Sports talk’s irascible 1-2 punch

Joe McDONNELL and Doug Krikorian (or “Joe and Doug,” as they’re known to regular listeners of local sports talk radio) held an on-air listener bash recently, on the occasion of their anniversary. The party was set up in the bar at Phil Trani’s, a dark, low-ceilinged place a few blocks from the 405 Freeway in Long Beach. There was free food -- pot roast, mostaccioli, French fries -- and special guests, including Tommy Lasorda, who arrived in a gray suit and could be observed consuming a large meatball during commercial breaks.

McDonnell and Krikorian presided over the affair like lodge brothers elected to high office. Vagabonds of L.A. sports radio, they were celebrating three years on the air at the same station in the same time period -- an eternity in their profession.

For most of the four hours of the show, McDonnell and Krikorian sat behind two microphones and a fold-out table that displayed their station logo above a riot of wiring tangled at their feet. Ancient arguments were stoked (who is the best Laker of all time?) and, with Lasorda there, the Dodgers’ latest bonehead moves were prime fodder.

Lasorda, for his part, sat perched at the edge of the table. He had all he seemed to need -- a meatball and a microphone. Soon enough they all got to ripping one another on the air: Lasorda ripped Krikorian for being cheap, and Krikorian ripped Lasorda for being Lasorda, and McDonnell ripped Lasorda for a managerial decision he made more than 23 years ago, in 1980, when the Dodgers dramatically swept the Houston Astros in the final three games of the regular season to force a one-game playoff.

“And then you started Dave Goltz,” McDonnell said with disgust.

“That’s all I had left, Joe,” Lasorda replied.

The bar at Trani’s was filled with men who might have served during the last great war. McDonnell, who is 47 and massively overweight with bleached blond hair, was wearing a Laker jersey with Magic Johnson’s name and number on the back. During commercial breaks he doesn’t move, while Krikorian, a garrulous 60-year-old sports scribe who also writes a column for the Long Beach Press-Telegram, tends to flit about. He is the sort of person who will hear his name shouted aloud in a bar (“Hey, Doug, what’s [former Press-Telegram sportswriter] Doug Ives doing?” a tableful of gentlemen at Trani’s wanted to know. “Promoting golf,” Krikorian called back).

In his career Krikorian has covered something like 24 Super Bowls, 19 World Series and numerous title fights. He has also covered many more games that, to be honest, aren’t worth remembering.

Miscreants on the margins of sports, McDonnell and Krikorian nevertheless wield an odd sort of power in this city. Their show, perhaps more than any other forum, gives voice to the triumph and anguish (mostly the anguish) of rooting for the home team in L.A.

Tune in today and you will hear them bemoan the imploding Lakers and the byzantine Dodger sale, in between all the stuff that makes it a sports talk radio show -- partial-score updates for gamblers and commercials for car insurance and penile enhancements. You will hear surprisingly good guests (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was in-studio recently) and consistently odd ones (who is Sonny Vaccarro and exactly what does he do?).

The strangest thing is that “The McDonnell-Douglas Show,” which airs on KSPN (710 AM) from 3 to 7 p.m. weekdays, continues to exist despite the attendant explosion of sports as entertainment product. The pair are in the midst of a five-year contract, but only the first year was guaranteed; they can be fired in an instant, and have been fired before.

But amid this uncertainty they have become a local constant -- a bridge between slick, hype-driven coverage and a time when athletes made good money but not Madonna money, and sports was still about the intimate relationship of the fan to the local team.

This all seems hopelessly quaint in an era when advertising has turned the game into product placement and the networks cover games with more urgently talking heads than an episode of “Nightline.”

Sports talk radio has always been a haven for the lunatic fringe, a low-rated medium for men dominated by trumped-up controversy manufactured daily. But it has also given inconsolable, and triumphant, fans a place to go.

In his book “True Believers: The Tragic Inner Life of Sports Fans,” Joe Queenan consults a therapist to determine why he is emotionally addicted to the fortunes of Philadelphia’s sports teams.

“One day I sat down to calculate how much of my adult life had been wasted on athletic events,” he writes. “The numbers chilled me to the marrow.”

Sports talk is aimed at this person. You could argue that L.A. isn’t as passionate for the local teams as places like Boston or New York or Philadelphia. You could also say that ours is a city of immigrant fandom -- Packer fans and Yankee fans and 76er fans all mushed together in one unwieldy mass.

And yet there exists the local fan with the long memory and the bleeding heart, and for this person there are Joe and Doug.

