Tag Archives: wfan

Media Morons, Sports

One Shining Moment With Mike Francesa and Marie

I grew up listening to WFAN. Since that was (and continues to be) the Mets’ flagship station, my mom had pretty much every radio in the house tuned to it. Mike and the Mad Dog could be heard in my house post-school on any given weekday, with that duo just beginning to rail against their Target of the Day as we got off the bus.

Mike and the Mad Dog basically invented sports talk radio as we know it; i.e., two loud guys screaming at callers and each other for several hours. Growing up in a non-cable household, and thus cut off from ESPN and most televised games (particularly baseball), this was my family’s only pipeline to the world of sports and the discussion thereof in the heady First Bush/Early Clinton years, a time of tumultuous change.

With the advent of the internet, however, it seems like sports radio is an idea whose time has passed. When you can comment on a story on almost any major news site, or even start a sports-related blog of your own, waiting on hold for an hour to possibly talk to some imperious host for 8 seconds has a lot less appeal than it once did.

It has even less appeal when it comes to Mike Francesa. I don’t know if he became unlistenable after his break-up with Chris “Mad Dog” Russo, or if he simply suffers from comparison to the modern internet-powered array of alternatives. In either case, I’ve come to find his brand of pomposity and shit-stirring intolerable. It doesn’t help that he is a first-degree troll when it comes to the Mets, an expert at tapping into the Self-Loathing Troglodyte segment of the team’s fanbase. I certainly don’t look at the team through rose-colored glasses, but that doesn’t mean I want to hear its every move sneered at by default, either.

I once listened to Francesa every day, whether I liked what he had to say or not, because, well, that’s what you did, right? These days, I feel no need to tune into something that pushes my buttons so much, especially when there’s so many other places I can go to that fulfill the same function as his show and then some.

On the rare occasions when I have listened in the last few years, the show seems to skew painfully old. I hear a large proportion of callers who are firmly in the Early Bird Special set, asking Francesa questions they could easily have answered via Google. (“Hey Mikey, what time does that Knicks game start tonight?”) More and more, his audience sounds like it’s made up exclusively of people who the Internet Age has left by the wayside. It’s fine and good that this crowd still has a place to commune, but it sounds like something that will age itself out of existence, and soon.

However, this demographic means you get glorious moments such as this one, which I heard in the car on my way to pick up my daughter from school yesterday. In it, Marie from Long Branch takes a hilariously long time to figure out that you can’t listen to a radio show and talk on the phone at the same time. Then, she repeats everything Francesa says for the benefit of her husband Louie before cutting to the chase: she wants in on a promotion the station is doing with McDonalds. Francesa grants her wish and finds out exactly what she likes to get in excruciating detail. Quarter pounder…fries…iced tea….entire geological age passes…

Then Francesa asks about her favorite teams and promises to send her something during the baseball season. At this point, three-plus minutes into the phone call, we discover that Marie thought she was talking to a WFAN underling, not Francesa, the whole time.

Later, we learn a bit about Marie and Louie’s met-cute backstory, and even hear from Louie himself, all of which is actually kind of endearing. (I’m a softy; sue me.) Still, the first three minutes of this call are some of most unintentionally hilarious radio I’ve heard in years. It made me laugh so hard, I literally punched my steering wheel (because laughter makes me angry).

Whatever else you want to say about Francesa, this is something you could not hear anywhere else. Take that however you will.

For a better audio clip of the tail end of this call, click here. Thanks to @CoreyNYC and @WFANAudio for sending the audio and video my way.

Baseball

Next Up on The FAN: Questions of Great Thelogical Import

In the wake of another disappointing weekend for the Mets (during which they could conceivably have swept the Cardinals but only managed one win, and that one a 20-inning purgatorial nightmare), the WFAN airwaves were rife with distraught fans declaring their disgust. But while most callers employed the harshest language radio would allow, one Mike Francesa listener had loftier thoughts on her mind.

Yes, you heard right. Kathy thinks the Mets need Jesus. And not Jesus as in “Jesus Christ, can’t this team do anything right?!” No, she seems to honestly believe the Mets, as a team, need to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Why? “That team is horrible!” Because as we all know, only righteous, pious teams win championships. Just look at the Mets’ last World Series-winning team. The 1986 Mets were a collection of clean-living souls who only played baseball in between their seminary studies and mission trips to Guatemala.

