Surprised this hasn’t been posted yet. An oral history of the Afternoon Saloon:

https://theathletic.com/367811/2018/05/31/pull-up-a-chair-and-grab-a-drink-heres-the-oral-history-of-the-afternoon-saloon/

Very good read. The board also gets a mention.

Can someone post the full text for those of us who are not a subscriber?

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“McNeil, Jurko and Harry” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but that will be the name of the new sports-talk show premiering Thursday in the 3-6 p.m. time slot on WMVP-AM 1000.

The show, featuring veteran Chicago radio personalities Dan McNeil and Harry Teinowitz and former NFL lineman John Jurkovic, will replace the “Huge Show” with Bill Simonson and Lou Canellis.

— May 3, 2001 Chicago Tribune

“Who saw it coming?” Dan McNeil said to me recently, while sucking on a Marlboro outside of Wrigley Field. “It was an odd mix.”

Who indeed.

The “Mac, Jurko and Harry” show launched on May 3, 2001 with great hopes and no guarantees on a station, WMVP 1000 AM, that was known as the national ESPN radio home in town, lagging far, far behind the local fare of The Score, which had recently moved to the 670 AM frequency.

It took a village to put the show together, and no one knew if it would work for one year, let alone the seven-plus ones it was on the air. By the time it was over, when Dan McNeil was let go on Jan. 16, 2009, the bigger surprise was that it ended quietly.

The “odd mix” of late 30s-early 40s Chicagoland dudes — McNeil, a radio man with a gravelly voice and rocky disposition, John Jurkovic, a jovial ex-football player with a gift of gab and Harry Teinowitz, a comedian with a Rain Man-like memory about sports — prospered amid the salad days of sports radio’s boom time in Chicago. Mac, Jurko and Harry redefined sports radio in this town in the early 2000s, making money hand over fist and having a fun time while putting on a daily show where anything could happen.

Famously branded as “The Afternoon Saloon,” the show changed the trajectory of a radio station, WMVP-1000 AM, and the lives of the people who worked for it. This is the story of that show, the last neighborhood corner tavern.

(All job titles are from the time of the show’s run.)


THE HEAVY FUEL CREW RUNS OUT OF GAS

McNeil left his job as executive producer of Chet Coppock’s WLUP-AM show “Coppock on Sports” in 1991 to join the fledgling sports talk experiment at 820 WSCR AM. He enjoyed great success along with the station, partnering with ex-Sun-Times writer Terry Boers in a show known as “The Heavy Fuel Crew.” But in 1999, The Score juggled its lineup, moving McNeil to a show with ex-Bears lineman Dan Jiggetts. Mike North got a solo show and Boers was paired with Dan Bernstein in what turned into a long-lasting relationship and a very successful show in its own right.

Immediately, McNeil, then in his late 30s, wasn’t happy. He left The Score 14 months later and later hosted weekend shifts on ESPN Radio in Bristol, Connecticut. Before he left The Score, he told John Jurkovic, an amiable NFL defensive lineman from Northwest Indiana, he wanted to do a show together when he retired from the league. Jurkovic was a radio nerd, as well as a jock, and was training for a second career. After his radio show with Spike Manton was canceled on WMVP 1000, Teinowitz was traveling the country, doing weekly bits for ESPN’s new “Mike & Mike” radio show, among other local gigs.

DAN MCNEIL, co-host: Yeah, I didn’t feel very good about it from a handful of standpoints. I had a junior partnership, number one. I was on the air between 4 to 8. Jiggetts got to leave at 7. The junior partnership irritated me. The direction the station was taking irritated me. North denies it but most of us believe he engineered all of it. I’ve talked to him about it several times. He still denies it. Whatever. It was many years removed now. But I didn’t want to start at 4. What show starts at 4, you know? And I wasn’t really ready to stop working with Terry. Terry and I enjoyed our partnership. I thought we had made some really good radio strides the last year we were together. He was actually taking an interest in doing some of the radio stuff which took many years for him to want to do that.

I was mad at Mike at the time and that was the wrong person to be mad at. I should’ve been mad at management for acquiescing, if he was in fact the guy who engineered all that. And if it wasn’t his idea, it was a terrible idea on their part. I only made it another 14 months. I resigned in October of 2000.

MITCH ROSEN, program director, 1998-2002: We knew each other from seeing each other in press boxes. We had both interned at WGN Radio. Now he’s older than me. I would go to the Blackhawks’ old press box and he was there. And I would always listen to him on Coppock and of course, The Score. When he was let go at The Score, we started a good relationship. We’d meet downtown sometimes or different places. I always knew he was a difference maker. The big question was, well, who do you put him with? I had a GM at the time, a good guy named Bob Snyder who had a vision to do a three-person afternoon show. Harry was already in place. I think Harry had done updates and obviously had done Harry & Spike there. I didn’t know Jurko from Adam. But so Mac said you got to meet John Jurkovic. I said, “Do you think it’ll work?” He said, “Trust me.”

MAC: Mitch and I had talked. He was hot for me coming over to ESPN. But his general manager Bob Snyder was not. He still believed in his afternoon show of Bill Simonson and Lou Canellis. When I looked back on it was probably one of the most reckless things I ever did, quitting a job that paid good money with three kids at home, young kids, and a wife who was working at home, staying at home, to be the mother full-time of three young kids. And I quit a job that paid me a base salary of $200,000 with nothing promised to me. That’s kind of stupid when you think about it. But if I had not done that I would’ve continued to be miserable and maybe the Mac, Jurko and Harry thing would have never been born.

BOB SNYDER, GM of WMVP, 2000-04: To the best of my recollection, Bill Simonson and Lou Canellis had a lot of promise. Lou, when I got to Chicago in 2000, Lou, as he is today, was wildly popular. Bill was, in many ways, appropriately polarizing because that’s what you want. But at its core, it wasn’t going to be a show that could compete with The Score. Or no one I knew thought it could.

MARC SILVERMAN, reporter and host: Simonson was so out of his mind.

ADAM DELEVITT, producer of Mac, Jurko and Harry, 2001-06: I came from the Huge Show with Bill Simonson. He threw a stapler at my head. So dealing with these guys was great.

SNYDER: I give Mitch a lot of credit for a lot of things if not most of the things that happened at ESPN in the four-plus years I was there, 2000-04, and that includes Mac, Jurko and Harry. I might’ve been the one who sewed the trio together and brought it to fruition, but I’m fairly certain Mitch pushed me to think about Dan McNeil. He did that often. In the early days, middle days and late days. He was just always a Dan McNeil fan and rightly so. I guess Dan’s proven him right. They’re still together now, after having bouncing around.

ROSEN: I remember the first time I met Jurko was at a bar in the west suburbs [Reilly’s Daughter in Oak Lawn]. Mac said, “Trust me, he’s a Chicago guy, a former NFL guy.” So I went back to Snyder and said I’ve got the partner I want you to meet, and it’s Jurko. Snyder and I both liked Harry and thought there was always a role for Harry. There was never really a three-person sports talk show in Chicago. Way back on WMAQ, there was a show called the “The Sports Huddle” with a guy named Chris Cross and he’d rotate guests. But this would be a dedicated three-person show.

JOHN JURKOVIC, co-host: Mac came to me with the idea of putting a show together while I was still playing.

MAC: I was bringing Jurko over. Jurko and I started talking about partnering a good year before his playing career ended. His last year in the league was 2000. He and I had already been talking about our show that we eventually wanted to do. And I was in the process of selling Mitch on hiring Jurko. And Mitch was a willing participant in that. The general manager wanted to keep Harry because he felt it was important to maintain some of the station’s DNA and not sound like a completely different station.

HARRY TEINOWITZ, co-host: I had done the En Fuego night. The way there’s Miller Lite girls at an event or Bud Light girls at an event, Bob Snyder was all about events. He got the idea to have station cheerleaders. So Dan Patrick’s catchphrase was “En Fuego” and we had En Fuegos. And Snyder knew that I was a standup and asked me to host the En Fuego night.

So we went out to Dave & Buster’s and it was great. All these little kids running around and all these hot vixens and we had En Fuego night. He thought I was pretty funny so that’s when he got the idea to add me to Mac and Jurko. The next thing I knew I got a call from the station. “Hey go to Ditka’s, you’re going to meet Mac and Jurko and we’re going to do a show with them.” I thought, great, because I thought I was done doing Chicago radio.

