“The readout from our sports-radio diagnostic noted the following: Hosts don’t necessarily maintain the air of swamis. Callers have been downsized or have fled. News updates are anachronistic. Why do we still listen to sports radio?”
– Bryan Curtis in his Grantland feature on national sports radio host Scott Ferrall
Having taken increasing responsibilities on a hockey radio show over the past few years (shameless plug here for Hockey on Campus, Saturdays and Sundays during college hockey season on SiriusXM NHL Network Radio), I have thought a lot about sports radio and its future. Reading the above quote in this weekend’s Grantland profile of CBS Sports Radio host Scott Ferrall stopped my eyes in their tracks.
Why do I listen to sports radio, and why did I start given that I’ve never been a member of the genre’s key demographics?
I feel completely old by saying this, but when I started listening to sports radio, my city had just one show for two hours on weeknights. That was it. I started actively listening as a 11 year old, while my friends were busy calling our Top 40 station to ask for the last gasps of New Kids on the Block and the new sounds of Mariah Carey. (Don’t worry, I also joined them in singing Emotions into my hairbrush (and having my sister ask me to please stop because I sounded like a dying animal.)
Every evening during dinner, my father and I would turn on the Bob Matthews Show on Rochester’s WHAM 1180. Our family dinners were spent listening to Matthews, a longtime columnist for the Democrat and Chronicle, and whichever guests he had on that night. My father and I would argue with the radio, but we would never call the show. I remember wanting to a few times because I had strong feelings regarding some football topic (probably that I felt they were giving Dallas Cowboys’ quarterback Troy Aikman way too much credit for something), but my father always waved me off. “You’re a girl. They’d never put you on the air.”
I was a girl in the early 1990s, and because of that, conversations with my father and listening to Rochester’s one sports radio show were the only football and hockey content beside the newspaper I had. This was back when ESPN showed more sporting events than endless hours of SportsCenter, so it wasn’t like I had a plethora of talking heads to listen to. Never mind chatting about sports at school – there just were not a lot of sports fans at my creative and performing arts high school. I was an odd duck.
Even though sports radio was never made for me – it was made for men like my father, and still is – listening gave me a sense of belonging. There were other odd ducks like me who talked quarterback rating and defenses. Maybe, someday, I would find some of these people in person.
When I moved to Boston in 2004, I listened heavily to sports radio again because I didn’t know many people yet and thus couldn’t have sports conversations in person. (I guess I could have saddled on up to a bar and just started those conversations up with strangers, but I didn’t quite have that gumption.) A few years later, I spent weekend overnights at my then-boyfriend’s parents’ house, where I was regulated to the guest room. Nervous and unfamiliar with the setting, I kept the clock radio in the room tuned quietly to sports radio so because it was something familiar. The combination of my boyfriend’s mother vacuuming loudly as a family alarm on Sunday mornings while the syndicated NFL Preview with Boomer Esiason played on the guest room clock radio is a standout memory of my 20s.
For me, my listening to sports radio is so much rooted in finding people having the same conversations I wanted to participate in. In the Grantland piece, Curtis touches upon the idea that social media is now fulfilling that particular need. That’s true – for people who can engage regularly online. Not everyone can. Economic (the affordability of internet, computers and smartphones), generational (not everyone is fully comfortable with their online abilities) and functional (not everyone can engage with their smartphone or a computer at the their jobs during the day) factors make sports radio still an important outlet for a certain population of sports fans.
There are also times where sports radio still is the best way to have some sports discussions. On Hockey on Campus, the conversations our host has with some of college hockey’s legends are best conveyed in audio format. We could transcribe them (and will next season), but there’s always going to be nuances lost in that transcription. Jack Parker and Jerry York are quite quotable coaches, but their telling quotes lose that je ne sais quoi when you read them.
And maybe that really is sports radio’s saving grace. We may tweet in 140 characters, we may text our friends, but the nuances of audial conversation are still the best. What’s more fun – chatting around the table with your friends or texting? Do I remember tweeting, or do I remember laughing until my sides are sore at something someone said to me? Maybe I value conversations because for so much of my life I couldn’t have them – either because I didn’t have people to have those sports conversations with, or because earlier in my childhood I had speech issues that prevented me from having many conversations at all.
Conversations still have incredible value to me, and that’s why when I’m in a hotel room alone on some crazy work trip, I always roll over and make sure the clock radio is on the first sports radio station I can find. Because sure, now I’ve got people in the press box like me, and I’ve got people on Twitter like me, but when I’m all alone, hearing those conversations still has meaning. There’s still a place for that.