September 4, 1992 will go down as a very important date in Toronto Radio history when CJCL 1430 turned into the Fan 1430 and then turned Fan 590 and later became Roger sportsnet 590, the Fan when Rogers rebranded over a year ago. It now has been 20 years of sports programming for the most part and now I have come up with 20 things that we have learned from the Fan.
20 - The Sports babe was money wasted of programming that taught us local is better than a national box programming;
19 - Chris Shultz knows his football and was very entertaining while it lasted as apart of the Mike Hogan mid-day show until Rogers bought the station;
18 - When everybody goes on strike it is not a good time to be a sports radio station and when baseball squashed the World Series in '94 and the NHL decided to scraped the 34 games of 1994-95 season and only played 48 regular season games;
17 - The Fan can scrape the majority of their hosts and repack themselves and become a stronger product when they scraped all their monday - to -friday except for Bob bobcat McCown;
16 - Mike Wilner is not someone to mess with as if U are stupid and ask a stupid question Wilner can get very angry;
15 - Sports updates every 20 minutes is a lor better than the original 15 minute update;
14 - They can recover from huge mistakes like hiring announcer Andrew Krystal as he was not a good fit but it did not hurt the product and they got rid of very quickly;
13 - Tim and Sid is a great afternoon drive show and bring edutainment monday - to -friday;
12 - U do not need to pay an arm and a leg for Toronto Maple Leaf radio rights as they gave them up along time ago and have had a lot strong ratings;
11 - Bringing in Live Audio Wrestling as a replacement brand when they were unable to stream Raptors and then turned it into a weekend evening program on the station and began a 15 plus years of Live Audio Wrestling after getting its start with the Fan before moving on to other stations;
10 - Other companies can take up sports radio on 1050 in the early 2000's with the Team 1050 and right now TSN radio 1050 for over a year and the fan destroy them;
9 - soccer on the radio is not good programming as they have had it before and it did not last;
8 - Blue Jays baseball is best on the Fan as others have tried to do Blue Jays baseball and failed miserably;
7 - It is a breeding ground for talent as George Stroumboulopoulos (the hour), Barry Davis (Blue Jays baseball), Elliotte Friedman (HNIC), Spider Jones, and Dan Shulman (radio voice for Sunday Night Baseball);
6 - The highlight reel which was a mashup of mistakes throughout the week and it was awesome;
5 - Losing great people like Jim Kelley and Jim shaky Hunt who were co-host with Bob McCown with Hunt being the best co-host and who can forget him always asking coaches at the Superbowl and Gray Cup if their players can have sex during the week leading up to the big game. Tom Cheek was a huge lost to the station and Blue Jays baseball has never been the same and Pat Marsden leaving a huge hole in the morning show when he passed away;
4 - Game which was an overnight weekend program that introduced us to Bob Mackowycz, Jr, Jeff Marek and George Stroumboulopoulos along with others who moved on to greatness;
3 - Stormin' Norm Rumack and callers allows getting under his skin and his hammerhead alert and him going crazy in his early days at the station was crazy;
2 - Waken up on September 11th, 2001 and listen to the Fan and instead of sports I was listening to news reports from New York it was a surreal moment after the twin towers went down;
1 - Prime Time Sports the staple of the station is bigger than the actual station;
Happy 20th and hope u have at least 20 more
Tom Mehegan
No comments:
Post a Comment