Back on the air at Phil Trani’s, the actor and former Ram Fred Dryer called in; he and Lasorda got to reminiscing about seeing the Hollywood Stars play at Gilmore Field. David Vasay, the 27-year-old producer of “The McDonnell-Douglas Show,” worked his black book, the one with the phone numbers -- home, cell -- of pro athletes and their agents and team publicists. Laker greats (and friends of the show) Jerry West and Elgin Baylor went on the air. So did current Laker General Manager Mitch Kupchak, even though last year, as the Lakers flamed out in the playoffs, McDonnell and Krikorian were calling him “Asleep at the Switch Mitch.” Marge Hearn, widow of Chick Hearn, paid her regards and a respectful hush fell over the room.

But Lasorda continued to be Lasorda, and Vasay finally put the black book down. For McDonnell and Krikorian, another afternoon drifted into evening on the wings of old anecdotes, bad jokes and arguments that will never end.

Avoiding homogenization

There are now four all-sports radio stations in the L.A. market. KSPN, McDonnell and Krikorian’s station, is owned by ESPN Radio, which is owned by Disney. Extra Sports (690 and 1150 AM) is owned by Clear Channel Communications, while KMPC (1540 AM) is owned by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, whose Vulcan Ventures acquired One on One Sports Network in 2000 and changed the name to Sporting News Radio.

In radio, corporate mergers have led to charges that the airwaves are growing ever more homogenized. The debate has particularly coalesced around the Texas-based giant Clear Channel, owner of more than 1,200 stations across the country and which has employed a strategy of eliminating local DJs and talk show hosts in favor of streamlined playlists, canned DJ banter and syndicated talk personalities like Rush Limbaugh.

A similar trend has taken over sports talk, which is what makes the survival of “The McDonnell-Douglas Show” a fluke. On KSPN, most of the talk is syndicated. The voices scream at you from some nonplace (it’s actually Bristol, Conn., ESPN Radio’s headquarters), a vast chattering class of ex-jock insiders and twentysomething “Sports Center” anchors hyping and shouting.

It is somehow reassuring, then, to hear Krikorian reminisce about the days when he was the only beat guy covering the Lakers on the road full time. It was 1968 and he was working for the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner. The team paid for his airfare and hotel and even gave him a per diem. On the plane, as Krikorian is fond of recalling, he filled in when West, Baylor and Wilt Chamberlain needed a fourth for a game of hearts.

Unlike the big sports radio personalities like Jim Rome, McDonnell and Krikorian worked the endless nights in the bowels of arenas, hanging around practices and locker rooms. The athletes were more accessible -- or at least not apt to be on their cell or portable DVD players.

Krikorian, in his day, drank with the coaches and brought dates into Dr. Jerry Buss’ box at the Forum. McDonnell simply showed up. Night after night after night. For a while there, he says, he had his own key to Dodger Stadium.

None of which means “The McDonnell-Douglas Show” is high art (some days it’s not even low art). Thursdays feature the regular segment “Who Do You Want to Kick Out of L.A.?” (Last week, would-be Dodger owner Frank McCourt won in a landslide.)

McDonnell, nicknamed “The Big Nasty,” frequently calls people (callers, general managers, whatever) “idiots,” and he is often a surly guardian of his airwaves. For all the trashing they do, they are also not above fawning over celebrities (their Abdul-Jabbar interview was an hourlong valentine). Krikorian, who is not a natural broadcaster, is prone to odd, flowery language (“That has to be one of the most stunning revelations ever uttered, Joe,” is something Krikorian seems to say weekly, if not daily).

Like all sports call-in shows, theirs is supposed to be about the hot topic of the day, spun for maximum bombast. “I would flirt with her,” McDonnell said the day Kobe Bryant was charged with sexual assault in an Eagle, Colo., courtroom.

“I talked to a prominent NBA executive who told me this guy is squeaky clean and doesn’t mess with the women,” Krikorian floated.

The show is much more refreshing on days when there isn’t a hot-button issue, when McDonnell and Krikorian mostly just talk to each other.

Their guests are typically oddsmakers, fight promoters and beat writers. Such people constitute the fringe world of sports, the people lurking in the corridors. The networks have little use for them; to hire an unwashed hanger-on over a slick ex-athlete would sully the corporate enterprise. But Joe and Doug are already sullied. When I asked Krikorian, for instance, how he had found Mike Corrigan, an oddsmaker who used to appear regularly on “The McDonnell-Douglas Show,” he hesitated, then said the guy was a bookie from his gambling days. In fact, Krikorian said, Mike Corrigan wasn’t even his real name.

