Mac, you are one of a kind. Love your style. You're the only real thing we have in this City right now.

A few Questions:

Why don't you guys ever try to get crazy with getting top guests on? I mean maybe even Top Guests from time to time who maybe aren't even trying to shamelessly plug anything.

It would be cool to have Mike Tyson on, or have a recurring segment where you like have a top or even an up-and-coming comedian on every Thursday or something. How has local guy Pat McGann or other local comedians never been on a show?

Kind of like how Joe Rogan, etc. does it. Shit, have him on! You don't have to be tied to sports or even touch politics to be super "Interesting Radio".

Also if you fuck someone like they are a millionaire they might go try to be one.

I don't like white rappers.

I was thinking about this the other day as well. They used to regularly have non sports guests with a sports tie in and frequently those people were pretty fun. Some were duds but some became regulars.

I would bet a guy like Obama would have an interest in getting on the phone for 15 minutes and talking Sox. In fact, I'd be really surprised if he didn't listen to the Score at some point in his life.

Ashton Kutcher is a huge Bears fan. He might be fun in a whacked out sort of way.

I always thought it would be fun for The Score to have a screening of that movie from a few years ago Big Fan about the guy who calls in to sports radio. I'd love to see a guy like Maddux Boy sitting in the front row unironically taking notes to critique the show afterwards.

I apologize to The Hawk

They should book R.Kelly.

They should book R.Kelly.

I apologize to The Hawk

Are you stoned or pissed off, or both, when you create these postings?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/ct-spt-wscr-dan-mcneil-mental-health-facebook-20190118-story.html

I apologize to The Hawk

Sharing a vulnerability uncommon among sports radio hosts, WSCR-AM 670’s Dan McNeil laid himself bare in a post-midnight Facebook post Friday.

McNeil, 57, apparently was triggered by a text from a listener who informed him he had been selected in the listener’s so-called dead pool in which the deaths of those chosen score points weighted toward the decedent’s relative youth.


Despite initially seeming to laugh off the note as he might on the air — “Give the dude credit for a sound investment strategy; I’m a good ‘value pick’ in a pool like that” — McNeil responded with soulful ruminations on living with vices, mental health issues and suicide.

Then he shared the impact he imagined his death would have on his three grown sons.



“I must confess, this guy got to me,” McNeil wrote. “I even cried a few times. Daydreaming about my sons’ sadness over the void in their lives is an optic I’d just as soon avoid.

“What kind of human has so much contempt for a radio show, he wishes for — at the minimum, bets on — a guy’s death? So, hoping that guy is reading this — as I did on the air, hoping he was listening — I want him to quickly meet my sons, now bereaved by the loss of their dad.”

McNeil envisioned Van, 28, dumping his ashes up in Eagle Lake, Ontario.

“I want him to do it in the water where he releases his next” muskie, he wrote, urging his eldest to “sing a fishing parody we did and laugh. Don’t be blue. Be joyous over good times had.”

McNeil said he hoped his youngest son, Jack, 24, would steer clear of sadness the first time he plays drums in front of a crowd of 500.

But most affecting were McNeil’s reflections on autistic son Patrick, 25.

“His sadness is my biggest fear,” McNeil wrote. “Fear isn’t strong enough. It … takes my breath away. He doesn’t have typical friends. He’s verbal, but not conversational. I am his life soulmate and he is mine.

“Patrick already has expressed being terrified over the eventual passing of loved ones. He’s close to very few and my departure would be catastrophic for him. He still asks me to tickle him when he goes to bed. He has the spirit and doting eyes of a 5-year-old looking at daddy.”



But McNeil also took unsparing and clear-eyed stock of himself as he edges toward the end of middle-age.

“I still smoke,” McNeil wrote. “Still 30 pounds too fat. I love coffee. Exercise is finding the remote when it’s lost in the sofa cushions. Publicly, I’ve been forthright about the toxins I’ve ingested. For decades.

“Mental illness runs in my family. I’ve been diagnosed depressive — and some other fancy polysyllabic word better defined by the phrase ‘bi-polar lite.’ I take a pysch med, Lamotrigine, and do talk therapy. I do my best to have gratitude therapy at least once a day.”

McNeil then noted that the children of a parent who commits suicide are more likely to do the same.

“Bet the texter who took me didn’t know I even had that on my dead pool candidate resume,” McNeil wrote. “Sometimes I get defensive, but I don’t think I'm fragile.”

McNeil returned to WSCR-AM last year for the third stint there of his 30-year-plus Chicago sports radio career. He co-hosts with Danny Parkins weekday afternoons on The Score from 1 to 6 p.m.

In an interview later Friday, McNeil said he felt fine. He called the feedback he had received regarding the Facebook post as well as an earlier on-air discussion of the text “amazing.”

“Sometimes I get a therapeutic benefit, as cliched as this sounds, from navigating my way through darkness publicly to find some light,” he said.

McNeil said he hasn’t “been happier at work in many years” and has “stopped doubting if I want to do this for a lot longer because I have got the right guys around me and I'm in a good place.”

It has been almost 20 years since a listener’s taunt got to him, he said. Someone left a voicemail in 2000 that included a vulgar, gratuitous potshot at a member of McNeil’s family.

“That cut me but was a great thing because it helped me develop a Teflon (shield) I might not have had,” McNeil said. “It was good in that I decided I was not going to let people who are unimportant in my life have free rent in my head.

“Until Wednesday, when that guy sent me that text, I hadn’t been cut by somebody in a long time. But it gave me a good chance to do some inventory and hopefully that post or that conversation on the air (about the text) was interesting to a few people and reached a few people where it matters.”

Are you stoned or pissed off, or both, when you create these postings?

I am not a legal expert, how many times do I have to say it?

Mac should have just told the guy to die in a fire.

Mac should have just told the guy to die in a fire.

We all have our triggers, I say this again, if Mac is reading, you bring joy to me as a radio listener. You are both fun and funny.

I love the new midday show. Unlike the past one that was probably the worst show in the history of the score, this one is two imperfect people(who say it themselves) who have quality sports content and a fun time.

yeah cuz that's so original and hurtful. You always have the worst 'insults'

I am not a legal expert, how many times do I have to say it?

I apologize to The Hawk

Die in a fire.

It's more fun to be a victim

There will never be an effective vaccine. I'll never get one anyway.

Its cool that when Mac's feelings get hurt, he finds a way to keep his name in the news and likely make some money off of it! (any publicity is good publicity)

Much more efficient than us slobs.

That's USA ALL-American resourcefulness, brother!

sabu, your hostility is misguided. I am not in a deadpool. Considered one this year (85 & over) but passed. More importantly, if I DID get in one, I sure as fuck wouldn't notify anybody I chose.

sabu, your hostility is misguided. I am not in a deadpool. Considered one this year (85 & over) but passed. More importantly, if I DID get in one, I sure as fuck wouldn't notify anybody I chose.

Mac, when's the last time you ate a pain pill?

Last time you attended a meeting?

It sounds like everyone but Terry was high as a kite.

The victims are the American People and the Republic itself.

NO