John Campbell has thought seriously in recent months about retiring as the sports director at KCRG-TV9. Goodness knows he's earned it.

He's covered Rose Bowls and RAGBRAI, the Final 4 and Big Ol' Fish, preps and pros, triumphs and tragedies for more than 40 years, including the past 32 years in Cedar Rapids.

He'll turn 65 in two weeks, a traditional age for retiring and passing the baton to the next generation, for traveling and accepting a new set of challenges.

"I've been wondering what was going to happen this year, because my contract ran right up until my 65th birthday," he said Wednesday in the KCRG building in downtown Cedar Rapids.

Campbell and his wife, Mary, talked about it, weighing the pros and cons, contemplating the possibility of a more normal lifestyle. When Campbell was anchoring all those 10 p.m. sportscasts, Mary was home with the kids, helping with homework and tucking them into the bed.

"She sat home thousands and thousands of nights," Campbell said. "We're looking forward to the day when that won't be the case.

"This job is not easy on family life. I missed things. I tried to make things, and I tried to spend as much time with the kids as you could, but the job obviously took me away."

Kelly, their daughter, is 39 now. T.J., their son, is 36, so they aren't kids anymore, but Campbell can't help recalling all the bowl trips he took over the years while his children were growing up and home for the holidays.

He's been flooded with thoughts, trying to decide what to do next, but there was one inescapable fact. He likes his job, he's in good health and he truly enjoys working with Scott Saville and John Sears, his on-air partners in the KCRG sports department.

"I just didn't feel like I was ready to retire," he said. "I really still like what I do. It's fun most days, and Scott and John are great guys to work with.

"I thought about retiring. The alternative of staying here and working and covering sports in Eastern Iowa just sounded better to me right now."

Campbell has agreed to another one-year contract with KCRG, taking him to the end of 2012. Then he'll weigh the pros and cons again. Campbell and the company prefer one-year deals, so they can make a smooth transition when the time comes.

CAMPBELL GREW up in Oskaloosa, listening to Jim Zabel call Iowa football games on WHO radio. That sparked his interest in sportscasting. "I just kind of got hooked on the broadcasting angle of it," he said.

He went to DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., and joined the student radio station. He played on the freshman football team at DePauw, but gave it up.

"My size and speed eventually caught up with me, even at a small school like that," he said. "I loved football. I still love football. It's a great game."

Campbell spent one year in graduate school at Indiana University, studying radio and TV, then went job hunting. He had three interviews in two days - one in Milwaukee and two in Green Bay, Wis. - and all three TV stations offered him a spot. He accepted a job with WBAY, then the CBS affiliate in Green Bay.

"I ended up taking the lowest-paying offer," he said, laughing. "They made me feel comfortable at WBAY. If I had gone to Milwaukee I would have been in way over my head and I probably would have been out of the business in two months.

"It was a good decision, a great decision to go with WBAY. I got a chance to grow at that station."

He joined WBAY in 1970 and spent his first two years as a news reporter and photographer. One of his jobs was monitoring the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and taking notes so WBAY could make plans for its 10 p.m. newscast that night.

Campbell switched to sports and quickly became the sports director, covering the Green Bay Packers as a young man not far removed from college. He greatly enjoyed the job, traveling all over the country with the Packers. Then a friend at KCRG told him about an opening in Cedar Rapids.

That was in 1979. He accepted the job at KCRG and never left.

"I'm from Iowa. I thought it was a great move," he said. "I was looking forward to covering the University of Iowa. The neat thing was, I came here the same year Hayden Fry did. To me, that's when Iowa sports exploded again. It had been down for quite awhile."

Lute Olson was the UI men's basketball coach and the 1979-80 season became a special campaign for the Hawkeyes with a memorable run in the NCAA tournament. "My first year down here I went to the Final 4 and I said, 'Hey, this is going to be fun.'"

The Hawkeyes have not reached the Final 4 again, but Campbell's first reaction was correct. The 1980s were a golden age for University of Iowa sports and lots of fun.

