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Introduction

A Brief History Of Sports Talk Radio

All About Rome

The Importance Of Being Jim Rome

The Long History Of Sports Talk Radio In Madison

How Madison Won A Tour Stop

Now The Real Work Begins: The Setup

The Big Day: Anatomy Of A Jim Rome Tour Stop

To The Winner Goes The Spoils

Click For Pix

Where did it all begin?

Flash back to 1930. Disc jockey John J. Anthony created what is considered the first call-in radio show. Anthony asked his listeners to call him at the station and then he would repeat what they said over the air.

In 1931, NBC launched "The University of Chicago Round Table." That show lasted about a quarter of a century and demonstrated to radio programmers that talk radio could be popular and profitable, especially because it was less expensive than music and dramatic programming.

In 1945, a fateful phone call by big band leader Woody Herman into a radio show took talk radio into a dramatic new direction. Barry Gray, overnight DJ at WMCA, New York, had gotten bored with merely spinning records and decided to converse on the air with Herman who had called the show. The new format was immediately successful which led Gray to conduct more celebrity interviews, take listener phone calls and play less and less music.

And to prove that history is often about the coming of fruition of the inevitable, in the early 1960s, the first all-talk radio stations were born. KMOX, St. Louis, KABC, Los Angeles and KVOR, Colorado Springs pioneered this new format.

The 1980s saw the rise of syndication superstars like Larry King, Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh which paved the way for scores of other national radio hosts and whetted listeners' appetite for talk radio.

Sports talk radio, relatively speaking, is a latecomer to the world of talk radio. Still, sports talk radio can trace its origins to its Cradle of Civilization—Boston.

In the early 1960s, Don Gillis at WHDH would tape a group interview with area sportswriters on Friday night, then play it on the air on Saturday night. Shortly thereafter, another Boston station, WBZ, launched a nightly sports show. Then WBUR, the campus station at Boston University started "The Sports Huddle."

Fast forward to about 1972-1973. Again, in Boston, this time at WEEI, Eddie Andelman started taking phone calls from listeners, thus for the first time allowing listeners to actively participate in sports talk radio.

At about the same time, Ed Beiler hit the airwaves on the previously staid KABC in Los Angeles as "Superfan."

In Alan Eisenstock's book, Sports Talk: A Journey Inside the World of Sports Talk Radio, he recollects Beiler's dramatic debut which changed sports talk radio forever, though frankly, I doubt Eisenstock actually heard this broadcast as he seems to claim. First, his verbatim recollection is just a little too precise. Second, Eisenstock makes anachronistic references to music of the day, but it wasn't of that day. He quotes from Bruce Springsteen's song "Thunder Road," except the year is 1973 and the album Born To Run was not released until 1975. He also mentions listening to Peter Gabriel and The Police, but in 1973-74, that would have been impossible.

Still, it must have been a sensation for whoever heard Beiler introduce himself as Eisenstock quotes:

"My name is Ed Beiler. I know that doesn't mean anything to you right now. So let me tell you who I really am. I am your voice, the voice of the fan, the everyday Joe who can't afford a, a, a beer and a hot dog and shouts bloody murder from the first pitch to the last out because...I paid for my ticket and I am entitled! That's right! I'm the guy sitting behind you who screams like hell when a Dodger player boots a routine grounder or turns an easy fly ball into an adventure. I am also the first guy on my feet when Davey Lopes steals a, a, a base, when Don Sutton strikes out the other team's best hitter, and when Steve Garvey hits one out of the park! I am your best friend and management's worst nightmare! I am...Superfan!"

As Eisenstock writes, "And so it goes. For two straight hours, the man called Superfan rants, rages, screams, shouts, whines, taunts, and wails. He hangs up on callers and hollers at players. He challenges owners to call him and explain where they get the cojones to charge obscene ticket prices and virtually eliminate the very fan who made them rich. It is astonishing radio. It is both fresh and a little bit frightening. I feel like I'm overhearing a drunk in a bar screaming and slurring his opinions until he either throws a punch or passes out. On the radio, Superfan is the vocal equivalent of a train wreck. I know I should turn the dial, but I just can't take my ears off him."

