Ben Arnet was so excited for the Mizzou-Kansas football game. So excited.
Few people in this market care as much about the history, the traditions and the stories when it comes to our local teams, especially Mizzou.
As the Sports Director at NBC affiliate KOMU, Ben had become one of our town’s chief storytellers — and in 2025, there are few better stories than Mizzou and Kansas reviving their football series next Saturday on Faurot Field.
Ben, a Columbia native who proudly graduated from Hickman High and Mizzou’s School of Journalism, started digging into this story long before the season’s first kickoff. Last week, he brought his TV camera to the Mizzou football offices to shoot footage of the MU-KU football trophy. That same day, he interviewed department historian Bob Brendel about the rivalry’s place in history. On Wednesday, Ben had Director of Athletics Laird Veatch out to the KOMU studio for an interview. Just a few days ago Ben asked me if Mizzou and Kansas had agreed to exchange the rivalry trophy when they soon meet. I never got him an answer.
Turns out, there wasn’t enough time.
A few hours before kickoff Thursday, word quietly spread among a few folks at Memorial Stadium that something tragic had occurred.
Ben Arnet died.
Typing the sentence feels surreal.
He was just 43. Ben was supposed to be at the football game. He had a live interview planned from the south end zone with one of our administrators. His season credential sits on my desk.
Opening night at Memorial Stadium has become something of a local holiday around here, but for some on Thursday, the excitement on the field became a muted afterthought to this inexplicable tragedy. We wiped away tears and chocked back spasms of grief as the game carried on. KOMU officially reported Ben’s death shortly after the football game ended.
How could this happen? Just days earlier Ben was poking around Hearnes Center gathering archived footage for one of his Border War stories.
“He wanted a different piece of content every single day of the week leading to the Kansas game,” his dear friend and mentor Stan Silvey shared Friday.
On duty for the start of his 34th consecutive season as Mizzou’s radio sideline reporter, Chris Gervino learned of his friend’s death shortly before Thursday’s kickoff. He gutted through the broadcast over the next several hours.
“Such a tremendous loss,” Chris shared. “He interned with me at KMIZ and then went through our program at KOMU. Perhaps most importantly to me, I was honored to be his confirmation sponsor in the Catholic Church.”
I’ve known Ben since his days at Hickman High. I was a sportswriter just out of college; he was a fearless, precocious teenager on the hunt for the town’s best stories. Long before he became a student then a teacher at Mizzou’s J-School, Ben launched his own local sports show — as a high schooler himself! — and later worked for Chris at the ABC affiliate, then learned the craft as a college student at KOMU. At 19, Ben worked under Silvey’s watch to produce the Mizzou coaches TV shows.
“Someone asked me, ‘Why are you letting him do this?'” said Silvey, Mizzou’s Director of Broadcast Operations. “And I said, ‘Because he’s better than everyone else.’ He was that good.”
“He was born to do this,” he added. “And he was born in the right place.”
“From the time he was 15, Ben knew what he wanted to do – and all of us were so lucky to get to watch him do it,” former KOMU Sports Director Bob Ballou said Friday. “Nobody that I came across in our Sports department ever worked harder than he did. And he was so particular about every story, which, as someone who was young in the business, is the best thing you can be.
“He worked hard every day to make his stuff the best,” added Bob, the longtime Sports Director at the CBS affiliate in Austin, Texas, “and then got to work with students to see them do the same. He made an impact that none of us will ever forget. But more than anything he got to do what most of us don’t get to do – and that’s live out his dream. We will miss him dearly.”
Ben’s talent and drive as a broadcaster later took him to TV jobs in Tucson, Arizona; Wichita, Kansas; and Buffalo, New York before he returned home in 2011 to work for his alma mater and alongside Stan, together launching the Mizzou Network, a cutting edge digital storytelling one-stop shop housed in the athletics department. Their two-man crew would evolve to become what is now Mizzou’s Broadcast and Creative departments, two major branches within Mizzou’s external unit, which together employ dozens of producers, directors, videographers, photographers and graphic designers.
“I couldn’t have done it without him,” Stan said. “He was such a big part of what it’s become now.”
For seven years, Ben wrote, recorded, produced, interviewed and anchored all things Mizzou sports, covering and creating countless stories about the teams, the coaches, the student-athletes, the games, the rivalries — everything Black and Gold. On the side, he’d provide TV play-by-play for nearly every Mizzou team.
In 2020, Ben landed the dream job for a Columbia kid raised on Mizzou when he seamlessly followed the nicest man in local television as Gervino’s successor at KOMU. As the station’s lead sports anchor, Ben doubled as professor both in the classroom and out in the field, setting examples for hundreds of aspiring sports journalists with his passion, drive and embrace of local stories.
“I thought it was perfect,” Silvey said. “He was someone who went through the system, understood the history of not only the Journalism school and KMOU but Mizzou Athletics, too. I told him I thought it was the right move for him. He was torn because he loved working for Athletics. But for me, I thought it was a great move for KOMU. He did such a great job with those students.”
Teaching became a passion for Ben. As news hit social media Thursday night, current and former students testified to the impact and legacy he left behind. Ben, who is survived by his wife and young daughter, cared about connections and community. Students cycled in and out of the news station each semester, but they wouldn’t leave without learning the history of what makes this place special. Each year, he’d have me speak to his students about covering Mizzou Athletics. I was scheduled to visit his classroom this week. Mostly, we told old stories.
That’s what Ben had in mind last week when he invited Gervino, former KOMU news anchor Jim Riek and longtime ESPN “SportsCenter” anchor John Anderson for a media roundtable to share memories of the Mizzou-Kansas rivalry.
“I remember thinking as we were recording that he looked so happy and seemed so proud of putting that show together,” Gervino said. “And he should’ve been. He did a great job. We lost Ben way too early, but he accomplished so much and was so successful in his 43 years.”
Ben Arnet was a hustler — and I mean that as the strongest compliment. As a teenager he hustled to get the best stories. No assignment was too big or too small. As a storyteller, Ben was ahead of his time — and now gone way too soon.
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