ROSEN: We were about to sign everybody to a deal. We met at the Four Seasons. The station at the time was at the John Hancock, so it was right down the street. So it was Mac, Jurko, myself. I’m not sure Harry was there. Something went wrong at the last minute. Snyder called me out of the meeting. Snyder wasn’t there. He goes, “Mitch, come back to the office.” Left sitting at the Four Seasons bar was McNeil, Jurko and I think McNeil and Jurko’s agent Bryan Harlan. Eventually we got it all straightened out. It was either a Monday or Thursday and Jurko would refer to it on the air as Black Monday or Thursday. It’s like there was an objection from the audience. I don’t even remember what it was.

MAC: We called it Black Wednesday. The hold-up was, and this is why I always tell the young guys, when you’re told not to say something to somebody about a potential job chase or someone getting fired or hired. The general manager thought Jeff Dickerson, who I was bringing from The Score, to produce the Mac, Jurko and Harry show, [was responsible for a leak]. I don’t know how he came up with JD being the culprit, but he was convinced Jeff was telling the world that Mac, Jurko and Harry was being born. Jeff had nothing to do with it. I have no doubt people had learned about it, but I had a feeling Mitch contributed quite a bit and Bob probably did too.

Jurko, he ordered a $60 glass of scotch, Johnnie Walker Blue, and we sat in the hotel waiting for Mitch and Bob to come in together. My agent walks in, who was also Jurko’s agent, Bryan Harlan, and he looked ashen. I said, “What’s wrong?” He said, “We got a problem.” So the show, the launch of it, was delayed a few days to get that all figured out and JD exonerated from those seditious charges against him.

THE GOOD KID FROM CAL CITY

Ivan John Jurkovic was born in Germany and starred in football at Thornton Fractional North High School, along with his brother, the late Mirko Jurkovic. Jurko, or The Good Kid, as he became known, played at Eastern Illinois University, where he went undrafted in 1990 and signed as practice squad player in Miami. He eventually caught on in Green Bay, where the lifelong Bears fan was a favorite of teammates and coaches, and then in Jacksonville. He wound up starting 95 of 114 games over nine years in the NFL, last playing in 1999 for Cleveland. He knew he wanted to get into radio or TV after his career ended.

JURKO: My parents flew over, not quite on a boat, they came over in ’67 with two kids. I was a South Side, blue collar kid. Me and my brother played football at the time. We knew the only way we’d go to school is if we played and got a scholarship. We weren’t going to school otherwise. We were going to take our turn up on the steel mill. Lot of guys from Cal City ended up as pipefitters. I might’ve ended up as a pipefitter. Local 597 has a big influence down there in Cal City.

HARRY: He once told us if he knows he’s going to get dressed up the next day, he lays out his suit on the dining room table. So it’ll be right there and he doesn’t have to look for it. Of course that makes sense!


John Jurkovic was a fan favorite with the Green Bay Packers for both his performance on the defensive line and his irreverent personality. Both his success and his good humor helped him succeed in his post-football career. (Mitchell Layton/Getty Images)
JURKO: I wasn’t making great money early on. I took a contract to work here in Chicago that paid me less, working three hours a day, than I was getting to work once a week for the Cleveland Browns radio network, WKNR, whatever it is out there. I took less money to work full-time here just working one day a week out there.

I had done radio in Green Bay and Jacksonville and I had done my work for $50 bucks. By the end of it, I was making some real nice money in radio, which was kind of shocking for me, and television. I made close to $200,000 in Cleveland doing radio and television. Then I come back here and my first contract was for $80,000 and I was like, what the fuck is wrong here? Then I said fuck it. You gotta do it to establish yourself. That’s what I did. Then we all started doing well and we all started making money.

I thought, listen, you’ve got to establish yourself in the Chicago market. I said take it, if it doesn’t work out go back and coach. So that’s what I did.

SNYDER: Jurko was a fun-loving guy. In his own way, he was as competitive as anyone.

BEN FINFER, producer, 2002-09: Jurko is Jurko. One thing I’ll say about the show as a whole. More than any show I’ve listened to or worked on, and I know a lot of radio guys working in Chicago, they were themselves on the air more than anyone. They did not change their on-air personas at all and Jurko was right at the top of that. He didn’t hide anything. The way you heard him on the air then, the way you hear him on the air now, that’s Jurko. Mac probably wanted to play him up, but Jurko didn’t need to be played up.

Jurkovic wound up calling NFL Europe and Arena Football games early in his post-playing career, along with doing the daily show, before focusing on radio and his family.

JURKO: So we started on May 3. In June, I’m flying to Europe to do NFL Europe because I wanted to do games to see if I could do it like Matt Millen and those guys. I could, but I was too much like them and they were looking for something different at the time.

I got plenty of money. Money I don’t have a problem with, but every once in a while I think about going back and coaching, because I still got a knowledge. You know what I’m saying?

THE AFTERNOON SALOON IS OPEN

McNeil was the clear star of the show, the only one of the three with real name recognition among the heavily male demographic the show was trying to reach. But while he wanted control, he also wanted his partners to feel welcome.

MAC: There was conversation at the beginning, do we call it the Dan McNeil Show? Or Danny Mac and Friends or some derivation of that? I didn’t want it to be that. I didn’t want them to feel like junior partners. Maybe to a degree, I regretted that as Harry and I wrestled for creative control! [laughs] He never threw that at me, like, “Hey, my name’s on the show too.” But I knew that was his attitude.

HARRY: They said let’s make it the Dan McNeil Show and Mac was very generous and said, “No let’s make it the Mac, Jurko and Harry Show.” Mac is one of the most generous guys I’ve ever met.

FINFER: I remember still when Bob Snyder was the GM, don’t remember what year it was, but Bob brought us into the office and he was the one who introduced the Afternoon Saloon concept. It was already going in that direction. They were three guys who were like that anyway. He was like, “Why don’t you guys make it like you’re at the corner saloon hanging out?” I remember that, sitting in his office when he was saying that. I don’t know if we immediately went with that, but eventually that’s what it became. It was kind of Bob’s brainchild to turn it into that.

SNYDER: Here’s my best guess, that I said something about an afternoon saloon, but I probably wasn’t literal.

JURKO: You know who came up with that? [Assistant program director] Tom Serritella. Serritella came up with the Afternoon Saloon and it was originally fought by Mac. He didn’t like it. Eventually he kind of embraced it. Then we took that great picture in the basement of Chop House. We’re dressed up like those guys. That was a great picture. The Afternoon Saloon. The Afternoon Saloon rolled off the tongue.

ROSEN: Mac wanted to call it “Afternoon Thunder” because of AC/DC.

SNYDER: Was it Tom Serritella? Tom was a better drinker than I was. I will say this: using past experiences, there was a bartender who was moderately successful in Washington doing a show at WTEM. I liked the feeling of a bar in sports radio. I just looked around like who can pull that off here?

PULL UP A CHAIR AND TAKE A SHOT

The early days of the show were rough, but promising. WMVP, at the time, was the radio home of the Bulls and White Sox, along with ESPN national shows. Going up against The Score, even with a rejiggered lineup, wasn’t going to be easy.

MAC: David Wells made news on our very first show. He was a regular contributor before we started our show and on the very first show, he barbecued Frank Thomas for being soft. And it was David’s only year here. He didn’t endear himself to a lot of teammates, but there were people in that clubhouse who agreed with him on Frank. That caused quite a stir.

I remember the show being very sloppily launched because Dan Patrick was supposed to say hello to us from his Bristol studio and there was awkward dead air and Dan was just going, “Mac, are you there? Mac?” It was just very poor communication. It was a very sloppy start and we had a lot of sloppy moments those first few years. Fortunately, they gave us enough rope so we could put something together that was representative of big market radio. But those first couple years, there were some rough moments.

JURKO: I remember the awkwardness of it. I remember the trying to figure it out. I remember the earnestness of trying to get to the microphone and trying to say something. Like Dennis Miller, trying to say something funny. Remember when he was on Monday Night Football? Trying not to step all over the top of each other. Back then we were just trying to relax and get into a rhythm and that rhythm takes some time.

PEGGY KUSINSKI, update anchor: I remember thinking, “Whoa, this is in your face.” And it could be very entertaining. I really liked Mac and Jurko together. I thought they were very entertaining. I also thought with Mac, you just wanted to stay off his radar.

