ESPN’s Cowherd lets West Coast bias show

How big is Saturday’s Notre Dame-USC game? This may be a slight exaggeration, but it is so big that it brought Colin Cowherd to Los Angeles for the week. He’s here at the request of KSPN 710, USC’s flagship station and ESPN Radio’s L.A. affiliate.

Cowherd may be the hottest thing going in sports talk radio these days. Or maybe it’s ESPN Radio cohort Dan Patrick.

Cowherd’s show, “The Herd,” is on 710 weekdays from 6 to 10 a.m., followed by Patrick, who was in the news this week because he was a guest, along with Jerry Seinfeld, on David Letterman’s show the night comedian Michael Richards made an unannounced appearance to give his well-publicized apology.

Patrick said on his radio show the next day that he couldn’t believe what was happening, adding, “I thought at any moment Ashton Kutcher would come out and say, ‘You’ve just been Punk’d.’ ”

He also said that the last time he was scheduled to appear on Letterman -- but was bumped -- was in 1997 the night Farrah Fawcett appeared to have a meltdown. “I got Farrah’d that night, and I thought I was going to get Farrah’d again,” said Patrick, who called this week’s experience surreal.

Comparatively speaking, Cowherd’s week in L.A. has been ethereal -- or heavenly, if you don’t count a brief satellite transmission problem Wednesday.

His stops included The Times for lunch and a visit to the sports department. Certainly a highlight for Cowherd was meeting T.J. Simers, since they are now radio talk show competitors. The show Simers does with his daughter Tracy and Fred Roggin is on 570 opposite Cowherd’s.

Larry Gifford, program director at 710, said Cowherd’s show has done well: “He has doubled our ratings and doubled our revenue for his time slot.”

One thing Cowherd made clear during his visit is that he is a West Coast guy. In fact, the first hour of his show is done strictly for West Coast affiliates.

Cowherd, 42, married and the father of a 6-year-old daughter and 8-month-old son, is from the tiny seaside town of Grayland, Wash., about halfway between Seattle and Portland, Ore. He attended Eastern Washington, where he majored in broadcast journalism.

“So I’ve always had sort of a West Coast lean,” he said. “When I came to ESPN, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great for the people on the West Coast if I was a part of you?’ I always thought of ESPN as an East Coast company. During my job interview, I said, ‘Don’t take this personally, I’m a West Coast guy. I don’t know if it is against the rules, but I’m going to bring up USC football.’ ”

Cowherd, the son of an optometrist, said he wanted to be a sports columnist or Vin Scully when he was growing up. He said that when he was a kid, KFI’s booming signal allowed him to hear Scully calling the Dodgers’ games.

Cowherd in 1985 attended baseball’s winter meetings, held in San Diego that year, and landed a play-by-play job with the triple-A Las Vegas Stars.

While in Las Vegas, Cowherd also ended up working for a television station, and that’s where he met his wife, Kim.

“She was my intern. I was 26 and she was 19,” he said.

He said he didn’t make a good first impression.

“She brought in some TV tapes she had made in college to show me and get my opinion,” Cowherd said. “She looked great in the tape, really attractive, but she was wearing loop earrings and a low-cut dress. I said to her, ‘What, you going to a nightclub or do you want to anchor the news?’

“She thought I was a jerk.”

But things improved, and he said eventually he told her, “I can’t date you if you work here, so you’re fired. Now, do you want to go out?”

After Las Vegas, Cowherd worked at television station WTVT in Tampa, Fla., and then spent eight years in Portland that included stints at television station KGW and all-sports radio KFXX. In 2004, he replaced Tony Kornheiser at ESPN Radio.

According to KSPN station general manager Bob Koontz, Cowherd might end up being based in L.A. once the ESPN studio under construction across from Staples Center is completed in 2009.

Of L.A., Cowherd said, “It’s a great sports town, but different than most other sports towns. In Pittsburgh, everybody is a Steelers fans. Here it is all split up -- Dodgers, Angels, Lakers, Clippers, USC, UCLA. On a given Saturday, you can have 92,000 at the Coliseum and at least 60,000 at the Rose Bowl.

“When people say L.A. is not a sports town, I say, ‘Time out.’ It’s just that people in L.A. are doers; they don’t just sit around and watch TV. And L.A. is the least provincial market, in my opinion, in the country.

“In Boston, if you’re doing sports talk radio, it’s ‘OK, he’s not talking Red Sox, I’m changing stations.’ In Philadelphia, you just talk Eagles. I like to hit on a lot of topics and see where we go.”

Cowherd said he spends three hours preparing for each show.

“I usually know where every segment is going,” he said. “You have to take your audience somewhere. But the funniest stuff I’ve ever done is when a caller says something and gets me going and I start laughing. I mean, I want to know where I’m going, but I also want to free-form.”

As part of what 710 is touting as “Beat Notre Dame Week,” Cowherd will be broadcasting today from Dave & Busters at the Spectrum in Irvine.

During the show, there will be a “show your USC spirit” contest judged by Cowherd. Prizes include a trip to the USC-Notre Dame game in South Bend, Ind., next year, an Xbox 360 with the NCAA Football ’07 game, and -- get this -- a plasma flat-screen TV or two tickets to Saturday’s game.

That tells you this is a big game.

larry.stewart@latimes.com