https://theathletic.com/584506/2018/10/ ... espn-1000/Good read from October 2018...hadn't seen it until now.
Quote:
Dollars and sense: After 20 years, Marc Silverman’s distinctive voice still resonates on ESPN 1000
Marc Silverman sat in the basement of his expansive suburban home with a big glass of wine in his famously small hands. A TV the size of a SmartCar hangs on the wall next to two smaller TVs, kids’ toys engulf the room, and homemade collages of his salad days covering the Michael Jordan Bulls line the walls.
“When did you feel like you made it?” I asked him.
“I still don’t feel like I’ve made it,” he said. “I mean, what is making it?”
ESPN 1000 is celebrating its 20th anniversary Friday in perfect sports radio fashion, by doing a bunch of shows at a suburban sports bar. Silverman will be there for the main event, hosting the 2 to 6 p.m. shift with his partner Tom Waddle.
Silverman didn’t always have a regular show on the fledging all-sports station. The then-27-year-old from Skokie was hired away from a plum gig at WGN with the promise to keep covering the Bears and also get the chance to host a weekend show as WMVP morphed into an all-sports station dominated by national shows.
While he enjoyed being a reporter in the fast-paced mid-to-late 1990s Chicago, Silverman wanted to be a host like Chet Coppock or Mike North.
Silverman can remember the day he interviewed for this job, because it was the day after Mark McGwire broke the home run record. Silverman had to work the post-game show solo from St. Louis because Pat Hughes and Ron Santo had to jump on the charter plane. He landed at Midway and went right to the interview.
When WMVP 1000 re-launched as a sports station as the first owned-and-operated ESPN Radio station 20 Octobers ago, the schedule was Tony Bruno and Mike Golic (with local guy Lou Canellis), Nanci Donnellan, the “Fabulous Sports Babe,” Tony Kornheiser and then in afternoon drive, Harry Teinowitz and Spike Manton. Only the latter was a completely local show. (Why anyone at ESPN thought this lineup was a good idea remains a mystery.)
Every day, as Silverman remembered this week, ESPN program director Mitch Rosen had a 9 a.m. conference call with his reporters. Since they didn’t have the power of local programming, Rosen wanted to have a strong reporting team to file newsers that would air during the national programs, provide audio for the non-stop SportsCenter updates and give the station some kind of Chicago voice.
So Silverman, Bruce Levine, Steve Kashul and David Schuster would dial in and Rosen would quiz them on what’s going on with the news.
“Because as reporters he would want us to know everything that’s going on,” Silverman said. “And Bruce would try to one-up everybody with his knowledge. The next thing you knew, Schu was arguing with Bruce and I’m arguing with Bruce. All we were doing was try to set the schedule of what we were covering for the day and it just turned into one gigantic pig fuck. It was like four old guys sitting around Max & Benny’s yelling about cold corned beef.”
Silverman laughed when he told the story, because if you got Levine, Schuster and Silverman on a conference call this morning, they’d still be arguing like old men at a deli.
The station didn’t exactly take off. And so Rosen often told Silverman to rent, not to buy. Literally. Silverman remembers Rosen telling him not to buy a condo.
“That’s how little confidence he had, that we all had,” Silverman said.
Flash forward 16 years. On Oct. 21, 2014, Silverman found himself in the Chicago Tribune’s real estate column for paying nearly a million dollars for a home in Riverwoods for him, his wife and his young son.
His renting days had long been over, but some would say that moment was making it.
Still…
“I get to do something that I love every single day in my dream job in Chicago,” Silverman said. “But you always said to yourself, ‘Hey I just want to be No. 1’ at some time. You want to get really good at what you do. But then you always read the quotes from people who made it that it’s harder to stay on top. Then you’re stressed about staying there.”
Silverman, now 47 with two kids, Mason and Braxton, a wife, Allie, and a career talking sports on the radio, is living the dream of every kid who grew up in suburban Chicago listening to Coppock or North or, in later years, The Afternoon Saloon, on the radio.
The “Waddle & Silvy” show has been on the air since spring 2007. That’s impressive longevity in an uncertain industry. (I believe only The Score’s Terry Boers and Dan Bernstein lasted longer as a partnership, from 1999 through 2016.)