Beiler was ahead of his time, but perhaps a bit too intense, a bit too raw for an audience that just wasn't ready for him. Like a super nova, Beiler quickly burned himself out, getting the boot after railing on the legendary taste treat from Dodger Stadium, the vaunted Dodger Dog.

Throughout the remainder of the 1970s and into the next decade continued the prehistoric period of sports talk radio. While Beiler crashed and burned Andelman built a successful show, and because of this success, station managers around the country decided to add sports talk shows to their roster of news and talk.

Thus new sports talk radio shows popped up gradually around the country, mostly in bigger markets, but eventually in smaller markets as well. While WMAL in Washington D.C. launched "Sports Call" with Ken Beatrice in 1977, Madison, Wisconsin had its own show as well, hosted by longtime Capitol Times sportswriter Mike Lucas. Lucas has continually hosted the weekly show on WIBA AM since 1976, though he has had a variety of co-hosts. Lucas is often called "The Dean of Madison Sports Reporters" and for good reason. Aside from being a sportswriter and a sports talk radio host, he also does color commentary on the radio for University of Wisconsin football and basketball (along Matt LePay, who co-hosts the radio show and does play-by-play) and had previously done radio broadcasts of Wisconsin hockey.

In 1987 came a shocking development which would put sports talk radio in center court. That year, WFAN in New York was born, with the first ever all-sports format, 25 years after the all-talk radio station format had began.

Quickly, the format spread to radio stations in other cities. And then, in yet another bit of historic inevitability, in 1991, the Sports Entertainment Network was born. On January 1, 1992, ESPN Radio hit the airwaves. In September of 1993, One On One purchased the Sports Entertainment Network and renamed it the One On One Sports Radio Network.

Thus began the rapid process of bringing sports talk radio to the hinterlands because without some sort of nationally syndicated or network programming, all-sports radio stations could not work in smaller markets.

WFAN, for instance, is able to support enough on-air staff to go 24-7 with all local talent. That is because a market like New York can generate enough revenue to pay a staff that large.

Thus, with programming available from ESPN Radio and One On One Sports, WHIT in Madison, Wisconsin, a station only allowed to broadcast during daylight hours, was able to go all-sports starting in 1994. Renamed The Team, WHIT pioneered the all-sports format in Madison and showed the market that the format could be successful. After a few years, nighttime programming began getting broadcast on a sister station within the radio group. Soon after that, other players entered the market and joined the all or mostly all-sports fray.

Still, in 1994, when WHIT The Team was born, the sports talk networks were still in their infancy. ESPN Radio didn't feature big stars like Dan Patrick back then, nor did One On One. Shows like "Gameday" and "Gamenight" anchored ESPN's programming, with Tony Bruno and Chuck Wilson, who's still at ESPN, discussing ongoing games and later the results of all the day's games, along with interviews and commentary—and also a bit of arguing and joking. Initially, ESPN was more about sports news than personality, though Bruno was quite the personality in his own right, thus exhibited one night when college football pundit Beano Cook was on the show and Bruno was literally yelling and screaming at him. When Bruno finally quit his tirade. Cook responded in a quiet voice which barely hid his anger and said, "You know nothing about college football."

The all-sports format spread like wildfire. In 1996, less than 10 years after the birth of WFAN, Sports Illustrated reported the number of all-sports radio stations at 157 and said that Nanci Donnellan, a.k.a. The Fabulous Sports Babe, sports talk radio's first national star, could be heard on 215 stations. By 1999, according to Mediaweek, the number of all-sports stations had risen to more than 200.

According to Pamela Haag, author of "'The 50,000-Watt Sports Bar': Talk Radio and the Ethic of the Fan," there was good reason for the meteoric rise of sports talk radio, once WFAN took the plunge into the all-sports format and following the birth of the all-sports radio networks.

Haag states that following the Federal Communications Commission's efforts toward deregulating electronic media, which began in 1981, there was a need for niche radio programming. That year, immediately following the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, the FCC loosened restrictions on the buying and selling of radio stations and abolished requirements that stations provide minimum amounts of news and public affairs programming, as well as the "fairness doctrine" which mandated that stations provide "reasonable opportunities" for opposing views when stations would cover controversial topics.

Radio stations became more about business and less about community service, and as radio stations became more expensive to buy, media conglomerates grew, which became the only entities able to do so. The mom and pop radio station quickly became a thing of the past.

