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Apologies if this has been posted elsewhere...
March 2017
By Jim O’Donnell
Will the real Chet Coppock ever rise to the top?
Again?
His friends and fans say, “Yes!”
His detractors and booby trappers say, “Nooo!”
Both sides are surprisingly legion, which in the roulette wheel of Coppock’s mind is a good thing. When his name comes up, they all still pay attention.
He has helped build the contemporary sports media circus in Chicago. He now endures a peculiar, supremely frustrating wilderness. Coppock wants only one next chapter - a major broadcast sports organization to love and recognize him again.
That’s it - one single frequency of prominence to spin the dials of fortune and hand him a microphone and a full-time on-air platform and a hungry production staff.
Then, please stand back, haters and disdainers: “The Godfather of Chicago Sports Talk” will be back in your sports-loving ear.
It’s not about money, ‘cause money can’t buy you love. And when it comes to love - personal, professional, theatrical, Coppock remains a young and hungry heart.
“Naw, it’s not a love thing,” Coppock lies to a chum during a session that is one part lunch, two parts cathartic channeling. “It’s about relevancy. Irrelevancy scares me. Scares the hell out of me. I don’t want to be remembered as the Terry Malloy of Chicago sportscasting.”
Terry Malloy —- Budd Schulberg’s whistle-blowing longshoreman. Elia Kazan’s haunted, heroic ex-pug. Rod Steiger’s lament-laden brother and backseat mate in the iconic taxi noir scene from “On The Waterfront.”
Long, long ago, when Coppock was one of the unquestioned princes of broadcast sports media in Chicago, he used to joke about the scene. “I coulda’ been a contenda’.”
It was laughable back then because Coppock wasn’t just a “contenda’”. He was as close to being the king of local sports media as Johnny Morris and Tim Weigel would allow.
That was during the remarkable 34-month run - January, 1981, to November, 1983 - when Coppock was the lead sports anchor at WMAQ-Channel 5. He also delivered crisp morning-drive commentaries between the MOR country cow-kicking on sister station WMAQ-AM (670).
There was no 24/7 sports/talk radio in Chicago back then. A cable TV outlet dedicated to major local teams was considered merely a pipe dream in the mind of the shrewd Eddie Einhorn. ESPN was nothing more than a clairvoyant-plus set of call letters airing rodeo and lacrosse out of some hidden loch in Connecticut.
WGN-Channel 9 Sports had great game coverage but little studio cachet (except when a helicopter traffic reporter went down and Carl Greyson brought A-game bathos to “Nightbeat”). WFLD-Channel 32 had no news department at all.
Coppock was 32 years old and fresh as a young precinct captain in Bridgeport. A one-way trip to the stars appeared inevitable.
He had returned to his native land (New Trier High, Class of ’66) after a six-year run at WISH-TV in Indianapolis. One Indy setmate was a young and telegenic Jane Pauley. Across town, a rival TV news shop featured a quirky ham-and-flakes weatherman named David Letterman.
In Chicago, Channel 5 was forever chasing WBBM-Channel 2 and its impregnable golden triangle of Morris, Bill Kurtis and Walter Jacobson. WLS-Channel 7 was chasing anything that breathed, so much so that struggling station chief Peter Desnoes moved Weigel from sports to lead news anchor for a further flatlining 20 months beginning in January, 1982.
All of which left Coppock and his notably bombastic style as a keenly viable alternative to Morris’s peppy big league-ism (Author’s Disclaimer: You cannot write an authentic piece about Chet Coppock without using the word “bombastic”; he handed part of his peroxided soul to a moonlit mystic on Sheridan Road in Glencoe decades ago to cosmically assure it).
The future was his.
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The ground began to quiver every so slightly in September 1983. That’s when Channel 7, with nothing left to lose, brought in ex-Channel 5 sports producer (and future ABC Sports president) Dennis Swanson to turn things around. And boy, would he ever.
His first move was to shift Weigel back to sports. Smart. That meant Chicago TV sports viewers had three extremely distinct choices each weekday evening - the pedigreed and pugnacious Morris at Channel 2, the Yale-bred and people-cred Weigel at Channel 7 and the chronically carnival-esque and astutely aggressive Coppock at Channel 5.