HARRY: At some point we tried to say, “You know, Mac…you know, Jurko,” because Mac and Jurko were very aware they sounded alike, so they used to say when you’re talking to Mac say, “Hey Mac.” When you’re talking to Jurko, say “Hey Jurko.” Neither one of them really sounded nasally and Jewish, but they would sound alike. We heard that a lot.


The “Afternoon Saloon” poses with race car driver Jimmie Johnson in this undated photo. (Courtesy of ESPN 1000)
JURKO: I don’t know if you listened to any tapes of us at the beginning, but we were terrible. I’m being frank. Terrible. Mac was good. Mac could bring it in and out. Harry was trying to figure us out. I was trying to figure out everybody and catch up with baseball.

JEFF DICKERSON, producer 2001-02/Bears reporter: We did a couple of dry runs to put stuff on tape to listen to it. The first show was like any first show. You never feel like it’s going to be a great show. Every first show is like that. The first Mike & Mike, the first Mike & the Mad Dog. It never sounds great.

MARC SILVERMAN, reporter/host: I’m the last original hire. When ESPN bought 1000 in ’98, I came over. The famous story I always tell was when I was buying my first condo in the city, going from renting, it was like 2000. So I’d been there since ’98. I was telling Mitch Rosen about it and he said, “I don’t know. Maybe you should continue to rent.” So like even the program director was not sure where we were going. There were definitely rough times. I remember listening to the first show of Mac, Jurko and Harry. Because I was the Bears reporter and I was doing weekend talk. I was at a Cubs game on a rooftop. I knew the rooftop owner and asked him if he could put it on to start the show just to hear what the beginning of the show was going to sound like. It was really the first time that I felt like, wow, we got a legitimate talk show. A legit real professional show in the afternoon locally. It was a huge deal when they went on the air.

MAC: Yeah, we were resurrecting a radio station when we came in. They had no ratings. The Score was the biggest reason why. They tried a bunch of things on the old ‘MVP. Lance McAlister and Norm Van Lier. Peter Brown. The Fabulous Sports Babe. Lou and Bill. They tried a bunch of things and everything they threw against The Score just got crushed. So we were starting from a very low point in that frequency’s rich tradition. That used to be a great station in the ’60s and ’70s that was ‘CFL radio and had a huge audience in Chicago. It had a huge audience in the ’80s and ’90s when it was the AM Loop. Then the sports venue there for several years didn’t attract anybody.

A TRAVELING BAND

In the old days, as they say, sports talk shows used to travel. In the early days of the Afternoon Saloon, they were on the road constantly, and not just for basic events like Super Bowls.

MAC: Mitch Rosen, to his credit, wanted us to make a splash. He kind of put us on tour, sending us to events that I had a marginal level of interest in, but it created sort of the bigness of the show. We went to the NBA draft. We went to the baseball All-Star Game that summer in Seattle. We went to Vegas for a fight to open a new ESPN Zone in Vegas. He was sending us all over the place.

HARRY: We got to travel a lot, especially at the beginning. It felt more like a band than a radio show. And Mac made rules. There was a rule that we had to dress up for travel. Jurko and I are looking at each other like “What?” We’re in New York. That’s one of our first trips and we’re there for the NBA draft. This is the [Eddy] Curry-[Tyson] Chandler draft. We’re at the Hilton New York.

So Mac made a rule we had to dress up. Not dress up like Joe Maddon, but jacket, collared shirt. So the last night we’re there, we’re out till 3 in the morning. We wake up and we’re all in the back of the town car or limo or whatever’s taking us to the airport and Mac’s not there. Bob Snyder is like someone go call Mac. He’s not answering. Someone go up to his room. So I went up with someone to his room. His room’s like a disaster area and he’s hungover and he’s still not dressed. He ended up coming down in jeans and a shirt and Jurko’s like, “Hey kid, what happened to our dress code for traveling rule?” And he goes, “It’s over.”

MAC: Yeah, I had a bad one in New York for the NBA draft ’01. That was in the first couple ones we were together.

In the beginning, well, I wanted us to look like we worked for ESPN. I was proud I worked for ESPN. There were some people who had embarrassed the company on previous trips before our being signed there. Several different people had kind of dragged the station’s reputation through the mud and I said we’re going to turn this around. Yeah, it was taking it too far to have a dress code. It wasn’t strictly enforced. I just thought it was important we looked professional and we didn’t stumble off planes looking like we were going to a Grateful Dead weekend.

A trip to Tampa, Fla. before a Bears game led to one of the few memorable fights between McNeil and Jurkovic. McNeil was angry Jurkovic didn’t want to stay for a weekend trip to see Florida play in Gainesville and then the Bears in Tampa Bay.

JURKO: I said I wasn’t staying the weekend in Tampa Bay. I had kids, I had family I loved. My kids were small. I’ve been to a thousand NFL games. I’ve played in them. Going to an NFL game? For me, it doesn’t make any sense.

FINFER: Mac threatened to replace him with Skip Bayless. Skip, at that time, was still writing in Chicago. He was guesting at the station. Mac threatened to replace him with Skip, which sounds absurd now to think Skip as that kind of guy.

JURKO: We screamed at each other for 10 minutes and then we did a show.

HARRY: We traveled to Seattle for the All-Star Game. It was the year Jon Lieber pitched and it was Cal Ripken’s last game. We went to Seattle and we’re leaving the hotel. This is 2001 and hotel TVs weren’t set up like they are today. Mac’s like, “Good kid, you threw off my afternoon downtime.” Jurko said, “What did I do champ?” “I went to rent this porn and they said, “Sorry the gentleman in the room next to you is watching it.”

MAKING A THREE-MAN WEAVE WORK

There weren’t a lot of three-man teams in sports radio, certainly not in Chicago. It takes a confident, organized driver to make it work. The show had that in McNeil, even if he were also the host most likely to combust.

MAC: In the early days I was trying to establish Jurko as a personality. And Jurk came out of the gate that first year a little sluggish. He wasn’t relaxed. I think I foolishly put in his head a fear of being unprepared. I think he spent more time being worried about his preparation rather than being the Shrek goofball that he is. And as a result of that he was a little bit tight those first couple years and Harry pounced on the opportunity to get his star recognized. The toughest thing for me was being the traffic cop trying to build Jurko’s star and trying to keep Harry from being more than a very good player. He wanted to be a star.

JURKO: We started in May, in the middle of the baseball season. I played in the NFL for 10 years. I lost track of the Cubs and the Sox. I watched the Yankees. The Yankees were good then. Cleveland was good then. I was watching teams that were good. I wasn’t getting the superstations. I wasn’t getting White Sox games up there. I couldn’t keep track of all that. I played fantasy baseball for few years just to figure out what was going on. Get all the names back in my mind. That was a challenge.

DELEVITT: After that first year, it wasn’t a great show. They were awkward. Then they clicked. Jurko got his sea legs and got to know baseball. Jurko knew nothing about baseball. We made him join a fantasy baseball league. That helped. He doesn’t do it anymore.

DICKERSON: Jurko, back then, caused the least amount of waves. Jurko has had a really good career by being very good at what he does. I thought he brought a needed element to the show. We had a really serious radio driver. We had a funny man and we had a former player who was able to give you all that insight. We didn’t know how to unlock that insight back then. At some point we got it. But it took a little time.

DELEVITT: Harry kind of didn’t know his role. We told him his role was as the No. 3 guy and the foil. He went through lot of phases of being sensitive over being the foil and the third guy. We weren’t using his gimmicky, shticky ideas on the air all the time.

FINFER: Harry wanted it be more of like a Harry & Spike type of show and that’s not the type of radio Mac does. So there would be a lot of times in meetings where we would spend half of it rejecting Harry’s ideas. I used to joke we could bring in an intern whose only job was to reject Harry’s ideas. It’s not like they were all bad, he just liked to do more bits and stuff like that. That’s just not what Mac does. So there would be a lot of arguments about that. Eventually Harry, I don’t know if he ever liked it, but he settled into the idea that he’s the third guy. They’re going to make fun of him for being overweight, rich.

DELEVITT: It was so awkward when Mac would focus on Jurko and talk to him and Harry would press the button to talk to me in the ear, “Mac’s not talking to me, he’s talking to Jurko.” I hear it in my ear, “What do you want me to do?”