If The Afternoon Saloon of Dan McNeil, Teinowitz and John Jurkovic was the most important show in ESPN 1000’s history, I’d argue Silverman is the personification of the station’s success. (Because I was the second reporter to call Waddle about this story idea, he said the station’s anniversary should be renamed “Silverfest.”)
Along with Carmen DeFalco, who came on board shortly after the station’s launch, Silverman has been there from the beginning, when the station had an ESPN name but no cachet to back it up.
Silverman was a teenager in Skokie in the 1980s, the birth of the modern era of success in Chicago sports. You had Michael Jordan, the 1984 Cubs, the ’85 Bears, decent Blackhawks teams, the “Winning Ugly” White Sox. If there was ever a time for kids to dream about being sportscasters rather than doctors or lawyers, it was then. But Silverman didn’t want to be Jody Davis or Gary Fencik.
“The guy I always remembered listening to was Coppock,” he said. “I was obsessed. I was obsessed with Coppock in the ’80s. I’d sit in my little bedroom in Skokie and I’d have my radio on when I was supposed to be doing homework, trying to dial in to talk to Chet Coppock. I still remember it: ‘All right, let’s go to Skokie, land of Barnum & Bagel. Let’s pick it up with Marc. Marc, your dime, your dance floor.’
“I still remember it because I recorded it on a cassette tape. And I asked a stupid question about the Houston Oilers bumping Willie Gault off the line of scrimmage.”
Silverman was fortunate that his grandfather had season tickets to the Bulls and on the way home from games he’d shush him to hear Coppock’s take on what they just watched.
“I knew then that’s what I wanted to do,” he said.
The Score debuted when Silverman was in college and it clarified his path.
“Who is this guy yelling at me through my speakers, oh my gosh,” he said of North. “‘I want to do that! This is a thing? Sports radio is a thing?’”
Early in ESPN 1000’s tenure, Teinowitz and Manton were pushed out of their slot and in came “The Huge Show” with Bill Simonson. Canellis was his co-host. Needless to say, the hugeness of the show didn’t rattle the competition.
“Here we are trying to compete with The Score, an all-Chicago station with Chicago to the core guys and we come with our only local show and here’s this dude who’s whacked out of his mind from Grand Rapids, Michigan,” Silverman said.
The “Huge Show” ran from March 1999 through April 2001, when the station hired McNeil to host an afternoon show with ex-NFL player Jurkovic and Teinowitz, who was still working at the station, mostly doing weekly bits with Mike & Mike.
“I remember listening to the first show of Mac, Jurko and Harry,” Silverman said. “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.”
That show’s success changed the path of the station.
“Until they got there, it was month to month,” Silverman said.
After hosting with DeFalco in the evenings for about a year, Silverman got his first daytime hosting gig in February 2004 as a true sidekick to Jay Mariotti. The success of Mac, Jurko and Harry pushed the ESPN Radio higher-ups to finally pay for a second full-time local show and the irascible Sun-Times columnist got the mid-day gig.
“Mariotti, as much as people didn’t like him, people listened to him, because he had thoughts,” Silverman said.
What was hosting with Mariotti like for those of us that missed those, uh, months? Silverman said they “never had a bad relationship,” but can laugh that he was essentially an Ed McMahon-like sidekick to the opinionated columnist.
“The show would open and it would basically be 17 minutes of Jay reciting his column and giving his take on everything,” Silverman said. “Then he would say, ‘So Silvy, what do you think about that?’ And then he goes, ‘Oh wait a minute, we gotta break.’ So I would basically sit and watch Jay for the first 20 minutes of the show and not get to speak until 9:30 when we came back.”
Mariotti wasn’t always easy to deal with, but Silvy said there was only one time he really felt Mariotti’s wrath. Silverman had defended the White Sox point-of-view in a tricky Magglio Ordóñez situation and given Mariotti was in a forever war with the Sox and chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, it caused an argument on-air that spilled off-air.
“He was convinced I was taking that stand because of the Jerry Reinsdorf influence,” Silverman said. “He left me a 5-minute voice mail after he left for home that scorched me. ‘Don’t ever blanking do this again. Blank, blank. I will have you off the show. I will sue you.’ That was his famous thing he told everybody. We got over it. I sat him down and I told him for better or worse, I have opinions and when I give an opinion, it comes from me. I’d never give an opinion because my boss told me, that’s not true to yourself.”
