Hains said God has had a hand in everything that’s happened in his life, and Hains thought it was “cool” that someone was interested in telling his story.

“It might be kind of egotistical to have the story of my career, but a lot of it’s the story of my illness and how that went and how I recovered from that,” he said. “I hope that’s inspirational to people.”

Time for action
It’s been over a year to get the final cut of the film complete, Hildebrand said, noting it had a $30,000 budget. Roughly $25,000 of that total was raised through donations locally and in Kansas City, she said. Hildebrand’s crew mostly consisted of her and a director of photography. They traveled to Springfield, Kansas City, Dallas and Hains’ hometown of Marshall to conduct interviews and shoot footage. Editing and scoring the film has taken place over the past several months.

“Anyway, so I’ve been losing a lot of sleep, but it’s finally come together,” she said with a laugh.

Hains said the process involved a lot of phone calls with Hildebrand as he helped get people lined up, such as Mitch Holthus, the radio play-by-play announcer for the Kansas City Chiefs, and Brad Sham, who has the same role for the Dallas Cowboys.

“They’ve been to Springfield four times, I think, to shoot, and that involved interviews with me, my wife, my kids, my caregiver,” he said of the film crew.

Growing to love sports when his father began taking him to University of Missouri football games and Marshall High School athletic competitions, Hains said he first got to do radio sportscasting in his senior year of high school. A year later, he was at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he majored in broadcast journalism and immediately got to be the lead announcer of SMU baseball.

“That was a bad team. My senior year, we went 2-36. That was rough,” he said. “But again, that was good practice doing a broadcast for a bad team and trying to keep it going. That’s how I got started.”

After graduating from SMU, Hains began his post-college broadcasting career at Missouri State in 1977 and except for a four-year stint starting in 1981 when he worked in Dallas, has been the radio voice of the Bears for over 40 years.

“In 1985, since the years we were in Dallas, Missouri State had moved up from Division II to Division I,” he said. “So now it’s a Division I job and [then-men’s basketball coach] Charlie Spoonhour, who I barely knew, called me and said, ‘We’re getting ready to have some good things happen here. We need you to come back and be our broadcaster.’ Well, that was all I needed to hear.

“So, we came back and been back ever since and haven’t regretted it at all.”

After falling ill three years ago, Hains was hospitalized and in critical condition. Within days, he was transported to the University of Kansas Medical Center and later to two rehabilitation facilities in Lincoln, Nebraska. He was diagnosed with West Nile virus, the result of a mosquito bite, leaving him paralyzed and dealing with side effects.

While he hasn’t regained full use of his legs, Hains uses a motorized wheelchair that allowed him to continue his career in the broadcast booth.

“I wanted to get back in there, get back in the saddle, and I got to do that for two more years of just home games,” he said. “I had faith through all this that I would turn out fine whether I lived or died, but I wanted to live and I had a very strong conviction that the Lord was going to bring me through this. I thank him for every day that I’ve been granted since this happened.”

Hains said he was hardly familiar with West Nile virus prior to his illness, joking, “I won the lottery in 2022.”

Hains may not be the only Ozarks resident to be unfamiliar. Just 15 West Nile cases were reported in Missouri last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nationwide, there were 1,791 cases reported last year, down from 2,628 the year prior.

Swan song
His final game broadcast was Sept. 13 as MSU lost to SMU, his alma mater. That also marked the first Football Bowl Subdivision team to visit Robert W. Plaster Stadium following MSU’s move to Conference USA this season. It was a date that Hains said he long had circled as his swan song.

“It couldn’t have been nicer; it was a wonderful day,” he said. “If the Bears won, it would’ve been more wonderful.”

While he’s out of the booth now, talking sports on the air will still be part of Hains’s plans. He said he plans to be a contributor to a sports talk show set to debut Nov. 3 on 102.1 The Won, a new radio station from Mid-West Family Broadcasting.

Although “Voice Unbroken” will premiere in Springfield, Hildebrand said additional screenings are set for Kansas City on Nov. 8 and Marshall on Nov. 13.

A quartet of showings for the film are planned Oct. 30 at Alamo Drafthouse, each of which will have a post-show Q&A with Hains and Hildebrand. Initially, Hildebrand said just one screening was originally set for 6 p.m., but after the show nearly sold out, additional showtimes of 6:30 p.m., 7:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. were added. As of Oct. 22, tickets were still available for the three later shows, Alamo Drafthouse officials said. Tickets are available at Drafthouse.com/Springfield.