Syndicated programming grew in importance because it was so much less expensive than local programming, both in terms of on-air talent and programming formats and actual broadcasts. After all, why pay Dr. Johnny Fever to come and play his music when you can pay a national company to tell some college kid what to play, especially when the college kid will work for next to nothing.

Stations no longer were locally and individually owned. Management has to see that the station can pay tribute to its corporate master. Thus the bottom-line is that much more important. Thus the savings seen through the use of syndicated and network programming is that much more important.

Thus niche formats become that much more important. Thus demographics are everything. Along those lines, the growth of the sports talk format is interesting, because overall, sports talk doesn't rate very well. If one looks from market, to market, to market, one will find all-sports stations rated near the bottom.

However, what makes sports talk radio effective from a business point of view is that the demographic is not just reliable; it is ironclad. It's men, 25-54. From a demographic point of view, the listenership is relatively pure, meaning few listeners step outside of the targeted demographic which is pure gold to the advertisers, and despite the frequent jokes on "The Jim Rome Show" about his listeners being unemployed and living in Mom's and Dad's basement, the reality is that the average sports talk radio listener is reasonably affluent and likes to spend money.

Another thing that makes sports talk radio listeners attractive is loyalty. Essentially, these guys are sports fans and they exhibit that same kind of fannish, even clannish behavior in their radio listening.

Sports fandom and sports talk radio fandom go hand in hand. Be it locally or nationally, it's all about community. Think back to the earliest days of professional sports. While on a national scale, the NFL wasn't terribly significant in 1937, its individual teams were very important to their communities. It was all about boosterism. The success of a team was very important to the self-esteem of a community. This was especially true with the smaller cities which had professional teams before World War II. Remember, the Green Bay Packers were not always the aberration they are now.

This sense of community extends to sports talk radio as well. Regardless of where one lives and who they root for, they are all sports fans, and as listeners and callers on their favorite show, they are all united by that fact. And they are united by their fandom of their favorite show as well.

Therefore, the spread of sports talk radio to the American hinterlands was something that, given the circumstances, was absolutely, unequivocally inevitable, no question.

But as a product, sports talk radio had a long way to go back in 1994. For instance, I remember here in Madison, The Team used to broadcast programming out of Washington DC during the week, presumably because ESPN was not broadcasting on a Wednesday afternoon.

Here was the quandary. The infrastructure was in place, the listenership was there and eager for something they could sink their teeth into.

Then came the beginning of a revolution and it came from a Babe in Boyland (by the way, that's the name of Nanci Donnellan's autobiography.)

The Fabulous Sports Babe had been doing a sports talk radio show at KJR, Seattle. On July 4, 1994, she made her national debut on ESPN Radio. The show, with a mere 30 local affiliates, was ESPN's first call-in show and quickly created a sensation. Two years later, she had 215 affiliates.

Loud, brassy and abrasive, but intelligent and fun, Donnellan shook the world of sports talk radio to its foundation. This was entertainment. This was fast-paced and exciting, and because it was caller driven, it was unpredictable.

Donnellan was no Janey-come-lately. She landed her first sports talk show in Tampa in the early 1980s. Her nickname came when she broadcast from home while laid up with a bad back. She joked with the listeners about coming and spending an afternoon "in bed with a fabulous babe."

Her show was classically in-your-face. One day of the week was "Geek of the Week Day," which she was announced by yelling at the top of her lungs several times during that show, "It's geeeeeeeeeeee of the week daaaaaaaaay!" Everytime she would do that, she would then complain about the popsicle headache pains piercing her head.

Donnellan's show featured numerous sound-affects and a variety of well-worn shtick. New callers would identify themselves as virgins and implore the host to "be gentle." Callers would call her "momma" and, for the first time ever in national sports talk radio, were expected to perform. A bad phone call resulted in the caller being tossed rather ceremoniously with the sound of a burning fuse followed by an exploding bomb.

But alas, Donnellan's day in the sun would not last long. A few years later, following a contract dispute with ESPN, she would find herself out of a job. She later popped up at Sports Fan Radio Network, which featured JT The Brick, who was the winner of the first Smack Off on "The Jim Rome Show" and is now on Fox Radio, but again found herself out of work when SFRN was shut down due by its financially strapped parent company.

