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You'll still be able to find Dave Ross, et. al. on the FM dial (97.3), but 710 is soon to join the ESPN empire. Full details after the jump.
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While such a switch would mean Dave Ross, Dori Monson, the Ron & Don Show, and Luke Burbank's TBTL would leave the AM dial (they'd likely still be broadcast on 97.3 FM) , Seattle has long been an underserved sports radio market, as Jesse Froehling noted in his recent profile of KJR's true fabulous sports babe, Elise Woodward.
Says here the Everett Herald sports columnist ripped passages from SI's Life of Reilly, even though Reilly's now at ESPN Mag).
One of the things that's struck me about sports coverage in the Seattle area is the impressive amount of play that's given to horse racing. From KJR's brilliantly-named Win Place Show on Sunday to frequent print features like today's Gallop Poll, which features savvy commentary on the sport from current ESPN (and former KSTW) anchor and Kent native Kenny Mayne -- who's in town tonight in support of his new book -- we respect horse racing here more than, say, St. Louis, whose five sports radio stations devoted maybe 15 cumulative minutes per week to Fairmount Park, which was closer to downtown St. Louis than Emerald Downs is to Seattle. What's more, regular musings from the likes of the P.I.'s Larry Lee Palmer would never garner even subprime real estate in the Post-Dispatch, which does little more than run entries and results in tiny type.
In a 24-hour span that has seen us celebrate the work of SW production designer Claudia Johns and her sister, now comes news that Claudia's husband, the peerless Seattle P.I. sports enterprise writer Greg Johns, will appear (is appear the right word when you're talking about radio?) on KJR-950 at high noon today to talk about the Sonics and possibly women's roller hockey. Tune in, y'all: Greg's been known to drop f-bombs on the air from time to time, which is why he's not on more often.
For reasons that will become clear within the space of about a week, I've been doing a bit of research on the career of former Washington Bullet off-guard Phil Chenier, who was a ringer for Walt Frazier in the mid-70s—and almost as good a player. In the course of my online travels, I came across this piece on Chenier, which contains the shocking revelation (to me, at least) that when the Bullets beat the Sonics in the '78 Finals, they had to play a 1-2-2-1-1 home and away format. Why? There was a previously scheduled mobile home show at one of the arenas. That's right: the NBA had to work around a mobile home show during its biggest showcase of the year. For anyone who thinks the sport is at some sort of nadir, please bear this in mind.
Researching Chenier also reminded me how fucking incredible Elvin Hayes was in his day (and how incredibly fucking stupid the Rockets were to trade him to the then-Baltimore Bullets). Which reminds us that maybe it's not such a foregone conclusion that Tim Duncan is the best power forward to ever play the game, which became a common refrain throughout the course of last year's playoffs. With apologies to Karl Malone, who never won a ring and whose rookie season was nowhere near as impressive as that of either Duncan or Hayes, consider TD's and Big E's respective cumulative averages over their first six seasons. Duncan: a staggering 22.8 points and 12.3 rebounds. But Hayes? 25.4 & 16.3. Take that, Timmy -- and let's re-open the debate.
It was inevitable. Over the past few years, as ESPN has achieved greater “corporateness,” people have started hating on the worldwide leader in sports. This summer’s ill-conceived “Who’s Now” segments don’t really help. I’m not the first one to mock--from bloggers to media giants to ESPN’s own Bill Simmons (and the odd apology from another ESPN employee), it’s pretty much become de rigueur to pan “Who’s Now.” And now Sports Illustrated has jumped on the bandwagon, with a column in this week’s front of the book. It’s not exactly the best-executed piece, but when SI says your idea for filling slow news days sucks, it sucks.
Instead of running a fawning, overproduced, “soul crushingly lame” popularity contest, SI did something really fun, and really interesting: 36 writers penning 36 columns about the best games they’ve ever witnessed. The games range from Buster Douglas knocking out Mike Tyson to George Mason’s win over UConn, and every single one of them are more engaging than anything you’ll see on “Who’s Now.” And the games aren't ranked or "competing" against each other in some stupid bracket. They're just there to be read about, relived, and discussed. Did your favorite game make the list?
Losing Kurt Vonnegut and David Halberstam virtually back-to-back is a tremendous blow to America's living literary legacy. Halberstam died in a Bay Area car crash Monday at the age of 73, en route to conduct an interview with former New York Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle for a book he'd been working on, according to ESPN. A former daily journalist who won a Pulitzer for his war reporting, Halberstam developed a mid-career fascination with sports, the fruits of which were the beloved Summer of '49 and Playing for Keeps, in this writer's opinion the best book ever written about Michael Jordan.
That such an accomplished national affairs reporter would deign to write about a topic as seemingly trivial as sports probably proves just the opposite: that sports aren't trivial. Rather, they're emblematic of greater human struggles (such as war, a metaphorical mainstay in virtually all forms of sportswriting), and an escape for regular folks whose very sanity hinges on dramatic distractions from the work week's rigmarole. With Halberstam's death, and in an increasingly compartmentalized print media environment, the subtext and insinuation of Halberstam's spectacular versatility might be lost for good.