But Mariotti’s Reinsdorf paranoia was well-founded in this case. Mariotti was let go in late December, despite very good ratings in the Fall 2004 Arbitron book. The station’s GM Bob Snyder, who hired Mariotti, was already canned.
“I think that’s probably what ended up getting me fired,” Snyder told me. “I stuck to my guns on Mariotti. Jerry complained, as is his right. When Jerry complains, he talks to Bob Iger or Michael Eisner. Someone probably called my boss and said, ‘Who’s this guy Snyder pissing off Reinsdorf?”
While ESPN tried out a number of hosts to fill in for Mariotti, DeFalco got the gig as Silverman urged. The young guys were on the come up, but management at the time wasn’t fully supportive.
“We didn’t know what were doing then,” Silverman said. “We thought we did. But I still believe that would’ve been a big show.”
(Daily Herald sports media columnist Ted Cox wasn’t always a big Silvy fan. On Dec. 6, 2005, he wrote, “Silvy’s opinions are like his voice: shrill, emotional, lacking in substance.”)
When they were suspended for two weeks in late January 2006 — they allowed a poorly edited voice mail to play on the air that was full of expletives, Silverman said — the station brought in ESPN NFL analyst Sean Salisbury and regular fill-in host and Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Rosenbloom to do a fill-in show. That spring, those two were hired to do the mid-day show, while Silverman and DeFalco, who were doing well in the ratings, were exiled back to nights.
That temporary setback turned out to be the best move of both of their careers.
The Afternoon Saloon was still doing gangbusters, as were Mike & Mike in the morning. But Salisbury and Rosenbloom, which launched in May 2006, was widely panned, with the ex-QB doing most of the shows from Dallas or Bristol and Rosenbloom stuck here trying to make it work. The on-air product never clicked.
“‘Salisbury and Rosenbloom’ is probably the worst sports talk radio show of all time,” former ESPN producer Ben Finfer said.
“It’s on the totem pole of the worst Chicago sport radio shows of all time,” Silverman said.
In early 2007, ESPN hired Waddle away from WGN. He was put on nights with Silverman and the two built up a rapport before the obvious move was made. They would replace the mid-day show for the spring book. For Silverman, already in his mid-30s, this was his third chance at a regular show and as it turned out, his best one.
Silverman remembers the early days of the show, which aired from 9 a.m. to noon, as promising, but uneven.
“I always thought the good stuff was there,” Silverman said. “I think early on it was sometimes not doing one talk show, but two talk shows. You gotta find your rhythm. Some of the things that made us different was what made us good, some of the things that made us different made us not so good.”
Waddle knew a younger Silverman from their WGN days as a hard-working reporter, but someone who was wired a little tight.
“I don’t think he’d get mad if I say he was a red-ass,” Waddle said. “He was competitive. That was his nature. He wanted to be the first to get the story. I knew on Day 1 he was going to be a success, because no one worked harder, grinded more. That’s kind of how I played football.”
Waddle was being serious there (I think), but their partnership works because they are both self-deprecating and can toggle between hardcore sports discussions and giggly goofiness. Waddle was the undrafted free agent receiver who wasn’t afraid to go over the middle but had no illusions about the grandness of his NFL career, while Silvy is the self-described “dork sports guy.” Waddle and Silvy can laugh at themselves — it’s actually a driving theme to their show — which is an underrated trait for anyone in our business.
Waddle already had four young kids when the show began. He thinks his more laid-back attitude about life has rubbed off on Silvy, while his partner’s attention to detail helped him grow as a host.
“I was a lot more serious, thats what you learn as you grow up,” Silvy said. “I was young and dumb. Completely young and dumb. I’m a single guy, no one depends on me. I don’t have to worry about anybody else. All I’m worried about is are Ben Gordon and Kirk Hinrich and Luol Deng going to be good enough to beat the Detroit Pistons, and that was my life. Is Alfonso Soriano going to hit in the leadoff spot? I don’t have a girlfriend, I don’t have a kid. You know what I mean? You learn. You grow up. I’m still passionate. I will still give you an opinion, but it’s not going to be same thing as it was.”
