RADIO : The Sporting News : Sports is the talk of L.A. radio, with two stations going round the clock; the trend gives AM a new way to lure the FM audience

Ken in Calabasas complains that the Clippers still need a point guard.

Willie in Westwood wails on the reputed failings of UCLA basketball coach Jim Harrick.

Bill in Burbank wants to know who’s better: Canseco, Fielder or Bonds.

Tom from Tustin wants to know why the Rams didn’t get more out of Plan B.

And Eddie in Escondido waits on hold for 90 minutes just to moan that Gretzky isn’t the player he once was.

Welcome to sports talk, long a Southern California radio staple but now a booming cottage industry--in which thousands of grown men, and a couple of women, rant and rave about everything from how Chevrolet is doing on this year’s stock car circuit to whether USA Today had the right to reveal that Arthur Ashe has AIDS.

“About four months ago I got an award from the California Sports Broadcasters Assn., and I stood up before this crowded room and I said, ‘I have a feeling that in a few months 85% of you out there will have your own sports show on radio,’ ” said Steve Edwards, the host of a sports talk show weekday afternoons on KABC-AM (790). “It is the thing of the moment.”

Two weeks ago, KMPC-AM (710), already the radio home of the Angels, Rams and UCLA, dumped its Frank Sinatra-Tony Bennett music format to go all-sports. Earlier this year, Tijuana-based 50,000-watt station XTRA-AM (690), which can be heard throughout much of Southern California, jumped the gun on KMPC and went to a 24-hour-a-day sports format after seeing big gains in the ratings of its midday sports shows.

Thus the Los Angeles area, home to two major league baseball, football and basketball teams, a National Hockey League franchise and UCLA, USC and several other major college athletic programs, has become the only market in the country with two full-time sports radio stations. On any given weekday afternoon, there are programs on four stations with people calling in to gab about games: KMPC, XTRA, KABC and KLAC-AM (570). KABC also offers “Dodger Talk” before and after baseball games, and KLAC does the same with the Lakers during the basketball season. KIEV-AM (870) and KMNY-AM (1600) broadcast sports talk shows on the weekend.

“It’s not something I would listen to unless I’m in the car,” said Ron Weiss, a sports enthusiast who always listens to XTRA’s Lee (Hacksaw) Hamilton because of his vast sports knowledge. “I’m in a baseball rotisserie league, and they give you information to help with that. They give you the scores. They give you the latest information about the sports and the athletes that I like to follow. Someone can call up and say, ‘I’m concerned about the Air Force’s linebacking corps’ and Hacksaw can tell you who they’ve recruited for next year. It’s fun.”

It’s also good business. “It’s a viable alternative for AM radio,” said Hamilton of XTRA, which also broadcasts games of the San Diego Chargers, Los Angeles Kings and San Diego State University. “The stations getting into it are stations that haven’t succeeded in their old formats and are looking for a hook. XTRA surely was, and now we’ve finally hit on something that works.”

“We weren’t doing very well with the old format,” acknowledged Bill Ward, KMPC’s general manager, explaining the switch from music to sports. “All AM stations have difficulty because FM has 80% of the radio audience. So we have to find something to specialize in, and the potential is far greater in sports than in the aging music format. And we were kind of schizophrenic. We had sports part of the day with the Angels and Rams and UCLA, and then we’d go back to music. As the music got older, the difference between the fans of the sports and the fans of the music became greater and greater.”

Choosing between the two was easy. On the one hand, the pop standards from the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s had become a financial liability at KMPC because fans of that music were growing older and becoming less attractive to advertisers. On the other, the sports talk audience is predominantly adult men, a demographic group whose members tend to be light television viewers and therefore tough for advertisers to reach.

“It’s definitely an audience that advertisers want,” said Allen Klein, president of Media Research Graphics Inc. “It is a consuming, upscale, working audience. Sports stations really do reach a piece of the population that has dollars to spend.”

John Severino, president of the Prime Ticket cable sports network, who has had preliminary discussions with both XTRA and KMPC about simulcasting certain talk shows, said radio is just now capitalizing on the idea of using sports as a form of “niche broadcasting” as pioneered on cable TV by ESPN and regional sports channels.

For advertisers of cars, beer, certain clothing lines and other products aimed at young adult men, traditionally the only way to reach their target audience, he said, was to pay the steep rates for commercials on network TV sports events. Now, these advertisers can pinpoint the people they want on the radio at a fraction of the cost, and the sports radio station, like the regional sports channels, can make a bundle.

Since switching from a news-talk format to a heavy dose of sports talk in the fall of 1990, XTRA--or “The Mighty 690,” as it calls itself--has doubled its ratings in San Diego among all listeners and grabbed a small but measurable audience in Los Angeles, where it formerly had none. The station’s highest-rated program, Hamilton’s 3-7 p.m. show, is fifth among all San Diego radio stations in grabbing men ages 25-54 and scores well with that group among Los Angeles stations too, easily beating KMPC’s previous afternoon combination of music and sports and running close to Steve Edwards’ show on KABC.

“There are a ton of sports fans. Sports talk really was an unfilled need,” said Howard Freedman, XTRA’s vice president of operations and programming.

Steve Hartman, who co-hosts an XTRA talk show with former ABC Sports producer-director Chet Forte weekdays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., said Southern California, the home of transplants from all over the country, is perfect for sports radio because these immigrants are dying for news of their hometown teams that they rarely find in the local papers.