JURKO: I gave Harry some advice. I said sometimes Mac just wants to be in charge and he’ll sit there and ask us for ideas, just throw whatever you want at him and know that he’s not interested in what the ideas are. He doesn’t care. He just wants to be the boss that day. “Give me ideas.” Just throws stuff across his plate, let him reject you and it’s no big deal. He was never going to take any of your ideas anyway, so don’t worry about it.


Dan McNeil (left to right), Harry Teinowitz and John Jurkovic hosted charity golf outings, among numerous other activities that saw them make friendships with their listeners. (Courtesy of ESPN 1000)
MAC: So we were a three-man booth, which took several years for me to get used to. And after the third year, I favored the three-man booth. If I had the chance to be in a three-man booth, I’d jump on it. Because if you have two guys and neither is interested in a topic it doesn’t go anywhere, or only one of the two is interested, there’s not as much give and take. With three guys there’s a much higher percentage there’s going to be some dialogue. There’s going to be some back and forth.

ROSEN: To Bob Snyder’s credit, one time he gave me a great example. He goes, think of “Seinfeld,” the TV show. It’s called “Seinfeld,” but in different episodes, George might be the star or Elaine might be the star. Kind of think about that. Mac is definitely the driver, it goes around him, but some days Jurko might step up or Harry. Going into the show, that was really the idea behind it. A three-person weave. Mac was a radio guy, Jurko was the former jock and Harry was the funny guy. We took a gamble and it paid off in a huge way.

MAC THE KNIFE

Dan McNeil was just a kid from Northwest Indiana who dreamed of working in sports. He went to college at Ball State, where he worked in radio. After college he wound up interning for Chuck Swirsky at WGN Radio and writing for The Times near his hometown in Indiana. Eventually he moved up to Coppock’s show and then The Score. While he was known for being reckless with his mouth, he was fastidious about his radio show.

FINFER: Look, he was the show. I mean, Harry and Jurko were obviously very important to add a certain dynamic to it, but Mac drove the show. It was what it was because of him. He was the one who came in every day with topic ideas. I was the audio guy and he always had ideas for me for what he wanted to do.

DICKERSON: Mac had a clear idea of what he wanted the show to sound like.

MAC: The best shows I’ve ever done was when Ben Finfer has his fingerprints on them. He’s better with production than anyone I’ve ever worked with, sound-wise, making magic out of sound. He’s more pleasant to be around probably than any co-worker I’ve ever been around. He doesn’t take it too seriously. I’ve really enjoyed working with Ben.

Shit, we were lucky enough to have a three-man staff for a while. We had Ben, Adam Delevitt and a kid named Scott Bertram, who also was on the payroll as a part-timer even though he was with us full-time. We had three outstanding producers. Adam was an outstanding producer too. Little Delly. I used to call him Little Capone. He struts around. “I may fire an intern today!” Cocky.

FINFER: I knew what he wanted. But you know, he’s very particular, especially back then, about drops and timing. Hitting posts. He loves hitting his posts. He was very particular to how things sounded. He liked it planned out. He would listen to the audio before the show. He didn’t really want to be surprised on the air. He’d send me an email in the morning like, let’s have this stuff. Our show was on at 3, he’d get there really early because we’d have a meeting before. He’d come walking back and listen to everything I had in the sound library that day. He wanted to hear the opens. He just wanted to have an idea for how he was going to react.

MAC: It was a challenge, yes. I always felt like a show on the radio should sound like a show that deserves to be on the radio. That’s a compliment I’ve had over the years that I enjoy hearing. Some of them you’re like yeah, sure. But when people say, “I hate your opinions, I don’t like you, but your show sounds like it should be on the radio,” I say I can live with that. I don’t need everyone to like me. If you do, you probably shouldn’t be in talk radio.

KUSINSKI: Dan and I worked together at ESPN Radio back in 2000. He, you know, could be difficult, very demanding, very judgmental of those he worked with. In many ways, no one else could live up to how good he was in his own eyes. But he had a nice side. I’ll never forget that he gave me a gift when my kids were born 16 years ago. After that, he gave me a Mother’s Day card that said you’ll never forget your first Mother’s Day. But there were other times when you just questioned his mean vitriol on the air in Chicago. He was downright judgmental and mean.

DANNY ZEDERMAN, executive producer, 2007-09: The way it would work for me was I’d get in and the first thing I’d do is call Mac on the phone. When I called Mac on the phone, I knew what kind of day it was going to be by the mood he’d be in. He could be in the greatest mood and want to talk to me about music and movies. He’d be happy to talk to me. It was great. When that happened, I knew we were going to have a good show. He’d be open to Harry’s ideas. If he were in a bad mood, I knew we were fucked.

SILVERMAN: Truthfully I never had much of a problem with Mac. I kind of look up to him. This was the guy who didn’t play a sport, who started at the bottom as a producer and hustled his way to the top. At that time, he would call us [Carmen DeFalco and Silverman hosted a night-time show] “The Bachelors,” stuff like that. I never felt he was condescending. I’d go to Mac because I wanted to be a host. There were a couple times Mac and I would go out at night and I would pick his brain. I wanted to be a host so badly and he would give me tips.

THE SHOVE

Tension between the three, particularly Mac and Harry, became the show’s calling card. It wasn’t forced jocularity or passive-aggressive behavior. When they argued, it sounded authentic. On a mid-April 2002 show, a web poll, of all things, set off the first memorable fight on the show, but certainly not the last.

HARRY: I think the main reason people listened is they wanted to hear when Mac and I were going to kill each other.

MAC: You’ve had The Shot. You’ve had The Drive and you have The Shove.

HARRY: Dumbest thing [we fought over] was a web poll. It was a Cubs game, and I suggested a web poll and Mac thought I was trying to sabotage the web poll on purpose. I mean, I have a lot of ideas and a lot of them aren’t good. So you know just say that’s a dumb idea or a bad idea. I wasn’t trying to sabotage the web poll. I can’t remember what the question was. I would think of segment ideas all the time.

MAC: I was in a mood that day. I don’t genuinely think he was trying to sabotage the show. That’s what he said I accused him of. I didn’t think he was taking something that was a content driver very seriously, that was all. And he just kept pushing my buttons and got in my personal space right before it was showtime. It was a minute after 3 and he’s right in my work station, right in my grill and I shoved him. You know, Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down. As soon as I did it, I said, “Harry you get your wish. I’m going to be suspended for that mistake so you’ll have several weeks without me.” And sure enough that’s what it was, a two-week suspension.


Harry Teinowitz and Dan McNeil did have their tender sides. (Courtesy of ESPN 1000)
The two managed to do the entire show together that day, despite the pre-show fight. McNeil was later suspended.

HARRY: Jurko wasn’t there and [TV sportscaster] Corey McPherrin was filling in. I love Corey. Corey’s awesome. And we could not have made him feel more uncomfortable.

JURKO: These guys come to me and said, “Jurko you can’t fucking take off work.” Because every time I take off work they had to work together and they couldn’t stand each other.

HARRY: So I suggest a web poll question and Mac thought it was trying to sabotage the web poll. That led to the shove. The shove heard ’round the world.

SNYDER: Consistent with my nature, I thought it was great. But there were legal concerns, of course, being a Disney station and so I wasn’t really able to enjoy the mayhem. I had to deal with it. My way of dealing with it was, OK, I love my brother and my brother and I would get into fist fights over the years and other fights. We were good once we were able to move on.

Five weeks later they got into another argument about Teinowitz being both a Cubs fan and a Sox fan. “The credibility issue,” as Jurkovic termed it. McNeil, who controlled the microphones in the studio, shut off Teinowitz’s mic during the argument.

MAC: I think the conflict we had enhanced the popularity of the show. My wife describes sports radio as soap opera for men. With that natural tension, none of it manufactured, there were times we really got under each other’s skin. People seemed to thrive on that. It was kind of like a soap opera. Was it real? Yeah, we didn’t contrive anything. I think we fought in a lot of ways like brothers fight with each other. You could tell your brother to get fucked and the next day give him a knuckle punch. I don’t think there were any long-term grudges or anything.