(Silvy isn’t so buttoned-up that he won’t tweet exhortations to athletes for three hours straight during a Cubs game.)
McNeil once told me the station was at its best when Waddle and Silvy’s show got cooking. It made ESPN 1000 feel more complete. The show has grown and thrived over the years, flipping time slots with DeFalco and Jurkovic in Spring 2013, moving to the coveted 2 to 6 p.m. drive time shift, where they battled with Boers and Bernstein, Bernstein and Jason Goff and now McNeil and Danny Parkins.
Ratings success comes and goes, but Silvy said he and Waddle talk often about keeping the show fresh as it chugs along.
“I don’t feel in any way, shape or form that we’ve grown stale,” Waddle said. “I’m not tired of the show. I’m not tired of our relationship. I’m not tired of him. Every so often you have to reinvent yourself, but I don’t see a point of diminishing return with this show. I see a long future of doing what we’re doing.”
When ESPN Chicago launched as a companion website in Spring 2009, it helped raise the show’s profile. Now every time they had a guest break news on the air — like Charles Barkley ripping Michael Jordan’s Charlotte organization — it would be written up in a news story on the main ESPN website and they started getting recognized more and more on SportsCenter.
“It was sort of a validation,” Silvy said. “It’s always interesting trying to strike a balance because you want to break stories but you want to be entertaining. That’s the way you establish more trust with your listeners.”
Not long after, ESPN started to use the duo for national guest-hosting gigs on both TV and radio.
But Waddle said he thinks what really cemented them into the Chicago sports consciousness was the Jay Cutler Show, their weekly show with the Bears quarterback that ran during Bears seasons from 2012-14.
Waddle and Silvy got the reticent Cutler to open up on air, which I believe helped improve his media interactions through the end of his Bears career. But the most impressive part of the show to me was how Silvy would challenge Cutler, both on the show and during the week.
Given the serious financial commitment the station and its sponsors made to the show — I believe Cutler earned $10,000 an episode the first year, and the price went up in the second season — Silvy’s intense interviewing style during trying times was impressive from a journalistic sense.
“Silvy won’t back down to anyone, that’s one of his greatest qualities,” Waddle said. “There’s no backing down, but he doesn’t demean the person either. He stands his ground and asks tough questions, but he doesn’t get pissy trying to make a name for himself by creating controversy. Jay probably respected the times Silvy would challenge him. Sometimes when the show would be over, Jay would say ‘Fuck Silvy’ and Silvy would say ‘Fuck Jay.’ And then next Thursday, we’d be back high-fiving and everyone got along.”
(Except for all those times Cutler didn’t show up and they had to scramble and get Kyle Long or Brandon Marshall to do it.)
Possibly my favorite Silvy moment on the radio was another upfront interview. Before Derrick Rose’s second year in the NBA, the show had Vinny Del Negro on to preview the season and at the very end of the interview, Silvy said, “DRose at the end of the game.” It started a spirited back-and-forth with Del Negro, who was criticized for not playing Rose at the end of close games as a rookie. Needless to say, Silvy was right.
Like a lot of successful people in a creative industry, Silverman had to not only outlast the competition, but he needed some breaks on his side to make it work. Yes, he was fortunate that he grew up in a city where he could pursue his profession at a high level and be able to work early on for no money. But he also had to be willing to do the work.
“When I started at WGN, I worked 70 hours a week and got paid zero,” he said of his internship. “Because I wanted to do it. You saw at ESPN, we had some interns who didn’t get it. You run into kids who say they want to do it, but they don’t really want to do it.”
Silverman didn’t have a backup plan then and he jokes now that even while he’s at his most successful, he probably needs one. Sports radio is a fickle business, in that regard. When Boers had a retirement party in 2016, I realized it was the only time I’ve seen a host retire on his volition. Waddle made an intelligent point to me that they are lucky they’ve had continuity in management. Down the dial, we’ve seen how a change up top can alter a performing lineup.
But while an uncertain future is always in the back of Silverman’s mind, how he made it is a lesson for every teenager listening to his show on their laptop while they’re supposed to be doing their homework.
“If you work, you’re gonna get it,” he said. “I’m 100 percent on that. I don’t have the prototypical voice. I’m not the smartest guy out there. But I will outwork anybody in this business.”
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