ESPN Broadcaster's Quest To Connect With His Late Father Brings Him To Rockford University Ghost Story

Knox Fowler on Nov. 5, 1968, for the Department of Theater Arts at Rockford College. (Photo offered by Rockford University)

By Kevin Haas
Rock River Current
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ROCKFORD — At Rockford University, Knox Fowler was an inspirational theater director who was instrumental in creating the faculty’s Maddox Theatre.

Then he turned a ghost story.

“We would all have different experiences at night,” he stated Beth Dorland, a 2002 Rockford University graduate who’s now the chairperson of its Performing Arts Department. “Every night you would say, ‘goodnight Knox,’ to make sure that nothing happened the next day.”

On Sunday, Fowler shall be launched to the nation in a brand new mild: That of a father who was documenting his emotions and fears as he confronted most cancers.

Chris Fowler, the award-winning ESPN broadcaster recognized for calling a few of faculty soccer’s greatest video games, set out on a deeply private journey to uncover his father’s previous within the upcoming SC Featured documentary “Finding My Father.” It airs on Father’s Day on Sports activitiesCenter.

“50 years since I walked into this place,” Chris Fowler says within the characteristic whereas looking from the Maddox Theater stage. “This is a place I associate with family tension.”

Knox Fowler led the college’s Theater Arts Department from 1961 to 1974, again when it was known as Rockford College. He left to be part of the graduate school at Penn State University, and he was working as a guide for NBC tv when he died in March 1979 in Colorado Springs on the age of fifty.

Chris Fowler’s journey to rediscover his father was set in movement when he discovered an previous shoebox crammed with eight cassette tapes of his father’s recordings on his expertise with most cancers. Knox Fowler had been utilizing the audio tapes to doc his ideas for a future e-book.

“A voice I hadn’t heard since I was 16 set me on a quest to find a father I never really got to know. Until now,” stated Fowler, certainly one of ESPN’s most recognizable voices, in a press release.

The ESPN broadcaster got here to Rockford University in March to movie a part of the documentary. He met with college archivists and alumni who had labored with his father, Dorland stated. The characteristic additionally consists of an interview with Joyce DeWitt from the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s sitcom “Three’s Company.” Knox Fowler had forged her in his summer time inventory theater season.

He “had complete awareness of everything from the design of the set to the angle of the audience, and he demanded that you rise to his level if you’re going to work with him,” DeWitt says within the documentary, a portion of which was shared with the Rock River Current by ESPN by a media screener.

Man in a suit and tie wearing dark sunglasses standing outdoors, addressing a crowd with a raised hand, a building with large windows behind him. — Knox Fowler sits outdoors close to Burpee Student Center at what was then Rockford College on this undated photograph. (Photo offered by Rockford University)

Chris Fowler was 13 the final time he had stepped foot contained in the theater, he stated on Instagram.

“The state of the art theater he willed into existence and poured himself into during his most fulfilling professional years…they say his spirit still haunts the space. A friendly, supportive ghost. 50 years later, it was truly powerful day for me. I spent time sitting in ‘his’ seat,” Chris Fowler wrote on Instagram on March 11. “If there’s one place my dad’s spirit would hang out, it’s in here.”

Dorland stated there are a number of seats within the theater acknowledged as belonging to Knox.

“We always say that Knox has a few seats in the house that are always down. You push them up and 20 minutes later they’re back down,” Dorland stated. “He sat in one of those seats.”

Maddox Theatre, with a chair down entrance and middle, on Thursday, June 18, 2026, at Rockford University. (Photo by Kevin Haas/Rock River Current)

The theater is taken into account a becoming place for his spirit as a result of he was instrumental within the planning of its creation, in accordance to his obituary and Rockford University archives.

“He’s the reason the theater was built the way it was built,” Dorland stated. “He really helped it become a state-of-the-art theater at that time.”

Chris Fowler stated he felt no supernatural ripples throughout his go to, however loads of feelings.

“His students go to see sides of him that I never did, and got to learn things from him that I didn’t get to learn,” Chris Fowler stated on “The Rich Eisen Show.” “His students are now in their 70s, so they have conversations with them about how he’s still making an impact on their lives and stuff that he had taught them when they were college kids.”

In a part of “Finding My Father,” Chris and his brother, Drew, pay attention to the tapes collectively.

“He left a piece of himself with a whole lot of other people and made their lives better through his wisdom and his example, and that’s gratifying,” Fowler instructed Eisen. “But Drew and I both feel it would’ve been cool to have more first-hand experience in those areas.”

Chris Fowler has spent greater than 1 / 4 century with ESPN, primarily as a university soccer and tennis broadcaster and host. (Photo offered by ESPN)

Kathi Kresol, a Rockford historian and writer of the e-book “Haunted Rockford, Illinois,” stated Maddox Theater has a number of reviews of individuals seeing shadows, listening to footsteps and whispers which are credited to Knox Fowler.

She stated Knox Fowler’s spirit is taken into account to be an encouraging one.

“They felt like they were being watched, but kind of cheered on, too,” Kresol stated. “He loved what he did and he loved that college. … We find that some of the hauntings people don’t realize that they’ve passed. He knew he was passed, but he loved it so much that he wanted to keep doing what he loved.”

There continues to be a plaque within the Clark Arts Center inexperienced room devoted to Knox Fowler. It reads, partly, “His great motivation, refusal to compromise and his simplicity of purpose keyed the project which culminated in the Cheek and Maddox Theaters and the ancillary facilities necessary to their operation.”