AN INSTANT SUCCESS YEARS IN THE MAKING

Artistically, the early years of the show had their ups and downs. That was mirrored in the ratings. While WMVP beat The Score in the Summer 2002 Arbitron ratings book, according to a Dec. 6, 2002 column by the Daily Herald’s Ted Cox, according to a Jan. 16, 2004 story by Cox, WMVP 1000 beat The Score and Mike North (with co-host Doug Buffone) in the afternoons “for the first time ever” in the Fall 2003 book. “On a personal level, this is as good as it gets,” McNeil wrote in an email to Cox, a frequent chronicler of the show throughout its run. In the fall of 2004, The Score centered its afternoon show around Sun-Times columnist Rick Telander. That’s around the time the Afternoon Saloon really started to roll.

MAC: It took three years. Maybe right around late 2003, early 2004, we were starting to hit our stride more. We weren’t taking things as seriously. I wasn’t taking things as seriously. Harry’s nature rubbed off on me and it was a good thing because I was probably treating it too seriously and I think that made Jurko tense early on. We started treating it as something other than a place for people to learn. We wanted to make it a fraternity house. We wanted to make it a neighborhood corner tavern. That’s how we started calling the show, I think the mantra distinguished that show in sports talk. I don’t know if one’s quite replicated since and I don’t know if one before captured the same spirit of fraternity and community. The neighborhood bar type of feel.

JURKO: With the head start The Score had, we never ever should have beat them. They did us a favor when they put Telander in there. When they juggled everything and when they put Telander in there with Hoody [current ESPN 1000 host Jonathan Hood], they didn’t have two years to formulate their show. We had the cushion. Hey, nobody really expects anything of us. Simonson was awful, we had time to develop. They probably thought about shit-canning us a couple times and then we started to get good. Then we started to put the ratings up there. You start getting good and putting ratings up there, they start charging more per spot and next thing you know everybody is making more revenue, boom.

MAC: They were going to pull the plug on it, after the second year, maybe not even that long. There was a consultant named Rick Scott, considered by many to be the consultant in sports radio. He’s done very well and he has a lot of good ideas. But one of his ideas was to dissemble Mac, Jurko and Harry in its second year. But Bob Snyder, the general manager, didn’t agree with him. He let it ride for a little bit longer and I think he was glad he did.

SNYDER: Yeah, Rick is someone who I’ve known for 40 years and Rick has had a relationship with ABC and Disney. I did talk to Rick often, but I don’t remember it being on a formal basis. We’d talk often as friends. He had a sports radio conference for years that I spoke at. Yes, the show could have been broken up many times.

JURKO: I give Snyder a lot of credit for not giving up on us. It took about two years for us to get traction. Because it wasn’t smooth.

The trio succeeded with a variety of regular segments, like their media critiques, which featured call-ins, called Critics at Extra-Large. There was a trivia show called Jurko vs. Harry, Future Mail, “B” Stories, Harry’s Almanac. The show’s Friday gambling segment “Who Do You Love?” was probably the best produced regular bit in station history. They took parody songs seriously. They made friends with listeners, forming a community before Twitter existed. McNeil was a regular on a local message board, where he would chime in under his own name.

JURKO: We ended up doing “What’s in the Vending Machine?” because it was Mac’s idea and he wanted it done. Sure, let’s do it. Give it a whirl. It was the worst thing we ever did. But you remember it. It was memorable, because it was that awful.

Critics was great. That was fun. “Who Do You Love?” was fun. Bama Brian! “I love Alabama!”

Now you’re sitting there 18 years in, and now you’re trying to reinvent the wheel. You’ve heard them all, you’ve seen all the bits and it’s like “Waddle’s World. Kap’s Chronicle.” They want to do Jurko’s Journal. Or Jurko’s Urinal. It’s like, c’mon guys we’re all doing the same shit here. It’s all “B” Stories, which all came off [Larry] Lujack and John Records Landecker back in the ’70s WLS when they had Animal Stories and the Cheap Trashy Showbiz Reports. Everybody is stealing off everybody.

JIM PASTOR, GM of ESPN 1000: I got here in 2004, right when it was starting to gain a lot of momentum and I remember before I joined the station, I was a big fan of the show going in too. So I had been following it for awhile. It was kind of nice being a fan of it before even getting here. Because sometimes you get too close to a show while you’re here and you know the good, the bad, the everything. It was good for me to appreciate what it was and how those guys worked together. But it was the best. That show defined this station for a long time, even more so than our Bulls and White Sox or other things. To me it’s on the Mt. Rushmore of sports talk shows.

The show rarely had reliable local daytime help until the end of their run when the “Waddle & Silvy” show moved to the slot after “Mike & Mike.” Jay Mariotti’s short stint hosting a show in 2004 did solid ratings, but his stay ultimately got Snyder fired as GM because of Mariotti’s multi-media war of words with Bulls and White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf. No matter what, the Saloon was always full. In the Fall 2004 book, the Afternoon Saloon did a 5.5 rating among men ages 25-54, while The Score’s show of Telander, Buffone and Hood did a 2.2, according to Ed Sherman of the Chicago Tribune. The Score was in a down cycle.

FINFER: When we were getting our best ratings, that was when Telander’s show was on The Score and I think even Telander would admit that was not the greatest show. We were getting huge numbers among men. Vaguely, I remember we did do pretty well with women too. But it was the male demo that we dominated.

MAC: For a while they had North [against the show] and we drummed him. I think it was North and Buffone. We beat them pretty good. [North] wasn’t there very long though. Then they tried Telander/Hood. We destroyed that show. Then it was Boers and Bernstein. I think they won two ratings books out of 15. I think we were 13-2 against them in almost four full years.

HARRY: We got to go to Hawaii. We went to the Pro Bowl. It was great. Again, it was Mac. It was all Mac. “We need to be there. All the stars of the game will be there.”

MAC: We went twice. We got away with it twice. The second time was my treat. I had a bonus in my contract, if we beat The Score in four consecutive ratings books, I got an additional $10,000. And the bonuses were very, very healthy. They were bigger than that. But when I looked at that on my ‘05 contract, I told the fellas if we beat The Score in four straight ratings books, we’re all going to the Pro Bowl. I was going to spend the entire ten grand on that trip and that’s what I did.

McNeil was known to be generous come bonus time and prided himself on taking care of his producers with expenses, lunch bills, you name it.

FINFER: He almost said it as an aside, probably a throwaway comment. I don’t know if he thought we were ever going to win four ratings books in a row or not. Now he would say he knew the whole time, but I’m not sure he knew back then. He said four books in a row and we’re going to Hawaii. And he did. We ended up winning way more than that and he followed through. I remember I still had to pay for the hotel room which was still pretty expensive in Hawaii, but yeah we traveled a lot. It wasn’t always me. They would go to spring training, Super Bowl. New York for a week in between Giants and Jets.

HARRY: [In 2006], the Bears had back-to-back games playing at the Meadowlands playing the Jets and Giants. [Weeks 10 and 11] “We need to be there for those games.” Mac said OK. We stayed in New York for a week. It was great.

MCNEIL: We worked really well with our sales department. We had Bud and Miller both fighting over us. So we agreed to do just two shows a month on location and each of them would get a sponsorship for one of them. We were bringing in big dollars from both beer companies. There was a lot of money being generated back when radio dollars were a lot more obtainable.

FINFER: When it was bonus time, they would get paper checks. I’d go to the mailboxes and hold them up to the light. And it was sickening. I mean at bonus time, one of their checks was more than I was making in a year. It was insane. Money was flying around. It was before the collapse. So things were much different back then.

HARRY: I was making good money, but I was not making as much as Mac and Jurko.

JURKO: Harry and I had an incident when he found out what my bonuses were. He got my envelope, which said, “This is what your bonus is, congratulations.” Harry cried like a baby. I said, “Listen, this is the way this works. I sign my contract. I look at it. I don’t worry what he makes, I don’t worry what you make. I look at my contract and if I’m happy with that contract, I put my signature on it. I got nothing to bitch about.” If I didn’t like my contract. I need to find another job.

HARRY: Mac used to challenge the bosses so much and I couldn’t believe he was doing it. And a lot of times it would work. We all thought it was a good idea to go out on Fridays and meet listeners. That was part of the reason we did very well. Jurko’s awesome with listeners and I’m always happy to meet people, visit with people, do shots with people. Mac said if we’re traveling more than 50 miles away from the station we should get paid like it’s an appearance or we’re not going. I’m like “What? You can’t say that. These are our bosses. It’s good for us to go.” I thought we should go everywhere. There were like three times in a row we went right by Joliet. We should be everywhere, northwest, east and south. Mac said, “No. We’re not going unless they pay us appearance fees.” And they did.