Morris hated both competitors. But the Bears’ ol’ No. 47 also brought out the highest degree of competitive juices in both Coppock and Weigel, ironically casual chums since the pre-Indy days. That link extended back to when Coppock published a weekly Chicago sports tabloid at age 25 and Weigel free-lanced for him while maintaining a full-time gig in the sports department of the classic Chicago Daily News.
But for nine-and-one-half weeks in the fall of 1983, through the White Sox’s first division crown (and ALCS playoff loss to the Baltimore Orioles), the mano-a-mano-a-Chet-o raged on.
Without question, Coppock’s high tide at Channel 5 peaked on Halloween night, 1983. That was the monumental, era-ending evening when “The Papa Bear” - George Halas - died at age 88 in his lakefront condo.
Sid Luckman, the legendary Bears QB and a good pal of Coppock, was bedside. Within moments of Halas’s last breath, Luckman called Coppock with the stop-the-presser.
“I had been interning a few months prior to Halas’s death under Chet at Channel 5,” said Dan Jiggetts, the Harvard-educated former Bear and cornerstone of the startup of WSCR-AM in 1992. “I remember Chet being first on the air anywhere with the news that night. I also remember that the scoop, the biggest of the year in Chicago, seemed to solidify in a lot of minds that Chet Coppock was ‘The Big Dog” in Chicago sportscasting.”
Channel 5 interrupted its prime-time network programming with the news. By 10 p.m., the others were catching up. “Big Dog” milked his exclusive journalistic bone to the quick with Luckman live, in studio, detailing the final hours of “The Papa Bear.”
Morris seethed. Weigel chased.
Coppock, it seemed, couldn’t lose. But fate has a way of making your pocket aces worthless in the blink of a “5” on the river.
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Backstage at Channel 5 News, resentments were simmering.
Anchors Ron Magers and Carol Marin were forming a Damon-and-Pythias axis. No. 2 sportsman Mark Giangreco was showing the clandestine political skills that would launch a 30-year run as a No. 1 guy in Chicago TV sports shops (and even unseat the eminently unseatable Weigel at Channel 7 in 1994).
Coppock was annoying a lot of the wrong people at the NBC o-and-o with his one-man banding. A key accusation was that he far too frequently overran his allotted time for the 10 o’clock sports segment. Battle lines were quietly being drawn.
And then came the 22-point memo. The frigging 22-point memo that remains the 9/11 of Chet Coppock’s sportscasting career.
A major manager at Channel 5 had scholar-shipped an old friend to help oversee the sports department. Coppock perceived the fellow as incompetent and a TV news flyweight.
Post-Halas, Coppock also felt there were unexplored ways to draw new eyeballs to the station. Not all sloped toward the marquee-topping Marin and Magers. Suddenly, some were saying he was taking on a bit of a “Patton complex.”
Not good.
Then came the lure, the rope and the hangin’ tree.
Station chief Monte Newman asked Coppock to write a memo detailing his thoughts on problems and potentials within the Channel 5 news department. The request hinted that a team-first collegiality would quash the growing internal tensions.
For reasons known only to Chet and perhaps Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco’s sit-chill
psychiatrist on “The Sopranos”), Coppock wrote a decidedly non-political 22-point response. It was as if Neville Chamberlain had gone to Munich and told Adolf Hitler, “Screw you and your band of power-crazed thugs.”
“Monte wanted reasonableness and I gave him a diatribe,” Coppock now says. “As a strategic career error, it was Bill Buckner times one hundred.”
He showed the memo to three colleagues before popping it into inter-office mail — two in house, one not. All three told him not to send it.
“I told Chet not to send it,” said Jeff Davis, then lead sports producer at Channel 5 and an enduring Coppock loyalist. “It was Chet being Chet and I hoped he’d follow the old Ann Landers maxim about putting the nasty letter in your nightstand overnight, reading it again in the morning and then throwing it away.”
Chet didn’t listen. He forwarded it to both Newman and news director Paul Beavers.
Two days later, after completing his midday workout at the East Bank Club, Coppock got an “urgent” phone call from then-agent Jeff Jacobs (later the fantastically successful president of Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions).
Channel 5 management had its remedy:
Coppock was fired.
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“You don’t forget a moment like that and I never will,” Coppock told his lunchmate. “I can remember the full range of my thoughts and emotions and will until the day I die. To call it ‘a haymaker’ doesn’t even begin to describe the impact of that day.”