Let’s give Kathy the benefit of the doubt. It’s possible she was being hyperbolic or facetious, or perhaps she’s really young and has no context on which to draw (ie, the hundreds of championship teams whose off-the-field behavior indicated they had very little use for religion). Or maybe she was actually being sincere and thinks born again-ing your team will lead to success on the field. She’s entitled to that opinion (just as I am entitled to skewer it). Regardless, Francesa’s response was more wackadoo than the question.

Granted, this is a touchy subject. If you’re behind the mic, you don’t want be overly dismissive and offend anyone, but you also don’t want to open the floodgates to start a religious discussion on a sports talk show. Basically, you want this line of inquiry to disappear ASAP. If this was me, I’d be tempted to say, “Why should Jesus give a shit about a sports team?” But the safer response would be, “I’m not touching this with a ten foot pole.”

Francesa, who has a few decades’ worth of experience on the radio, clearly wants to go this route. But in so doing, he lets loose a brief, bizarre critique of this woman’s statement. To wit: Why would Jesus choose the Mets over somebody else?

That’s a fair assessment, Mike. Clearly the heavens have not turned their attention the Mets, unless it’s some malevolent trickster god like Loki.

Sports

Let Us Now Praise Famous Schmoozers

steve-somers.jpgBecause of my well-documented dislike of the zeppelin-sized Mike Francesa, I often use his home station–WFAN–as a byword for sports talk idiocy. But all is not lost on the self proclaimed New York’s #1. Well, most of it is lost (or, to use Francesa’s vernacular, LAWST!!!), but there is one chunk of the broadcasting weekday that isn’t a total waste of time. I am speaking, of course, of Steve Somers, aka The Schmooze.

I was reminded of Somers’ greatness by a recent appreciation of him written by Michael Brendan Dougherty over at The Awl. Mr. Dougherty usually writes for The American Conservative, so I assume he and I don’t see eye to eye on a number of issues. But love of Steve Somers transcends petty political differences.

As Dougherty deftly points out, Somers is the anti-Francesa (without ever mentioning Francesa by name). This is especially pronounced because Somers’ show comes on right after The Sports Pope. Francesa acts as the judge, jury, and executioner of his own little courtroom, making pronouncements and banging his gavel against anyone who dares disagree with him.

Worst of all, he never sounds happy. Ironically, his two biggest sports loves (if you can call it love) are New York’s two most successful teams: The Yankees and the Giants. And yet, their triumphs never seem to bring him any satisfaction. They just fuel more tweaking of the teams he doesn’t like. Perhaps because he’s so used to winning (by proxy), he simply expects victory, and so can’t enjoy it. He’s only satisfied when making other people miserable.

Somers’ favorites are perennial losers or hard luck teams like the Mets, Jets, and Rangers (he’s the only WFAN personality who actually talks about hockey, save Boomer Esiaison). And yet, there is always joy in his voice. Or at least a kind resigned, bemused attitude of oy, can you believe this? His attitude reminds you that, even though sports can give us agita and make us want to tear our hair out, at the end of the day they’re supposed to be fun. The season’s going down the toilet? Laugh about it already!

He opens all his shows with the same greeting: “Good evening to you and how you be?” Then he launches into a long, pun-filled monologue (he refers to the injury plagued Mets as the Medical-politans), occasionally spiced with audio collages. It’s difficult for callers to bash his favorite teams because he is usually the first one to dig at them. If a caller does manage to take a shot at The Schmooze, he will defuse the hostility with self-deprecating humor.

But my favorite Somers move comes on those rare occasions when he does have something to gloat about. He will speak long and slow and in a barely audible voice about a game, building up to his point at a glacial pace, then all of a sudden say, “and then THIS!”, followed by a soundbite of an amazing play from the game. It always kills me.

When a caller praises Francesa, he gives a perfunctory thanks and urges them to get on with their point. When a caller praises Somers, he sounds genuinely touched and says something like, “I’m happy enough to have a job already!” Perhaps it’s false modesty, but it must be hard to get a big head when your show is regularly preempted to broadcast Nets games.

In a way, Somers reminds me of the previous generation of sports radio voices, like Mel Allen and Bob Murphy. They didn’t exactly ask hard hitting questions, but they never ceased to be amazed that they actually worked in sports. It’s an attitude that runs completely counter to the trend in sports yakking. In order to get on sports radio or ESPN these days, you have to be loud, obnoxious, have some sort of schtick, and usually be very ANGRY about a subject that shouldn’t warrant such vitriol. Somers, on the other hand really does sound like he’s happy to have any job, let alone to talk about sports for a living.

It is we who should be grateful that Somers is where he is, doing what he does. So here’s to you, Schmooze, one of the good ones.