Still, while there can be no doubt of the importance of the Fabulous Sports Babe, what she did is analogous to the Spartans preeminence following the Peloponnesian War. In the end, what it really accomplished was clearing the way for another conqueror, Alexander the Great. Thus, as Donnellan's star began to fade, another star began growing increasingly bright and his time slot overlapped with Donnellan's, who he would soon overtake and replace as sports talk radio's big star.

Jim Rome went national in 1995 when Premier syndicated his show, three years after it originated on XTRA, San Diego, five years after he'd been hired at the station as a roving reporter.

Rome and his stock rose quickly after he had gotten his own show. By 1993, he had a show on ESPN2. However, notoriety turned to infamy following the "Chris Everitt" incident where NFL quarterback Jim Everitt attacked Rome on the set with the cameras running.

Regarding the incident, Rome would probably say this was a case where the adage that no publicity is bad publicity is not actually true. Coast to coast, Rome was lambasted. He lost his television show. One might argue that the Premier syndication deal might have come sooner if not for the incident, or perhaps had he still had a relationship with ESPN, maybe he might have been offered a show on ESPN Radio. Maybe he might have gotten the show that was given to the Fabulous Sports Babe.

None of those maybes really matter anyway. Rome got his syndication deal and grew to be the biggest name in sports talk radio. Today, his show is by far the highest rated sports talk radio show in the country and is in the top ten overall. Rome is a perennial member of Talkers annual "Heavy Hundred" list of most influential talk radio personalities.

In the process, he revolutionized sports talk radio. He made stars out of the callers. No sports talk show had been as caller driven as The Jungle. His adage, "Have a take and don't suck," called on the callers to rise to a minimum level of competence. To facilitate this, he created competition between the callers with the "Huge Call" and "Huge Fax" (now huge e-mail) awarded in the final two segments of the show.

In the process, he created something bigger than that. The Jungle is a culture in and of itself, with its own language, history and customs. The Tour Stops are symptomatic of this fact. Why else would 10,000 people come to Madison, Wisconsin in December from all over the Midwest and all over the country? A Jim Rome Tour Stop is above and beyond anything that has ever been seen in sports talk radio, or radio in general.

There are many reasons one can attempt to ascribe to this phenomenon, but one thing that needs to be stressed about Rome and what he brought to sports talk radio is that he made it hip. He brought Rock and Roll to what had been a pretty square medium. For sports talk radio to grow into what it is today, this had to happen. Remember, the key to sports talk radio is the demographic. Rome secured the younger half of that 25-54 age group.

My theory about this is that when you look at the previous generation of sports talk hosts, people like Ken Beatrice or Lee "Hacksaw" Hamilton, they come from a time where America was much more polarized than it is now, in terms of politics and culture. When I think of Beatrice or Hacksaw, I flash back to a spoof of Peanuts in Mad Magazine where the kids are teenagers. It's the 1960s and the Peanuts gang is into protest, drugs, sex and Rock and Roll, except poor uncool Charlie Brown, who's vainly trying to drum up interest in a pep rally and just can't seem to understand the apathy of his friends.

This is the first generation of sports talk radio hosts, guys who were into sports at a time when it wasn't cool. Sure, I can believe that Chet Coppock is a legitimate hep cat, but Papa Joe Chevalier is the Dad who embarrasses his kids when he talks about Elvis and Roy Orbison in front of their friends.

Times are different. Today Republicans listen to Punk Rock.

Also, Rome is of the first generation that grew up, or partially grew up with sports talk radio. Rome has said he didn't go out of his way revolutionize sports talk radio; he simply knew that to succeed, he needed to do something that was not the same as what everyone else was doing. Still, I have to believe that having listened to sports talk radio as a teenager or even younger, Rome had to have been developing a sense of what he liked and what he did not like.

Rome brought star power to sports talk radio. Thanks to Rome, ESPN Radio gave shows to Dan Patrick and Tony Kornheiser. Even a more journalistically oriented network like Sporting News Radio has brought in some bigger names, like James Brown.

Of course, if it had not been Rome, it probably would have been somebody else. Subsequently, sports talk radio grew to the point where, at the beginning of the new millennia, big-time corporate money got involved. Sure, ESPN Radio had been around since 1992, and, of course, is owned by ABC. However, ESPN Radio was an easy spin-off from ESPN, so a major investment was not really required.