Still, there were lifelines. He had a contract that extended into 1985, so NBC/Channel 5 owed him a significant amount of money. Beyond his considerable equity in Chicago sports media, he was also on the radar in multiple other major markets.
“If you had told any informed individual in or around Chicago TV news on the day Chet Coppock got fired at Channel 5 back in 1983 that he would never again be a number-one TV sports anchor, he would have guffawed in your face,” the brilliant Gary Deeb - the greatest media critic in the history of Chicago journalism - told a visitor to his native Buffalo a few years back.
“He was simply too impacting,” Deeb added. “He was larger than life, in your face in an in-your-face sports town and reeking of non-stop showmanship. Chet’s a lot of bull [bleep] but it can be very entertaining bull [bleep].”
Above the bull [bleep], the ultra-sharp Jacobs, working with cooler heads inside the NBC/Chicago executive wing, wired together an intriguing solution:
Coppock would be given a nightly sports/talk show on sister-station WMAQ-AM (670). Quite cleverly, the program would be called “Coppock on Sports.” Sports acolyte Cheryl Raye - now the revered Cheryl Raye-Stout of NPR’s WBEZ-FM (91.5) in Chicago - would produce.
Long-form sports/talk in Chicago was still very much a commodity in gestation. There had been bits and pieces throughout the years, notably at-bats like Jack Brickhouse’s “Sports Open Line” on Channel 9, a Bill Berg evening try at WGN-AM (720), a Saturday morning prattler on WBBM-AM (780) manned by Brad Palmer and Rich King.
The closest progenitor to “Coppock on Sports” was also one with a dreadfully miniscule nightly audience. That was a very young Chuck Swirksy’s entree into Chicago sportscasting on the dying WCFL-AM (1000) in 1980. The station was running on fumes with few listeners, fewer resources and a feel of impending doom stronger than Gar Forman on NBA Draft Night.
“Going into ‘COS’, we were working without a net,” Coppock admitted. “But I was very lucky to have some great people around me picking me up, energizing me and the challenge was fantastic - blue-print a four-hour format that would be thoroughly big-league, draw listeners and turn a profit on a legacied 50,000-watt radio station that could hit 38 states five nights a week.
“What carnie wouldn’t want that big top?”
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“Coppock On Sports” wasn’t exactly the Wright Brothers of Chicago sports/talk. It was more like Lindbergh to Paris. But it would greatly expand the profit possibilities of the genre in the market.
Coppock’s colorful TV muscle transitioned amazingly well to radio. Raye proved brilliant at cultivating fresh guests. Their Rolodex was reliable and unmistakably major-league.
That is, even if Chet’s listeners sometimes had every right to think he had pre-taped segments with frequent phone-ins such as LSU men’s basketball boss Dale Brown and veteran NBA assistant Brendan Suhr ready to go in the blink of a scheduled guest’s no-call.
“We were,” Raye-Stout has said with a chuckle, “Nothing if not resourceful.”
Whatever they were, to this day, no reasonable radio or sports media professional can deny that the Coppock/WMAQ show looms as an enormous influencer on all that has since aired in Chicago and other ports o’call.
Said Rick Kaempfer, the veteran radio producer (Steve Dahl, John Landecker, et al) and current media critic for The Illinois Entertainer: “I’ve interviewed scores of radio pros and nearly every one of them pays homage in some way to Chet as the godfather of the industry. He has probably had the greatest influence of any sports radio talent in Chicago history.”
Added Chicago-based Lester Munson, the non pareil legal analyst for ESPN: “[Coppock] is there with Frank Deford, Vin Scully, Dan Jenkins and Jim Murray. He is a unique force. He is a master of all sports platforms - radio, television, print and the Internet. He made it look easy back then and there is no doubt in my mind that he could do it again. He’s one of a kind.”
His off-air image also grew, as always tilting toward the midway. Among other gigs, he emerged as Vince McMahon’s No. 1 ring emcee for WWF events in Chicago.
“My gosh, if you can imagine 18,000 at the Horizon [now AllState Arena in Rosemont] roaring madly as you enter the ring to begin WrestleMania 2, you can imagine what it must be like to be Mick Jagger or Paul McCartney when they take the stage,” Coppock said. “Thinking back, that stuff is so surreal.”