“THIS IS WHY I LEFT CHICAGO”

By 2005, the trio was dominating in the ratings game and for once, the White Sox weren’t an albatross for the station. In the last year of the Sox’s run at WMVP, they famously went wire-to-wire and made the World Series. The Afternoon Saloon did their show in the visitor’s radio booth at Minute Maid Park before Game 4 of the 2005 World Series. That’s where possibly the classic Mac, Jurko and Harry argument took place.

HARRY: The White Sox are in the World Series. How lucky are we that we’re at the White Sox World Series in Houston? And Jeff Schwartz is the PD and Jeff calls me during a break. Mac says don’t talk to anybody during a show, even though he was on the phone during breaks. So Schwartz calls and I answer it and Mac starts swearing at me, threatening me, and Schwartz heard everything.

MAC: What happened was he didn’t turn his mic back on and we already had several technical problems that day with a really old rent-an-engineer from Houston who was eating ice cream and didn’t have our digital sound machine potted up.

JURKO: Here’s what happened in the booth. We had an engineer from down there, the old guy, he was terrible. And he had dropped the ball a couple times things were happening. And Mac can’t stand it if the engineer is not awake, if he’s sleeping, this that whatever. If the guy’s making mistakes, he’s got to be a professional. Mac was just livid with the guy.

MAC: I was tired of the hiccups technically from someone who had no investment in our show and then Harry, that was the second thing he did, I remember him talking into a mic he didn’t have open. And I lit him up for it and he lit me up back and we started shouting at each other. And people by the batting cage during BP were staring up at the booth. No one’s talking to the players. Everybody’s staring up because we’re shouting at each other.


Hours before the White Sox celebrated their 1-0 win over the Houston Astros in Game 4 of the 2005 World Series, Dan McNeil and Harry Teinowitz were fighting in the radio booth at Minute Maid Park. (G. N. Lowrance/Getty Images)
DELEVITT: We went to break and Mac threw his headphones down and literally, with Jurko sitting between them, he’s trying to lunge, I think.

JURKO: And they’re screaming. The whole place hears us.

DELEVITT: All the media on the field turns around. We were in [John] Rooney and [Ed] Farmer’s booth. This was before Game 4, right before they were going to win!

JURKO: He’s screaming and he’s yelling and the whole world hears it. And he’s yelling at Harry but he’s upset at this guy. Harry triggered something, but he’s already mad at the engineer.

DELEVITT: The best part is Milo Hamilton came into the booth and he said, “Boy I’m glad I left Chicago.”

JURKO: “This is why I left Chicago.”

TEINOWITZ: And Milo Hamilton from the booth next door goes, “And that’s why I left Chicago.”

MAC: And Milo Hamilton says “Now, you know why I left Chicago.” That’s a guy who fought with everyone in Chicago while he was here, so he’s full of shit.

DELEVITT: We flew back to do the show and Mac wouldn’t do it. So I said to Schwartz, you gotta make him do it. Schwartz said, “Don’t force him. Don’t push me on this.” I’ll never forget. I didn’t know what to say. We had to bring in Bruce Levine the next day to do the show. So we had Jurko, Harry, Bruce and we brought in other people.

MAC: I wasn’t there the next day or the day after. Might’ve been the next day. I wanted to probably be away from Harry. The fact that Adam Delevitt and I stayed up until the sun came up, that had something to do with it.

DELEVITT: But that wasn’t the reason. He told me all night there was no way he was going to do a show with Harry. The problem was Jeff Schwartz, who was the PD, should’ve made him work, but he didn’t. He should’ve.

I pleaded with him over beers all night. You gotta do the show, you gotta do the show. He goes I can’t work with him, I’ll kill him. I’ll punch him.

JURKO: Spaceball [Schwartz] placated Mac. That’s the way Spaceball dealt with Mac, he placated him. But that’s the way they did it at The Score too. they placated him.

DELEVITT: But to miss the day after his team wins the World Series. It was bad.

JURKO: It didn’t make him look good. I think Mac wanted to prove a point that he was upset. I don’t know if he was upset at Harry or he was upset at the engineer.

MAC: I know, I know. But outsiders, we were like a family. We might fight among ourselves, but outsiders leave us alone or we’ll all come at you. Mac, Jurko and Harry. We went to Boston. We went to Anaheim. We’re there to finish it in Houston. Right before the big moment, we’re fighting with each other and screaming. So typical.

FIGHTIN’ TOWN

A June 2006 fight between McNeil and Teinowitz is almost as famous as “The Shove” in ESPN 1000 circles. This one earned McNeil a suspension that, coupled with a planned vacation, lasted nearly three weeks. Schwartz, the program director, left the station soon after the fight. The Tribune reported he had a panic attack.

FINFER: Boy, there were so many on-air fights, it’s hard remember which were which. I got suspended for a few of them because I was running the board and a couple times I didn’t dump. I guess there was one where Harry told Mac, he said “Suck my dick” or something on the air and I didn’t dump it. Keep in mind, this is probably 10 years ago, when you could get away with a little bit more on the air than you can now. I ended up getting trouble for that a couple times, fights they had I didn’t dump away from.

DELEVITT: I’d love to hear Mac and Harry’s description of when they got in a fight in the studio and they threw a chair. I’d love to hear each side, because I was there and I remember I had to call to get Silvy and Carmen on the air.

HARRY: We’re talking about a specific game and out of the blue, Mac says, “You know your father got you into radio. That’s the only reason you’re in radio.” Now my father took me to a lot of nice restaurants. I got to go to Miami Beach because of my dad. But I’m on radio because I busted my ass to get on radio. Because I did the midnight shift. I did the Bonaduce show. I worked really hard. It led to him saying, “Kiss my ass.” At that point I had the choice of letting it go, like I would with my wife. You know when you’re arguing with your wife and you try not to say anything because it’ll just escalate. After four, five or six times you have to say something? So he said “Kiss my ass” and I thought these are my choices. I can not let it escalate and come off like a pussy to the listeners, or I could stick up for myself. So I said, “Lick my sack.” I said it on-air.

MAC: “Kiss my ass. Lick my sack.” June of ’06. What is it about June?

SILVERMAN: So we were prepping for the night show. Carmen [DeFalco] and I had an office next to the producer booth and studio. You could hear from the speakers that things were getting heated. We heard some yelling, then you heard during a commercial break, a rumbling from the studio and Delevitt yelling, “Harry, no! Mac, no!” Things were being thrown. Chairs were being pushed. We were like what’s going on there? Next thing you know, the studio doors are open and they’re yelling at each other. Spaceball came out and was like “Silvy, can you go on?” There was a like a 15-minute commercial break before we started. It was for sure one of my top five most memorable days at the radio station.

CARMEN DEFALCO, host: I remember the chaos that ensued. We heard it bubbling on the air. We were listening to it. I remember thinking “Here they go again.” It poured out into the studio, we were sort of stuck in between should we be concerned, should we break it up and laughing hysterically. It was kind of funny.

HARRY: Mac and I were a lot alike. Mac used to say I was privileged and thought I was entitled. But we were the same age. We both liked thinking of old jersey numbers. We both loved movie lines and we both loved the Rolling Stones. We were both very much alike and yet there was a ton of tension. There were days when I couldn’t wait, of course I was getting buzzed after every show. You know it was like so much unnecessary tension. If you were a last-place team I could see why there would be finger pointing and people are arguing. But we were doing well and there was tension.

FINFER: They had the same music taste, the same nerdy knowledge of sports, jersey numbers and stuff like that. They had so much in common, maybe that’s part of why they clashed too.

MAC: Yeah it helped the show. It added suspense, drama, interest. I’ve thought about it years removed from it and having been through treatment a couple times as Harry has been. Would that show ever have worked if we both were sober? I don’t think it would have. I think the tension that existed was amplified by irritability from our alcohol and drug issues. I don’t know if we’d be very interesting now together (laughs), holding hands and going to meetings.

“FATH-AH”

While Jurko was kind of the glue that held the show together, the tension between McNeil and Teinowitz was the main driver of the show. Sometimes it worked for the show’s benefit, other times it didn’t. McNeil and Jurkovic were from blue-collar backgrounds in northwest Indiana, though by this point, both were making white-collar salaries. But there was a class warfare element to the relationship, something that likely brought in viewers from different socioeconomic groups around Chicago.

