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I went to a charity dinner last night (I wonder if spmack was there?!) and I met some Score salesmen who gave me the inside scoop on the Super Fan Dan the Sales Manager firing. Here goes: Dan was very good pals with WXRT sales manager/GM Michael Damsky back when they were in the old WXRT-WSCR on Belmont. Dan left WXRT to run WSCR downtown. Damsky got fired by CBS & joined WLS. Damsky liked Richman AND wanted to stick it to CBS so he convinced Richman to quit WSCR for WLS. BUT, as this was being debated, WLS corporate announced a hiring freeze. so Richman was hung out to dry waiting. WSCR got mad at Richman for being a traitor and fired him. (footnote: also in retaliation, CBS fired Damskys daughter from B96 sales!) PHEW!
Some significant untruths here. This part is true: Dan Richman was my protege and top AE at XRT and WSCR from 1992-2004, at which time he left to become the LSM then GSM of The Score. He is still my best friend. It is also true that I was fired from XRT about a year ago. The topic of Dan coming to work for me as the GSM of WLS-FM came up in the middle of last summer, shortly after I started as the Director of Sales over both WLS AM and FM. It was not "to stick it to CBS," but rather because it started to become apparent that Dan's time at The Score was going to come to an end. We talked very seriously about the possibility, but he was tremendously loyal to The Score and very much wanted to see if he could make a go of it there- Dan took himself out of the running for GSM of WLS-FM. There was never a hiring freeze at Citadel; when Dan bowed out, I simply firmed up a deal with the other candidate for the job, another long-time associate from my XRT days- Clif Wilson; the turn-around on Clif's hiring was less than 48 hours, with no push-back from Citadel. Dan's ultimate departure from CBS had nothing to do with the fact that he and I talked about a job- his boss, Paul Agase, and I are also very close and we all wanted to do what was right for Danny. In the end, CBS just felt they needed to make a number of changes in WXRT and WSCR management- Dan was oput, Agase went from combo GM to Score GSM, and Rod Zimmerman took over as the GM of both stations. Lastly, my daughter was not fired from CBS in retaliation for any discussions I had with Richman, or for that matter as a consequence of my being fired from CBS. She wanted to move to internet sales and took a job with Yahoo before I even went to work at WLS.