On even grander stages, he landed two platinum-plus endorsement deals. The first began in 1984 as spokesman for the Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana Chevy Dealers. That association would run for 10 years and eventually feature Coppock in TV spots with His Rare and Royal Airness himself - Michael Jordan.
The second was with Wheaties - yes, Wheaties - and put Coppock on national TV screens from Marblehead to Malibu alongside Walter Payton. Jordan-Payton - it was an unprecedented commercial exacta for a Chicago-based sportscaster. For power prestige and exposure, no one has ever come close to matching it.
His comeback after Haymaker Day ’83 at Channel 5, on its own scale, was as electric and engaging as any Ali or Sinatra ever rope-a-doped. He was making close to $200,000 per-year when the TV whip came down and that endline would only increase as “COS” hit.
Even when the dial ran cold at WMAQ-AM in 1988 (the station shifted to a death-star all-news format), Coppock bounded happily, confidently over to WLUP-AM (1000). There he was deigned fair-haired sports lad by then-red hot radio masters Jimmy deCastro and Larry Wert.
He was a force. He was a top-shelf brand. He seemed to have parachutes above safety nets.
Yet deep down, like Paglioccio, he also had the odd enemy within.
Himself.
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“I think the people I piss off are the ones who don’t understand that it’s all an act,” Coppock said.
“It’s Gorgeous George. It’s James Brown. It is prime-time Ali. So much of it - the fur coat, the Beach-Boys blonde hair, the ‘How ya’ doin’ everybody?’
“Those are all points of distinction. I made my bones long ago as a reporter and as an interviewer. The added glitz is just that - added glitz. I would hope my professionalism and reliability are beyond reproach.”
Some in the business agree. Others clearly don’t.
Said the objectively watchful Kaempfer: “I think even Chet would acknowledge that he has somehow managed to burn bridges at every conceivable sports radio outlet in town. He’s a hyperbole machine and he really does assume everyone realizes that. Unfortunately for Chet, sometimes they don’t.”
They don’t these days at ESPN-AM (1000). They certainly don’t these days at WSCR-AM (670), where it seems Coppock has worked overtime to forever alienate a management rightfully reveling in its remarkable 2016. That was the outlet’s banner year in which it hid an uneven talent lineup below carpet coverage and constantly crescendoing play-by-play of the Cubs’ historic march to a World Series title.
(“Selling ‘The Score’ last year was a no-work assignment,” a veteran of the station’s parent CBS/Chicago radio group recently said. “On-air talent became secondary. Everyone wanted to be on the Cubs express. [Ad salesmen] became mere order takers. The hardest part of the job was trying to move lesser accounts to fringe programming parts. It was a long way from AM-820 [the station’s original frequency in 1992].”)
Coppock has become accustomed to the sting of oversight and forgetfulness from people he helped get going in broadcast media. That was a trend that started when Coppock foundlings Terry Boers and Dan McNeil landed choice slots during the modest startup phase of “The Score” and suddenly tried to direct their banal scatch-and-sniff lo-jinks at him. For years, the back-and-forth jabbing was endless. Whizzing down, Coppock gave better than he got.
Coppock himself insists that WSCR architects Dan Lee and Seth Mason tried to woo him away from AM-1000 in late 1991. “But they had no money,” he said. “Mason interviewed me but I wasn’t going to switch back then.”
Even Raye-Stout, once the most hard-core Coppock supporter on the planet, has long been estranged from her one-time boss. The critical crack in that relationship came in 1988, when Coppock moved to AM-1000 and left Raye-Stout at WMAQ, instead hiring the unknown McNeil as his primary producer. (Raye-Stout was later hired as a reporter at AM-1000.)
“I made a mistake,” Coppock says today. “I thought Cheryl would have been eaten alive by the testosterone at AM-1000. Instead, I gave McNeil the biggest break of his life. It proved to be a ‘lose-lose.’ Now, if nothing else, I’d like to see Cheryl get into both The Radio Hall of Fame and The Chicagoland Sports Hall of Fame for her incredible career. I’ve been politicking on her behalf to get both of those initiatives done.”
But is there any politicking left for Coppock to get done to forge his own grand comeback?
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It’s a shame that Eugene O’Neill lifted the phrase “Ah, Wilderness!” all those curtains ago. Because few summations could more succinctly depict the professional strait Chet Coppock is in these days.