Teinowitz grew up well-off on the North Shore and went to New Trier High School. A trained actor, he had a bit part in “Risky Business” and was in the 1980 movie “Up The Academy,” among other roles. Teinowitz, always gregarious, was a heavy drinker in those days, an illness that came back to haunt him years after McNeil left the show.

MAC: Harry said, “My dad had a horse entered in the Kentucky Derby in 1987.” That was Cryptoclearance and I couldn’t wait ’til his lips stopped moving because I was looking at Jurko and he was looking at me. He just had this devilish grin. We were connecting without saying a word. I said Jurk, my dad didn’t have enough for the downpayment for a horse working for the Lever Brothers company as a supervisor. How ‘bout your dad?” “My dad, Sweet Veeds…” and he goes into that. “Fath-ah, where is my thoroughbred?” It evolved from that.

He didn’t at the time, but he realized after a time how many people got a kick out of it. He grew into his role as the foil. He didn’t like it at the beginning.

JURKO: Harry was like, “When we used to fly to the Derby.” Fly to the Derby? I said the big question for us in Calumet City was when are we going to eat our horse.

The other thing he said was “When we flew to the islands.” Flew to the islands? Yeah, Mac and I used to fly to the islands too. We used to go to Stony Island. We used to go to Rock Island. We started mentioning all the islands. Blue Island. We used to throw him the “Fath-ah! Is there any grey poupon, fath-ah?”


Harry Teinowitz succeeded in a three-man show by accepting his role as comic relief, while providing valued knowledge to most discussions. (Courtesy of ESPN 1000)
HARRY: The difference between Mac and I and Jurko and I is Jurko and I would get into an argument during the show on the air and we’d argue about it and we’d be like, “You’re an idiot. You’re a moron.” We’d go to break and we’d laugh about it. If Mac and I had an argument on the air, he’d be mad at me for a week. That’s the difference.

JURKO: Harry had his strengths. Mac was the driver. There’s no gray area. He brought it in and out of breaks. He set the tone, he moved it. He was the straw that stirred the drink. There were times when Harry needed to be more of the No. 2 guy, you know what I mean? Because Harry had the knowledge. There were times where both Mac and I had to let Harry go because Harry’s the one with the knowledge. There needed to be a recognition of who we had to recognize, who had the knowledge where. In areas of baseball and acquisitions and trades, Harry had an encyclopedic memory of certain stuff. And even when it came to football when it came to fantasy stuff, Harry knew certain things. I let the man go. You’ve got to let the man run a little bit. I saw it as Mac as the one guy. We were both twos. There were times Harry was 2A and you had to be comfortable enough just to let Harry go.

FINFER: I think Mac always theorized, I don’t know what the percentage was, like 30 percent listened just because of Harry and 50 percent was for him. He had a whole formula. There’s probably some truth to that.

MAC: He eventually got his head around the idea that being the eternal optimist is going to carry with it some backlash, some people aren’t going to like a guy who loves everything and loves everybody. Some people are going to resist that and eventually he wound up accepting that. It took awhile but he wound up accepting that and accepting the “fath-ah” thing too. He didn’t like it at first but eventually he would start saying it on his own. He would realize he would start saying something that sounds like he comes from money and he would stop himself and go “fath-ah.”

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

In the summers of 2006 and 2007, McNeil got hit with suspensions. In 2006, he was suspended 19 days for the altercation with Teinowitz. In 2007, it was for calling then-CSN Chicago executive producer Lissa Druss Christman a “bitch” on the air. McNeil was in actual trouble this time as Pastor told the Chicago Tribune, “The suspension is not based solely on the inappropriate comment he made on the air, but an inappropriate comment made by a person with a history of disciplinary problems.” The three of them were suspended as a team in 2006 for a raunchy on-air conversation that got them sent to human resources.

ZEDERMAN: I started on the show in March ’07. The thing was they still were a powerhouse. Ratings were still good. On-air, they still had the mojo. But off the air, it was like Mac would always compare everything to a band. It was like a band that had really grown apart. They were each doing their own thing, very separate, off the air. When we came to meetings, it was the only time they were together. There were points on the road where there was still real brotherhood, but there were also points where there was real distance.

DEFALCO: One summer I remember I did 10 weeks of the show for Mac. Ten weeks. Back surgery put him out for six weeks and later, he was suspended for a month.

DELEVITT: Here’s the funny thing. With The Score, Mac used to miss time, suspension or whatever, and Bernstein, I remember, used to fill time with Boers and that worked out. Here, Carmen filled in all that time.

JURKO: Planting the seed.

HARRY: I really like Lissa. Lissa Christman was really cool. I liked her a lot. I invented a term and Jurko loved it. Sometimes Jurko and I would get hit with “Mac-nel.” When Mac would say something and someone wasn’t listening at the time and they would assume Jurko and I were in on it.

ZEDERMAN: He had me call her to ask her a question about the Cubs. I don’t remember the question. She didn’t have an answer, so he called her a bitch on the air.

FINFER: We must’ve done a dozen “Mac is back” shows. “Mac returns from suspension!” So it must’ve seemed like it could’ve been the end. And eventually it was.

MAC: My wife, bless her, hated that. She just hated the uncertainty. She likes stability. I’ve told her a hundred times: what were you thinking saying yes to me if stability was your objective?

THE ACTUAL END

By 2008, the economy was taking a turn for the worse and McNeil’s contract and conduct didn’t always line up. On Jan. 16, 2009, the final show aired unceremoniously on a Friday afternoon. Finfer was at the Cubs Convention. The Obama inauguration was the following Monday. After the show ended, McNeil was summoned to a meeting with Pastor and his program director at the time, Justin Craig.

MAC: I don’t remember anything from the show because it was a typical NFL playoff Friday show and it was Jan. 16, I think of 2009, they called me in, Jim Pastor and Justin Craig, to talk and I knew I hadn’t said anything that would have gotten me suspended that day or that week. As they call me in, I’m checking, “OK, what did I say?” And Jim said you’ve done a lot of great things both on the air and what your show’s success has meant to our sales department. It just can’t ever be underestimated based on where we were at billing-wise when you guys started compared to where we are now. We’ll always be grateful for that, but we’re going to let you go. I paused before I said anything. I wanted to get my composure. All I asked was who made the decision and when.

And Jim told me, “I made the decision a couple weeks ago.” I said OK, have a nice weekend. I didn’t ask why. I didn’t ask when it was effective. I assumed I was just going to play out the string of a contract that expired in May. But when I called my agent Bryan on the way home, he said, “No, you’re done.” That’s it. You’re on holiday with 3 1/2 months full salary but you’re out of work. That was a weird time.

PASTOR: I’m not going to talk too much about specifics, but I think it just got to a point where it got to be a little bit of a destructive relationship internally. I think it reached a point where it was no longer long-term. It wasn’t going to serve or be as successful as it once had. The tensions, like that, were going to be too strong.

ZEDERMAN: Toward the end of the show he asked me to get him DannyMac.com. You could tell he wanted to start marketing himself. You could see the end was coming.


John Jurkovic (left) and Harry Teinowitz (center) were joined full-time by Carmen DeFalco in 2009 after Dan McNeil was let go. Teinowitz was let go by ESPN 1000 in 2013. Now, Jurkovic and DeFalco host together in the afternoon. (Courtesy ESPN 1000)
MAC: I saw my dismissal coming. I was the only one who saw it coming. The recession, they called it a recession, a depression really. It killed advertising dollars. Even though I hadn’t had any clashes with management for the entire year of ’08, I had a feeling they were not going to pick up my final year, which was scheduled to begin in May of ’09 and I was right. I was scheduled to go up to a really stupid salary that they couldn’t justify with advertising dollars being down.

You throw in the fact I was belligerent with my manager Justin Craig, who was my program director at the time. I gave him a lot of shit. I made his life miserable. I spoke for everybody in the room, but I was the nasty one. When the show needs to be defended, I was the one who defended it. I was the quarterback of the show. And Justin was a very good radio guy and still is, but it was his first job as a PD and he was a little overzealous about pushing corporate stuff and I was very reluctant to have any of that. I didn’t want a guy coming in from Bristol telling us we should be talking to Mike Tirico once a week, or whoever it was. Let us make those decisions. If it’s a guy from Bristol who makes sense, fine, like John Clayton. We liked him. We like information guys, but we didn’t mesh. We liked each other, we just didn’t mesh professionally.