Olson, George Raveling and Tom Davis were the men's basketball coaches, Vivian Stringer had great success with the women's team and Dan Gable won NCAA wrestling titles almost every year.

"You couldn't get a ticket to Carver-Hawkeye Arena. That's what seems so strange now," Campbell said. "And football took off under Hayden. It was a real fun time to cover Iowa sports."

Campbell considers the 1985 football game between Iowa and Michigan at Kinnick Stadium - No. 1 versus No. 2 - as the most fun he's ever had at an event. "There were just so many things that went into that story," he said.

CAMPBELL ENJOYS telling stories about interesting people, and John Hayden Fry was always high on that list.

"You never quite knew what you were going to get from Hayden," he said. "He could chew on all of us a little bit. But he was colorful. He did so much for that university. He was an awfully neat guy."

Campbell was demoted for a period during his tenure at KCRG, removed as sports director in favor of a younger man with better hair, but he accepted the decision, kept doing his job and ultimately was reinstated as the head of the department.

Fry could be rough on the media, but Campbell learned that Fry called the general manager at KCRG and complained about the way Campbell had been treated, a gesture he greatly appreciates to this day.

Campbell has spent a great deal of time covering the Hawkeyes over the years, due to geography as much as anything else, but he's prided himself on giving Iowa State, Northern Iowa, the smaller colleges and high schools their due as well.

"I always wanted to make sure we had coverage of the Cyclones, coverage of the Panthers, try to get out to Coe and Wartburg and Cornell and get them on the air every once in awhile," he said. "That was part of what I wanted to do when I came here."

He pulled for the Hawkeyes, but never became a cheerleader. He pulled for all the other "home" teams as well.

"I try to show some excitement, and we certainly look at stories from the Iowa viewpoint or the Iowa State viewpoint," he said. "And I'm happy when those people win.

"And why am I happy? Because I know them. I know the coaches, I know the players. I want them to be successful. And it makes our job a little easier when the teams you're covering are having success.

"That's just my style. I'm hoping for competitive games, deep down. And then if they win, that's great."

Campbell has always tried to steer down the middle, keeping his personal feelings out of the story. "I never try to make myself the story," he said. "I try to be fair to everybody. I want to be accurate."

The hardest stories, he said, were the ones about coaches being fired, especially when they were friends. And the worst stories to cover were the unspeakable tragedies, like reporting about the death of Hawkeye basketball player Chris Street or the murder of Aplington-Parkersburg football coach Ed Thomas.

Campbell went fishing with Street for a segment on KCRG, featuring Street as a fun-loving guy with an infectious spirit. They showed that clip at Street's funeral in Indianola and people cried. "That was rugged," Campbell said.

Thomas spoke at the KCRG banquet to honor the station's Athletes of the Week the year he was killed. A month later he was gunned down, leaving a profound impact on Campbell and numerous others.

Campbell has known most of the leading sports personalities of the past 30-plus years in Iowa, but he's also enjoyed getting to know the "Average Joes," as he calls them. He balances traditional sports with regular features from the great outdoors, a resonant theme with many Iowans.

"We've always had good response to the outdoors stories," he said. "We're all going to have Kirk Ferentz on Tuesdays at 6 and 10, but not everybody else is going to have the guy fishing on the Mississippi and things like that."

Campbell particularly loves all the pictures he gets for his regular Monday segment of "John's Big Ol' Fish," pictures submitted by young and old alike. He's got time for only 8 or 10 pictures each week and has a backlog of hundreds of shots. He promises to get as many of them on the air as he can, although it will take months.

He's got at least another year to show all those catfish, trout and bluegills now. And he's a youthful 64, thanks in part to a regular diet of exercise and smart living, so he could keep going beyond 2012, if that's what he and KCRG decide.

"This has been a good place, a good place to raise the family, interesting sports stories to cover and I'm on familiar ground," he said. "I like that."