He’s not completely lost. And certainly not forgotten. And as the late Brickhouse - godfather to Coppock’s daughter Lyndsey - would say, “They won’t be holding a tag day for Chet Coppock any time soon.”
But frustrated?
“Off the charts,” he admits. “Watching the Cubs win it all last year should have been nothing but wonderful. I mean, we’re talking about a kid from the North Shore who grew up watching Ernie Banks and Gene Baker and Moose Moryn on the North Side and and Nellie Fox and Billy Pierce on the South Side, through Santo and Williams and Cardenal and Sutcliffe and Dawson and Wood and Ross and Rizzo. All of ‘em.
“And for the most part it was wonderful. But there were moments when I couldn’t help but feel how much I could have added to the coverage and sideshows of it all. And that could bring on some bad, bad ‘black dog.’”
Some foxholers have stood steadfastly by him. Most prominent are premier executives John McDonough and Jay Blunk of the Blackhawks, two master craftsmen who have been properly front and center in the organization’s amazing renaissance. They continue to utilize Coppock in an assortment of roles involving alumni and corporate sponsorship events.
Another is Lou Canellis, lead sports anchor at WFLD-Channel 32. Canellis has made Coppock a recurring guest on his Sunday night “The Final Word.” Those outings showcase the currency and sheer presence Coppock has maintained.
On his own, Coppock recently completed his fourth book - this one a biography of the Bears’ unforgettable “Mama’s Boy” Otis Wilson - due out later this year. All of Coppock’s books have been driven by his encyclopedic knowledge of sports and a breezy fluidity as a writer.
“The writing,” he says, “Has helped keep me sane.”
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But the comeback. And the “contenda’” thing. And the relevancy.
“Put me in coach, I’m ready to go,” he says. “If the phone rang today, I could be up and running full steam, on the McCaskeys, on Toews, on Jeffreys, on Butler, on D-Wade, on Quintana, on Maddon, on the Reinsdorfs, the Patriots, on Chris Collins, on Brian Kelly, on all of ‘em, by tomorrow morning.”
But is it too late? Is it asking for a bridge too far?
“Here’s all I can say about what Chet Coppock is all about, in my mind,” said Jiggetts, whose daughter Lauren Jiggetts - also Harvard-educated, just like her father - appears headed for network orbit soon from WMAQ-Channel 5.
“Way back when I was trying to transition from the Bears to broadcasting, Chet could have treated me any way he wanted to when I was interning at Channel 5. And I learned long, long ago, when I was a kid on Long Island, it’s how people who are ‘up’ treat you when you’re a newcomer trying to get a leg up that truly shows what kind of person they are.
“And Chet was fantastic. He was selfless, he was generous, he was tremendous. Within a few years, I was getting NFL gigs with CBS Sports. You don’t move that quickly unless you’re getting some great, sharp mentoring. And that’s simply the way I think Chet is and has always been.
“Now, given the way all the age stuff works on sports talk and in sports media today, who knows? I think the stations that overlook the importance of having some ‘tribal elders’ on air, to connect all the strands, to explain the history and its relevance to what’s happening tomorrow aren’t providing full service to their audience. But hey, I’m an old dog now, so maybe I’m too prejudiced in that compartment.”
Coppock will take any positive prejudice he can get.
That’s because his clock ticks. And he sees Ali and Sinatra on one side. And Terry Malloy and Palookaville on the other.
“When I think of the best of times, the high points, I think a lot of sportscasters would be content with my legacy as it is now,” Coppock concluded. “I’m not. I’ve still got so much to give. And so many ways to glide in somewhere and push a broadcast outlet back toward the top or to even higher vistas than it’s ever been.
“If it is a love thing, it centers on my love for so many things Chicago and the players and fans and coaches and owners and the phenomenal sports culture here. The energy. The sports circus here is the greatest in America. It needs a media ringmaster.”
Talent…fire…hope…karma…comeback…relevancy.
One creative program director with vision, one well-placed phone call.
And “The Godfather of Chicago Sports Talk” will be right back in your sports-loving ear.
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“Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.”- JD Vance
“My god, what an !diot.”- JD Vance tweet on Trump
“I’m a ‘Never Trump’ guy”- JD Vance
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