Fox Broadcasting had decided to go into radio. Fox purchased Premier, which syndicates Jim Rome. In the summer of 2000, Fox Radio was launched.

Sometime in 2000 (exactly when is hard to determine), Clear Channel Communications purchased Fox Broadcasting, which meant that the largest radio station ownership group in the country now also owned a fledgling sports talk radio network, along with the syndication rights for the biggest names in radio, including Rush Limbaugh and Jim Rome.

It can be argued that, as a radio network, Fox has not had much impact. However, the existence of the network had a huge impact, especially in the area of infrastructure. Essentially, here's a brand new network that is owned by a company which owns hundreds of radio stations across the country and is willing to use its influence to get this new network on the air.

For instance, The Team in Madison began running Fox programming because it had gotten a clear message that if it did not run Fox programming, there would be a chance it would not be able to renew its contract for "The Jim Rome Show" which was soon due to expire. However, The Team also continued to run programming from One On One Sports. When The Team announced it was not willing to be exclusively a Fox Sports Radio affiliate, Premier took Jim Rome to the other side of Highway 14 to ESPN 1070.

Shortly thereafter, in late 2000, Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and owner of the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trailblazers, purchased One On One Sports and merged it with The Sporting News, which he had bought earlier that year. Thus Sporting News Radio was born. It was no longer the sole proprietor ship it had always been, but now was a multimedia enterprise with the synergy of two sports news organizations and the backing of a major conglomerate with an active interest in both sports and technology.

A few months later, the Sports Fan Radio Network shut its doors for good.

On Thursday, April 5 at approximately 3:30 PM, without warning, Sports Fan sent a faxes to its affiliates explaining that all programming, other than the afternoon and overnight version of "The Brickhouse" and the evening show with Scott Ferrall would be discontinued.

The downsizing of Sports Fan Radio occurred due to financial problems suffered by parent company Winstar Communications. The same day Sports Fan sent the infamous faxes, Winstar layed off about 2000 employees.

Winstar was primarily an Internet and broadband based company, and like many Internet companies, its stock had taken a beating. In the previous year, Winstar's stock had dropped from an all-time high of about $45 per share to an all-time low of $.21.

A class action lawsuit had been filed against Winstar. The plaintiffs allege that Winstar had misrepresented the financial health of the company to investors and would-be investors.

A cash-strapped Winstar had been searching for a buyer and/or investor to infuse the company with much-needed capital. One rumored buyer publicly stated that it had no intention of purchasing Winstar.

And apparently, Winstar needed the cash. April 16, Winstar announced that it would be unable to pay off a debt that it had incurred with Lucent. Winstar also stated it may file Chapter 11 reorganization in the near future.

Less than two months later, Winstar pulled the plug on "The Brickhouse." Ironically, the show resurfaced in the fall on Fox Sports Radio.

Today, sports talk radio is a high stakes game where a well-heeled, multimedia approach is required for success, especially considering where technology may take us in the future. The Internet melded nicely with sports talk radio, especially once hosts and networks began to utilize its potential. The Internet also has changed sports talk radio.

E-mail and instance messaging makes sports talk radio more interactive. Electronic bulletin boards and chat rooms built sports talk shows into communities which function 24/7. Higher modem speeds allow people to listen to sports talk radio on their computers and have also facilitated the growth of broadband. Sporting News Radio maintains a whole vault of taped interviews which can be downloaded and heard at the listener's convenience. The Jungle website sells subscriptions which allow people to download interviews or even entire shows.

And where does it go from here?

Satellite radio and Internet radio have arrived, but where's the impact? Satellite radio is probably still too expensive to replace what most of us have in our cars. Internet radio is too cumbersome, but what if they made a wireless Internet car radio? Would this spark a revolution of pirate sports talk radio? Smaller outfits have launched Internet sports talk radio networks, but only with limited success. Again, a big part of the problem is that the hardware is just too clunky and also, it's the old "tree falling in the woods" thing. What good is having a radio network if no one knows about it?

Still, we have seen in various ways, in various contexts, that the Internet has enormous grassroots potential, nationally and even internationally. Whether this will come to fruition in the arena of sports talk radio remains to be seen, but if one uses one's imagination, there could be some very interesting results if this potential is ever realized.