They were very aware I was a strong voice in the union, I was anti-Justin and I was scheduled to make eight hundred grand. Instead of paying that, they paid Carmen whatever they paid Carmen and tried to save some money.

PASTOR: He thought it was mostly about the money? I’m not going to talk too much about contracts or things like that. Was that part of the consideration? I think that’s fair. But also long-term we could sort of see where this was going, but there was no longer, between the three of them, as constructive [of a relationship] as it had once had been.

DELEVITT: For money? No. Is that what Mac said? No, not at all. There were so many times we were close to getting rid of him, but there was a final straw. The Mac-Mike and Mike thing? That was big. I don’t know if that was the final straw, but the nail in the coffin, I think.

McNeil had been writing a weekly column for the Sun-Times and in a Jan. 8 story, he ripped The Score for losing to Mike & Mike in the mornings. He wrote, in part, “it’s nothing shy of embarrassing that ESPN’s nationally aired ‘Mike and Mike in the Morning’ has become the highest-rated sports radio program in any time slot in Chicago. They do a fine show, but it’s best consumed in markets such as Bangor, Maine, or Enid, Okla., or Salem, Ore. In big towns like ours, local sports talk never should lose to a more vanilla national show. Shame on all of us.” Needless to say, that didn’t go over well.

DELEVITT: “How does a network show beat a local show?” Because they were beating Mike North at the time. “How does that happen?” I’m like who cares, that’s our station. And he wrote it anyway. I remember when he was writing it, I was like, “Mac, why would you do that? This is your station.” “This is my honest opinion.”

MAC: That could have had something to do with it as well. I know they were not happy about that. It was people see what they want, hear what they want. It was more of a shot at The Score than it was at ESPN. In a market this size and as provincial as we are here, how can a station with a local show not beat Brian Billick talking NFL or Reggie Miller talking about the NBA? I never asked. I kind of take some pride in never asking.

PASTOR: I vaguely remember it.

MAC: The contract didn’t end. They paid me for 3 1/2 months. If they would’ve renewed me to an 8, is that stupid money or what? For talking shit? This was right before the Obama inauguration. I think that was the following week. They told me, “No more.” I accepted it. I didn’t fight them on it. While I liked that show very much, I didn’t disagree with some people suggesting to me it was time to try something new. That’s what I was thinking at the time.

PASTOR: I think and I’ve told Mac this on more than one occasion since he’s left too. The type of show he wanted to do, he was better served being somewhere else too. The ESPN factor. Not about taking shots at them, but it got to be kind of an angry, I think, intense show that long-term that I saw more battles than I saw victories.

I think there were more than a few of us in the building who felt like it was time or getting close to it and so, would it have been nicer to tie it up on a neat bow and end it that way? Yeah. But the timing and everything else worked out best this way.

THE AFTERMATH

DeFalco immediately slid into McNeil’s chair in 2009, and McNeil eventually went back to The Score, where he hosted a show with Matt Spiegel. In 2011, Teinowitz got arrested for a DUI in Skokie and went into treatment for alcohol abuse. Two years later, ESPN let him go. There hasn’t been a full-time three-host show at the station since.

McNeil’s next stint at The Score ended in 2014, partially because of his own addiction demons, particularly with pain medications, which went along with a lifelong battle with depression. McNeil then had a short-lived FM radio show on The Drive. When we did our first interview in Jan. 2017, he was between jobs and eventually he started selling cars near his home in Indiana. In March 2018, McNeil, who had been hosting weekends again, got his afternoon drive show back at The Score in a surprise roster shake-up by new Entercom Radio boss Jimmy deCastro. McNeil is now hosting a show with a former Afternoon Saloon intern, Danny Parkins.

Jurkovic is still hosting a show with DeFalco, though it’s now on from 12-2 p.m., sandwiched between David Kaplan’s show and “Waddle & Silvy.” Silverman, who wanted tips from McNeil way back when, now hosts the big afternoon show at ESPN 1000 with his partner, ex- Bears receiver Tom Waddle.

Teinowitz, who had a show on the short-lived sports radio station, The Game, does fill-in work for WGN and writes occasionally for this website. He also works outside of the industry.

Delevitt is the program director of ESPN 1000, while Pastor is the vice president and general manager. Snyder owns a podcasting company based in Boston. Rosen is the director of operations at The Score, where he has worked since 2005. Finfer has worked as a host and producer for both The Score and ESPN 1000 over the years and is currently hosting a podcast for The Athletic, among other jobs. Dickerson is the Bears reporter for ESPN’s NFL Nation and is a national radio host for ESPN.

WMVP 1000, which competes on a more even plane with The Score these days, is celebrating a 20th anniversary as a sports station this fall. One hopes there will be a Mac, Jurko and Harry reunion show.

PASTOR: Here’s what I remember about that show as much as anything else. It was one of the few shows I can say this about: when you would pull into my garage whether it’s here or at home and I’d sit there and listen until the break because I didn’t want to turn the radio off. There are very few shows that had that and I think every listener back then, every P1 to the station can relate to that.

HARRY: Here’s how smart Mac was about the show. He wanted to make the show about us. So if we went to the Hawks game the night before, instead of just talking about the Hawks, we would talk about our experience at the game. Who we saw, what we did, where we went afterward. It was much more personalized, it was higher stakes and it was more fun.

JURKO: It was the best sports show in the history of Chicago.

MAC: In retrospect, it was the best show I’ve been on. It was the most fun I’ve ever had. Clearly the most lucrative job I ever had. We had a good time. We had a nice little run.

Editor’s note: Interviews for this story began in January 2017, before the story was shelved for a later date. At that time, I interviewed Harry Teinowitz at Walker Bros. Original Pancake House on Green Bay Rd., Dan McNeil at Giovanni’s in Munster, Ind., Ben Finfer at Hub 51 in Chicago and Adam Delevitt on the phone. In May 2018, I interviewed John Jurkovic at State and Lake Chicago Tavern in downtown Chicago, Delevitt again in his office at 190 N. State, along with Carmen DeFalco and Jim Pastor. I talked to McNeil again outside of Wrigley Field, where he was hosting his new show. Also, at this time, I talked to Bob Snyder, Jeff Dickerson, Marc Silverman and Danny Zederman on the phone. Media columns, particularly ones by the Daily Herald‘s Ted Cox and the Chicago Tribune‘s Teddy Greenstein, were valuable in fact-checking times and dates. Despite the obnoxious length of this story, tens of thousands of words were left on the cutting room floor.

Sini is writing for the Athletic nw?

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

Thanks, Matt!

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Somebody had to be a dick

You're welcome.

Management, you cool with people stealing content from the Athletic? Could get you in some doo doo.

It takes much much longer to read the entire thing than it does to sign up for a free trial

Wisemen, delete if necessary. Didn't even think about that.

Terrific read, thanks.

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Great share. That was interesting.

This made me the most:

"In the fall of 2004, The Score centered its afternoon show around Sun-Times columnist Rick Telander. That’s around the time the Afternoon Saloon really started to roll."

I was laughing through the "Fatha" part.

I really wish I could have listened.

Mods don't delete it. Or at least wait until tonight when I'm finished reading it.

Maybe ban Caller Bob for a few days for being a buzzkill.

Good job, PM

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

God that's an awful name. Shame on you Mac.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

I mean The Athletic is the only place left in Chicago that employs people with some semi-decent sports thoughts. Excuse me for not being cool with things that take away from their ability to make paper.

I think they'll survive. Lighten up, Francis.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

LOW T thinking

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Fatha, when does our buggy depart for the big race??


That brought back some great memories. My wife thinks I'm a nut because I'm sitting here with this huge grin on my face. What a terrific read.

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Ugh I miss this show or the fun of this show.

Perhaps a few people might read the article and see the quality of it and actually purchase their work?

Pretty good read about the 2nd best show Mac has been a part of

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

I like Parkins too but let’s settle down.

yes I know it was a HFC reference

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Good call. It wont be long before Parkins makes the Saloon the 3rd best show Mac has been a part of

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

Isn't that the purpose of signing up for a trial?

He’s talking about for assholes too lazy to do that like myself.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Yeah.
THATS why she thinks you're a nut.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

I find this thought insanely fascinating.

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You know me like that.

Was Lou ever Wildly popular? That statement struck me too.