Nice Guys Finish First? [J. Mark English]

On July 1, 1987, WFAN became the first 24 hours sports radio station in the history of the airwaves. The station struggled in the early going. In their original format, Greg Gumbel (now a host on the CBS network) hosted a sports show in the morning. But the ratings were sagging. Moving Don Imus into the morning slot saved WFAN.

His time slot dominated the AM airwaves for the next twenty years until he was fired. Now that WFAN (and their parent company CBS) struggles to find a successor to Imus, ESPN local radio station in New York, has finally surpassed WFAN in the morning ratings.

From the New York Times:

The first time Mike Greenberg, a self-titled sportscasting metrosexual, met his ESPN Radio partner, Mike Golic, he said to himself, “Will you look at this big, fat, disgusting slob.”

Such words don’t often lead to a long-term occupational commitment. Once on the air, he told Golic, “If we stood next to each other, we would be the number 10.” Golic, who boasts of owning two and a half suits, laughed. Later in their first on-air tryout, in November 1999, he recognized that the mocking camaraderie that began with Greenberg’s unprovoked insult might create successful radio.

“We come off as regular guys,” said Golic, a former defensive end for three N.F.L. teams. He was sitting across from the trim, well-groomed Greenberg after their show last Friday at Penn Station in Manhattan, the site of one of their regular forays away from their studio in Bristol, Conn. “The chemistry flat-out works.”

Seven and a half years after Greenberg insulted a man he had never met and took a job he did not particularly want (he preferred, at the time, to remain a “SportsCenter” anchor), their weekday show is carried on 336 affiliates and heard by 3.08 million listeners each week from 6 to 10 a.m.

In New York, on the ESPN Radio affiliate, “Mike and Mike in the Morning” was heard by more men ages 25 to 54 than WFAN in the same time slot in the three months ended April 4. That was before FAN’s morning man, Don Imus, was fired for his remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team.