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Two names conspicuously absent...
All-Sports Radio Matures Beyond Screamers
By DAN McGRATH
Published: January 27, 2012
Sports talk radio was a phenomenon fairly new to Chicago the first time I heard it here. I was visiting from California, taking my daughter to college on a trip that included a two-hour drive from Chicago. I came upon WSCR — “the Score” — while punching the buttons in a rental car and heard a boisterous guy later identified as Mike North lambasting the hopeless Bears in a loud, indignant voice that was both unmistakably “Chicawgo” and scalded-cat screechy.
“What have we here?” I wondered. Sports radio in my formative years meant Pat Sheridan on WMAQ or Red Mottlow on WCFL or the famed Musburger-Palmer Sports Report on WBBM. Easy listening.
This was most definitely not that.
The women in the car pleaded for music — they would have settled for my indescribably bad singing in their desperation — but I was fascinated and wouldn’t budge. This was either a dead-on impersonation of “The Super Fans” segment on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” or the inspiration for it.
Nope, neither. It was Mike North being Mike North — loud, opinionated, occasionally crude, undeniably passionate. If he truly spoke for the city, you had to wonder what that said about Chicago, but he was barreling toward becoming its most dominant sports voice, airwaves division.
The print title belonged to Jay Mariotti, a chronically dyspeptic, quick-to-anger columnist for The Chicago Sun-Times. Things are a lot quieter around here since both screamers moved beyond earshot.
WSCR has soldiered on nicely without North; it is celebrating 20 years on the air, which is commendable endurance in the fickle-format radio world. And with the old newspaper warhorses Mike Mulligan and Brian Hanley filling North’s former slot, morning-drive ratings have never been higher, according to Mitch Rosen, the station manager.
Chicago, red-hot sports town that it is, now has two stations devoted full time to sports and sports chatter, but the concept was hardly a sure thing when WSCR began in 1992.
Staying power isn’t the only justification for all the self-congratulation accompanying WSCR programming these days. Although rival ESPN 1000 has the abundant resources and marketing muscle of the Worldwide Leader at its disposal, WSCR holds a decided ratings edge in sports radio’s most coveted demographic: males age 18 to 54 with strong opinions, access to a telephone and time on their hands.
It got there by playing to Chicago’s provincialism. WSCR bills itself as the home of hyperlocal sports talk — think all Bears, all the time — while ESPN must accommodate a more national constituency.
The Score also made a wise move in aligning itself with newspaper people, early on and up to now. Name recognition aside, they’re trained reporters with good insights, and they know how to cover a story.
The print influence is not as strong at ESPN, even though the mother ship has always gone heavy on former newspaper scribes. The work of crossover pioneers like Peter Gammons and John Clayton, as well as Buster Olney and Rachel Nichols from the current roster, provided instant and lasting credibility for the network’s newsgathering.
I’m merely a male with a telephone, too old and too busy to be of much demographic value to either station. And hopelessly out of touch, I guess — I thought Tony Kornheiser was doing the best show in town when ESPN carried him a few years back, only to drop him because he wasn’t “Chicago enough” to last here.
Scott Van Pelt is?
Still, I’m a fairly regular listener, mainly because I’m in the car more than I was in my newspaper days. Then it was more of a duty — what fans were thinking mattered some. Now it’s a choice, although some of the ads don’t flatter one’s male identity.
I enjoy Mully and Hanley’s easy banter and value their newspaper sensibilities, but morning drive is a time-share: I get a better sense of what went on in the world overnight from “Mike & Mike” on ESPN. I appreciate Matt Spiegel as a calming influence on the bombastic Dan McNeil. Barry Rozner is the best of the fill-in hosts, and the afternoon producer Jason Goff will do well on the air once the station finds a slot for him.
The Score also gets good mileage from its contributors; Matt Bowen and Hub Arkush offset Mike Ditka’s celebrity with real football knowledge, and no one can touch Steve Stone as the last word on Chicago baseball.
How much influence the stations wield is hard to quantify, though I suspect it’s not as much as they’d like to believe — a good ratings number equates to about 200,000 listeners in a market of more than seven million people.
The newspapers pay attention. Though we wasted many man-hours running down radio-ignited rumors when I worked at The Tribune, we occasionally heard something that went somewhere.
Among newsmakers it varies. Andy MacPhail insisted he never listened when he ran the Cubs and scoffed at those who did. Dusty Baker heard enough to decide the city had turned on him. Ozzie Guillen (and his family) not only listened, he occasionally called in to tell his side, once before a Cubs game when he must have had better things to do.
Then again, Ozzie fit that coveted demographic
_________________ The Hawk wrote: There is not a damned thing wrong with people who are bull shitters.
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