King of ‘The Jungle’

Reggie Jackson is afraid. In the darkened studios of the Premier Radio Network in Sherman Oaks, sports talk radio host Jim Rome--the self-proclaimed “king of smack,” as he calls the take-no-prisoners style of sports radio he pioneered--leans into the mike.

At bat is Tommy Lasorda in the first in-depth radio interview since the former Dodger manager was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. And on deck is Jackson, “Mr. October” himself, the man who, with three home runs in three swings of the bat, yanked the 1977 World Series from Lasorda’s grasp.

“Reggie,” coos Rome, “it’s been a long time since we had you in The Jungle”--which is how Rome bills his four-hour morning gab fest.

“How come?”

You can hear the fear in Jackson’s voice as he comes on the air: Tremulous.

You can sense it in his tone: Timid.

“To be honest,” Jackson says from his car, somewhere in San Diego County. “I’m scared of you . . . . “

“Reggie, Reggie. Why are you scared of me?”

“Cause you can be rough, man, and I don’t want to be embarrassed . . . . “

“Reggie,” promises Rome, who’s on his best behavior this morning. “I want you to know that there is much respect for you in The Jungle.”

The interview comes off smoothly enough, with Jackson congratulating Lasorda on his Hall of Fame induction. Afterward, Rome is incredulous.

“Can you believe that?” he marvels at Jackson’s trepidation. “I mean, this man is a giant. At one time this man owned New York City. And now he’s afraid of a radio talk-show host?”

But the sports world has changed drastically since Jackson was tearing up the base paths, and nothing has changed more than the world of sports journalism. When Jackson was in his prime, there wasn’t a TV station in the country devoted solely to sports. Now, cable subscribers in Southern California can choose from five all-sports networks--ESPN, ESPN2, Fox Sports West, Fox Sports West 2 and CNN/SI--and that’s not counting Speedvision, the Golf Channel and the Classic Sports Network. Satellite dish owners get hours more. Meanwhile, the astonishing sums paid to sports superstars--Michael Jordan’s $30-million salary, Tiger Woods’ $60 million in endorsement deals--have distanced fans from the players and encouraged elements of the sports media to be far less forgiving in their coverage. It is at this juncture of richly compensated players and resentful fans that all-sports talk radio--and Rome in particular--thrives. There are now more than 150 radio stations devoted solely to sports talk, with three in L.A. alone. All of them owe their success to giving what John Walsh, senior vice president and executive editor at ESPN, calls “the voice of the fan” a chance to be heard. It is a voice that, venting against “heroes” considered overpaid and incompetent, is seldom happy.

No other sports talk host understands or exploits this better than Rome. A 1982 graduate of Calabasas High School and a champion tennis player, Rome realized he “wasn’t going to play Wimbledon, so if I wanted to stay in sports I’d have to figure out something else.” So he majored in communications at UC Santa Barbara. Now, at 32, Rome not only dominates the ratings in Southern California--more than 100,000 men, and a surprising number of women, tune into his show each morning on XTRA 690 AM and his afternoon show on XTRA 1150 AM--he can be heard virtually everywhere west of the Mississippi following his syndication by Premier last year. Since January, he’s more than tripled his affiliates to 70.

The notoriety has not come without a price. In an expose of sports talk radio, Sports Illustrated, no embodiment of moderation itself, decided it was a “savage” environment featuring demagogues playing to the jingoistic. The story described Rome as “cruel” and painted his callers as losers with nothing better to do than whine to talk-show hosts. Rome counters his callers should not be confused with his listeners--studies show that, at best, only 1-2% of talk-radio listeners bother to call in. The callers, he laughs, are the “yobless,” with the time to wait an hour or more on the phone, not the doctors, lawyers, motion picture executives and publishers he claims make up a goodly portion of his audience.

“Smart people,” Rome declares, “think my show is smart.”

*

“Play was stopped at [a recent] tennis tournament when a rat ran through the stands. That’s just not fair. I mean, why should Monica be treated differently than any other player?” --Rome on tennis star Monica Seles, a charter member of his on-air “Rat Family” of sports figures.

*

Sitting in his modest office at Premier, Rome is bemused by his notoriety. “Look,” he says, calling up on the screen of his Macintosh some photos of his so-called “Rat Family”--among them Seles, Seattle Mariners pitcher Randy Johnson and Denver Bronco coach Mike Shanahan--”tell me these people don’t look like rats?” From Rome’s point of view, that’s hardly “cruel.” “All ‘smack’ is,” he says, “is uncut, unadulterated candor. It’s the way you see things, no matter how much it hurts. It’s reality. I mean, do these people look like rats or what?”

In a world he sees brimming with hypocrisy and hype, calling a rat a rat is for Rome as refreshing as a cold one on a hot day at Dodger Stadium. “You know how the first time you tasted beer, it tasted bitter? But then you tried it again and discovered you liked it and wanted more. The Jungle is like that--at first it may seem a little harsh, but once you get used to it you want more.” By focusing on style over substance, Rome argues, people miss the quality of his brew.

In fact, Rome is a better prognosticator than many so-called experts, including the ex-professional athletes who litter the sports-media field. Reviewing tapes of the last several months of The Jungle, one is struck by how often Rome is right. (He accurately called both the NHL and NBA playoffs.) One reason is the guests. While Reggie Jackson fears The Jungle, players such as former Green Bay Packers defensive end Sean Jones love the show, calling in voluntarily to join the “clones” (as Rome’s listeners dub themselves) or phoning Rome on his private line to impart choicer tidbits.

And that, says Rome, is what his critics don’t get. “I’m not making this stuff up,” he laughs. He is, he insists, simply reporting what the players tell him, thus driving sports journalism to its logical conclusion: If the great sportswriters and play-by-play announcers of the past made you feel as if you’d been at the game, Rome’s show makes you feel as if you’ve been to the locker room.