Stories from back in the day

One night, in another dark restaurant-bar (the Buggy Whip on La Tijera Boulevard near LAX), McDonnell and Krikorian got to talking about nights at the Forum.

“You know how many people I snuck into NBA Finals games? Without tickets?” McDonnell said.

Krikorian: “Same with me. I got about six there for Game 6 of the Celtics and Lakers in ’87.” (He later changed this number to three.)

McDonnell: “Or the seventh game of the Pistons-Lakers. I had about eight people that I snuck in.”

“Sho, remember Sho?” Krikorian said. He was talking about an usher. “He’d let you go right in.”

McDonnell: “He was the greatest.”

Krikorian: “What was the name of the bartender, Joe?” He was talking about the bartender in the press room.

“Bill Granger,” McDonnell said.

Krikorian: “Bill Granger was the bartender there. He got a date of mine so drunk one night she vomited. Karen West [wife of Jerry West] had to help her back into the bathroom. She was a young girl, a young kid, I met her at 24 Hour Fitness....”

McDonnell and Krikorian disagree about how they met. McDonnell says it was on the field at Dodger Stadium; Krikorian says it was in the Laker offices. Both agree they were arguing.

This was the 1970s, when it was easier to be a fan in Los Angeles: The Dodgers were perennial contenders, the city had the Rams. UCLA won with John Wooden and USC with a run of star running backs. Then Magic Johnson arrived in 1979, ushering in Showtime. For the next two decades the landscape changed dramatically: The Rams left, first for Anaheim and then St. Louis, the Raiders came and went, and the Dodgers seemed gradually to fade away too, until the O’Malley family finally sold the team in 1998, turning it into a widget in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire News Corp.

Krikorian, who grew up in Fowler, a railroad town outside Fresno, witnessed all of this as a reporter and columnist at the Herald. It is with a faint note of pride that Krikorian informs you that both Chamberlain and Rams owner Carroll Rosenbloom died angry at him over something he wrote.

McDonnell was on the scene too, but as a 19-year-old who’d graduated from Alemany High in Mission Hills and then dropped out after a year and a half at Valley College to go into radio. He got reporting experience as a stringer for outlets including AP Radio, Mutual Broadcasting and WFAN in New York. The job involved dispatching locker room quotes and in-game reports. Two bites from the home locker room and two from the visitors’ would net him $20.

“With UPI it was $5 per player,” McDonnell said.

By the time they were first paired as talk show hosts, on KMPC in 1992, McDonnell had an ego to match Krikorian’s.

That may be the only constant in their relationship; off-air they retreat into very different lives, except on those occasions when they’re both at Trani’s. Krikorian has lived in the same house in Long Beach for 28 years. He’s been married twice and has no children; his second wife, Gillian, died two years ago of cancer at age 35. Krikorian brings her up often, warning that he might cry as he relates the details of who she was and how they met -- or how, when she was in the hospital, the terminally ill former Laker great Happy Hairston was just down the hall.

McDonnell, who has never been married, recently moved back in with his dad after the death of his mother. He says he’s set up a mini-studio at home and some nights does a postgame talk show from his office. He jokes darkly about how he used to hate talk radio and how he wants to retire at 55, but that’s hard to believe; one day recently, McDonnell hosted several hours on the anniversary of the JFK assassination on KABC and in the middle of the show, phoned over to KSPN to chime in after the UCLA-USC football game.

Always a tough crowd

Several weeks after their third-anniversary show, McDonnell and Krikorian did a live remote from the home of a sponsor, Martin Cadillac, in West Los Angeles.

Such promotional gigs are as old as radio. This time the chairs and fold-out table were several feet from a hulking Cadillac SUV. Muzak played in the background and a spread of finger food had been put out. Salespeople stood around with no customers.

The hosts kept reminding people to come on down, but no one did, and it was something of a dead week on the sporting scene. College football was between its regular season and bowl games, the NBA season was in its infancy, and the Dodgers were still doing nothing on the free agent front.

So Joe and Doug did what they do: McDonnell kept ripping UCLA’s football team for going to the “Silicone Valley Bowl.” They heard actor James Caan was in the service department and cackled for an hour about getting him on the air, then trashed Caan when he failed to show. Lasorda, ambassador to himself, called in, and when he hung up, Krikorian speculated about how much the former Dodger manager was worth ($20 million, they agreed). There’d been a trade in the NBA (Portland’s Bonzi Wells to Memphis for Wesley Person), but it wasn’t worth talking about. So McDonnell opened the phones to whatever, and sports talk was once again about two guys from the hometown, talking into the void.