Live sports, please come back! Whether or not there are fans in the stands, I don’t care. After spending an hour on Sunday watching the world championship of a team video game called Rocketball, I am ready to watch real people play real games in real time. Earlier this week, I watched a computer simulation […]
As an intern in the sports office at WGN Radio in Chicago, I worked with Chuck Swirsky, Randy Minkoff, Wayne Larivee, and Dwayne Staats. It was a great place to learn among broadcasters who have had long careers doing what they love. My hero in the sports broadcast business was Jack Brickhouse, with whom I probably […]
Entercom fired a bunch of radio professionals yesterday. Believe it or not, that saddens me more for the company than the individuals who were told to pack a box. Big media companies, despite their insistence to the contrary, are mostly the same. They are too big to quickly pivot or embrace that their most important […]
You get to a certain level of life experience, and no level of stupidity surprises you anymore. HBO’s documentary “The Scheme” debuted last night, and the idiocy and greed in college basketball was so thick among all participants that I was stunned by it. Christian Dawkins was a runner for a sports agent who built relationships […]
Former Harlem Globetrotter Curly Neal died yesterday at age 77. Kids in the 1970s knew two of the Globetrotters – Meadowlark Lemon and Curly. Meadowlark was hilarious – a nonstop cascade of basketball comedy. Curly had a shaved head and smiled all the time. Both were featured prominently on Scooby Doo episodes and the strange […]
Local radio helps communities connect, and that connection is needed more than ever as we have been forced to withdraw from personal contact by the Coronavirus pandemic. Somehow, some way, radio is best at building one-on-one relationships. We feel connected with hosts is a way that just doesn’t happen with other media. Maybe it’s because […]