It’s where his infamous “gloss” comes from, the patois that the “clones” jabber on the air. One minute they might be talking about “the gangsta’ hooper” (Nick Van Exel, so named for his proclivity for fighting on and off the court), the next about “the pasty gangsta’ ” (pale-faced Utah Jazz guard John Stockton, long labeled a dirty player). As Rome points out, players have long tagged their high-paid teammates and competitors with pungent nicknames that describe them with far more accuracy than the team PR office might like. Nike has spent years promoting its endorsee, San Antonio Spurs center David Robinson, as “the Admiral” because of his degree from the Naval Academy. In The Jungle, Robinson is known as “The Little Mermaid” because of the “softness” of his play.

Gloss played a substantial part in “the incident,” as Rome now calls it, that put him on the national sportscasting map. Today he says it was nothing more than the result of having good contacts. But at the time it seemed much worse--even Rome privately wondered if it wasn’t the nadir of his career.

The year was 1994 and Rome was beginning to develop his acerbic style at XTRA, where he’d been hired to host a four-hour call-in show. (It was there that he came up with the concept of The Jungle when, after a particularly brutal afternoon of callers attacking the athletes and each other, Rome finally muttered, “It’s a jungle out there today.”)

Looking to bring a more youthful audience to ESPN2, its new sports television network, ESPN hired Rome to host an evening show, “Talk2,” in addition to his daily radio show. At the time, says Rome, an admitted workaholic, he was going virtually nonstop, from 6 a.m. till midafternoon on the radio show and from dinner till midnight at ESPN. In other words, he might have made a mistake.

Rome had learned that many Rams players were blaming another dismal season on quarterback Jim Everett, whom they had taken to calling “Chris” after female tennis star Chris Evert. Rome had been calling Everett “Chris” on the radio for several weeks when he invited the quarterback to appear on “Talk2.” Everett agreed, but after the third time Rome called him “Chris,” the 6-foot, 5-inch Everett surprised everyone by knocking over a table in a lunge at the 5-foot, 6-inch Rome. Many argued that Rome had it coming. Others noted that Everett, having missed Rome, merely confirmed what The Jungle had been positing all along: that in crunch plays, the quarterback had a tendency to miss his mark.

*

“I love interleague play and think it’s going to be great for baseball. But that’s not why I like it. The best part is that all the blue hairs out there are freaking out. Guess what, old people. We run things now and there is nothing you can do. You’ll be dead soon and need to realize that we are going to do what we want. And we want interleague baseball. Deal with it.” --Rome on “blue hairs,” gloss for the older generation.

*

Rome himself is the first to admit that behind the “blue hair” apprehension is a major cultural shift. At 32, he is a member of the otherwise leaderless Generation X and suspects that much of what the elder statesmen of radio complain about in his show is simply a case of youth envy. For example, the late Chet Forte was not only a champion basketball player but managed to survive nearly two decades with Howard Cosell as director of ABC’s “Monday Night Football.” Yet when, in his waning days, he came to Rome’s flagship station XTRA as a talk-show host, the acrimony between Forte and Rome was palpable. As Forte, who played Sinatra for the musical breaks on his show, used to complain, “Who can listen to him? You need a translator.”

Rome, who favors songs like punk rocker Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” as his musical intros, couldn’t care less. As Rome explains it, with pictures of the Rat Family floating on the computer behind him, previous generations had cowboys or WWII heroes to grow up with. His generation had Muhammad All and Joe Namath, who told the world what they were going to do--and then went out and did it. And that, more than anything, is Rome’s definition of smack.

“It’s only smack,” he laughs, “if you can back it up. If you can’t, it’s nothing.”

Which is why it’s ironic that it’s Reggie Jackson who’s now afraid of Rome, for in his time there was no one better at “running smack.” Who can forget the controversy stirred up by Jackson’s fabled pronouncement that “he was the straw that stirred the drink” when he got to the Yankees in the mid-’70s? Then he went out and led them to back-to-back World Series victories over Lasorda’s Dodgers. Then again, in those days he only had Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner to worry about when he came off the field.

Compared to Rome, those guys were easy

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Talkin’ Trash: A Glossary of Jim Rome “Gloss”

Brubaker -- University of Nebraska football coach Tom Osborne, who presides over a team noted for having athletes arrested for various crimes (after the Robert Redford prison movie “Brubaker”).

*

Clank Fu -- Laker center Shaquille O’Neal, so dubbed for the supposed sound of his egregiously bad free throws bouncing off the rim (from “Shaq-Fu,” the video game he’s endorsed).

*

Crying Irish --Notre Dame fans, for their constant whining after each loss.

*

The Great White Guppy -- Golfer Greg Norman, whose fans call him “The Great White Shark,” who blew a six-stroke lead to lose last year’s Masters tournament on the final day.

*

Mr. Ed --Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway, for his supposed facial likeness to a horse.

*

Moellered --To get drunk, after former Michigan football coach Gary Moeller, who was fired after a very public incident of intoxication.

*

The Pleamaker --A “gloss” on Dallas Cowboys receiver Michael Irvin, known to his fans as “The Playmaker” after his plea bargain on charges of narcotics possession.

*

Shawshank -- Tennis star Steffi Graf’s dad, who spent time in prison for tax evasion (after the prison movie “The Shawshank Redemption”).

*

Serta -- Laker center-forward Eldon Campbell, who to Rome appears half asleep when he plays.

*

Williamsport -- Denver’s Coors Field, which Rome believes has inflated batting averages of Colorado Rockies players because they play in a park so small it resembles the Little League world championship venue in Williamsport, Pa.