The sports talk format was born at WFAN-AM in New York in 1987. It took more than a year of lousy ratings and substantial alterations of the programming before the station took off, but it has come to be so profitable that it recently sold for about $60 million, a huge price for a single AM station, said John Lund, president Lund Media Research in San Francisco.

Sports talk stations have also succeeded in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Denver and Seattle. KPLY-AM in Reno, a city with no major league sports teams, has turned a profit by broadcasting San Francisco Giants and Sacramento Kings games around its full-time sports talk shows.

So the format seemed a reasonable gamble for KMPC. In Southern California--a Noah’s Ark of a market in which there are two teams in nearly every sport--”it’s a no-brainer that sports talk will do well here,” said Len Weiner, KMPC’s program director, who arrived here from WFAN in March to institute the new format.

Weiner has attempted to model KMPC on WFAN, down to the idea that in the morning-drive period, a sports station needs “an anti-sports show” that appeals to a more general audience. Robert W. Morgan, who had earned respectable ratings under the old format at KMPC, was kept in place with a wide-ranging morning show. (XTRA airs a sports program in the morning, but it is lighter and wackier than the programs that follow it.)

For the rest of the day, Weiner said, the trick is not to gear the talk shows for the hard-core fan--the guy looking for tips on whom to draft in his fantasy baseball league or for information on injuries so he can decide whether to bet on a particular game. These people will listen anyway because they can never get enough sports, Weiner reasons. His goal is to draw women and casual sports fans too, which he said can be done with the right personalities. KMPC’s lineup includes recently departed KCBS-TV news anchor Jim Lampley and retired local sports stars Todd Christensen and Steve Yeager.

Weiner said that 30% of WFAN’s audience is women. Women’s voices are rarely heard on most local sports shows, however. One exception is on Edwards’ KABC show: Rivals often rib him that his is the only sports talk program with more women callers than men. He jokes that it’s because of his “animal magnetism,” but his 4-7 p.m. sports program is preceded by his own general-interest talk show, which attracts many women, and throughout his years on television in this market he has served as host of programs with strong female appeal.

XTRA’s Forte agrees that it’s the personality of the hosts that draws an audience. “You have to have fun with it. It’s not brain surgery,” he said.

Nonetheless, Forte, an old pal of Howard (“Tell it like it is”) Cosell, pulls no punches in criticizing players, coaches and sporting institutions in general. XTRA’s Hamilton and nighttime host Jim Rome similarly show no mercy in lambasting ignominious sports figures. Venting anger and frustration is one of the appeals of this format for an audience of fans disappointed in the performances of their athletic heroes, Weiner agreed.

That presents a problem for a station that also broadcasts the games of a particular team. Hosts of “Dodger Talk” on KABC, the station that broadcasts all Dodger games, have long had the reputation of being soft on the home team. KMPC has an additional burden: Gene Autry owns both the radio station and the Angels.

“Any radio station that broadcasts the games of a team is walking on eggshells,” Weiner said. “There is a way to say a team isn’t any good without screaming and yelling and flailing your arms. You don’t say, ‘Don’t go buy any tickets, because this team really stinks.’ But it comes down to credibility. You have to bash people when they deserve to be bashed or you lose that.”

KMPC boss Bill Ward said he does not expect an overnight success. It will probably take more than a year, maybe two, to iron out all the bugs and build a big, profitable audience, he said.

KMPC management dismisses XTRA as no threat, insisting that its rival is aimed primarily at the San Diego market. Executives proclaim simply that KMPC will become “the No. 1 sports voice in Los Angeles”--and radio consultants agree that KMPC ought to prevail because listeners generally prefer the most localized product.

But like a brash boxer drumming up publicity before a big fight, XTRA promises a war. Freedman points out that XTRA originates some of its shows from Los Angeles and continually discusses the fortunes of L.A. teams. Hartman usually works his half of his show with Forte from the patio at Legends Sports Bar in Santa Monica, regularly commenting on UCLA (his alma mater), the Raiders (his former employer) and the length of the dresses on the young women strolling the promenade.

Freedman believes that the publicity surrounding KMPC’s switch will actually benefit XTRA. He predicted that KMPC will lure new sports listeners into the fold, and since XTRA is only two clicks away on the dial, many of them will sample XTRA and stay because they’ll like what they hear. Later this year, XTRA plans to boost the power of its signal to 100,000 watts, which will likely enable it to reach the entire state of California during the day and all the way to Alaska at night.

“They will get a bloody nose trying to take us on,” XTRA’s Hamilton boasted.

And then again, maybe everyone will emerge victorious. Thanks to the constant availability of sports on cable television--”You can see high school basketball games from Indiana on television here, for God’s sake!” Edwards said--sports broadcasting and merchandising have grown exponentially in the last decade.

“I can’t be very glib about where the roof to this thing is,” said Edwards, who takes a less passionate, more levelheaded approach to sports than many of his colleagues. “We have created a whole subculture that people can almost live in. Sports is the great unifier. If you’re a bus driver or an attorney or you stay home all day, there is a common language of sports that we all can share. It’s a universal experience, and you can’t say that about too many other things these days.”

Weiner adds that the format serves as a diversion from the recession and the rioting. If you’re tired of all that depressing news, he said, “turn us on and we’re talking about guys named Tommy and Buck and Whitey and Mookie. We’re not talking about an execution. We all have enough problems. Turn us on and laugh.”

Or, if you’re a Rams fan, turn them on and cry.