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mdmost

By mdmost
in Movies and TV

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Grubes
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And I did. Just because it's "the way it is" doesn't mean it's not disappointing when the time comes to accept that the business is the business. The Ticket is an incredible thing. There's a reas

Grubes
Grubes

Still going with that bit? What if I gave you a shoutout from my verified (cue Vivaldi) Twitter account?   

MAUFRAIS
MAUFRAIS

He looks like mark mcgwire fucked Tom kite.

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Surly Bevo

Surly Bevo 24908

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10 minutes ago, Mileslong said:

Junior saying everyone. Loves kyler, what’s not to like, great guy blah blah blah. Does he even realize what a little bitch he is? I’ve never heard kyler him say one positive thing about another player, always slight insults

Junior lives his life soaked in Sooner semen....pay no attention to Junior.

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mdleast

mdleast 8289

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Here is one of the deepest Ticket cuts you’ll find: the one episode reboot of the old (like 18 years old) Ticket TV show where they tried to retool and reboot it as a more traditional talk show. There was not a subsequent episode....

 

 https://youtu.be/62a58jvxLEM

 

 

The guy that posted it was apparently the producer of the show and he is digitizing and uploading the other episodes.

 

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Landomatic

Landomatic 3813

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Do the other hosts really believe Jub can sing?  They just did a segment on Jimmy Buffet singing the National Anthem at the Saints game and Junior was talking to Jub like he's some kind of musical genius.  Surely they know he's horrible right?  I know they made fun of him for the "I still ski on the weekends" lyrics but I almost get the feeling they actually think he can sing.  That Ticketstock spot they're running right now is one of the worst things ever and I just assumed it was meant to be a joke, but I'm starting to think they're serious about it.

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gyroprotagonist

gyroprotagonist 2592

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1 hour ago, CBT said:

 


Again. Best yards/attempt bro.

 

becoming the weekly Troy patting his own back show.  At least he had the disclaimer that he was in fact, not patting his own back.

also, loved how he called out Bob for his Patriots being gifted the Super Bowl every year because their division sucks take.

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futureman

futureman 22446

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15 minutes ago, gyroprotagonist said:

becoming the weekly Troy patting his own back show.  At least he had the disclaimer that he was in fact, not patting his own back.

he’s trying to diplomatically inform all the dak apologists just how bad dak really is.  troy can see it.  I can see it.  it’s time the rest of you saw it. 

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LonghornSean

LonghornSean 3989

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3 hours ago, Landomatic said:

Do the other hosts really believe Jub can sing?  They just did a segment on Jimmy Buffet singing the National Anthem at the Saints game and Junior was talking to Jub like he's some kind of musical genius.  Surely they know he's horrible right?  I know they made fun of him for the "I still ski on the weekends" lyrics but I almost get the feeling they actually think he can sing.  That Ticketstock spot they're running right now is one of the worst things ever and I just assumed it was meant to be a joke, but I'm starting to think they're serious about it.

 

Seriously, his attempt at hitting the high note in that 25 or 6 to 4 spot is horrible.

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C-Man

C-Man 27202

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6 hours ago, gyroprotagonist said:

becoming the weekly Troy patting his own back show.  At least he had the disclaimer that he was in fact, not patting his own back.

also, loved how he called out Bob for his Patriots being gifted the Super Bowl every year because their division sucks take.

I thought that was Sirois's take. (Whoever it was, they aren't entirely wrong. That division has been the worst in the NFL for nearly 20 years. That definitely helps.)

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gyroprotagonist

gyroprotagonist 2592

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19 minutes ago, C-Man said:

I thought that was Sirois's take. (Whoever it was, they aren't entirely wrong. That division has been the worst in the NFL for nearly 20 years. That definitely helps.)

gagree.  I know Bob had a whole segment on it last week.  and it highlighted that Brady is not that great in road playoff games, which they play few and far between because their division sucks and they can normally get homefield throughout.  

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Dbeasy

Dbeasy 15043

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Do the other hosts really believe Jub can sing?  They just did a segment on Jimmy Buffet singing the National Anthem at the Saints game and Junior was talking to Jub like he's some kind of musical genius.  Surely they know he's horrible right?  I know they made fun of him for the "I still ski on the weekends" lyrics but I almost get the feeling they actually think he can sing.  That Ticketstock spot they're running right now is one of the worst things ever and I just assumed it was meant to be a joke, but I'm starting to think they're serious about it.

He a talentless hack riding Gordo’s coattails to wealth and prosperity.
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Catdaddyhorn

Catdaddyhorn 3444

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22 hours ago, gyroprotagonist said:

becoming the weekly Troy patting his own back show.  At least he had the disclaimer that he was in fact, not patting his own back.

also, loved how he called out Bob for his Patriots being gifted the Super Bowl every year because their division sucks take.

Bob's right.  If they don't get the extra bump of going 6-0 or 5-1 against their division every year they make half the number of Super Bowls they've made. The 2 years they actually had division mates with a pulse they didn't even get out of the divisional rounds.  

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LonghornSean

LonghornSean 3989

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2 hours ago, mdleast said:

There is a great, long article/interview with Rhyner up at The Athletic (which you all should already be subscribing to).

 

Quote

“I’m not a big stayer,” Mike Rhyner says, shaking his head in bemused wonder. Somehow, in spite of that declaration, Thursday, January 24th, 2019 will mark the 25th anniversary of Rhyner’s brainchild that revolutionized the American sports radio landscape: 1310 The Ticket.

Time is a funny thing — we move forward through it, but can only experience it by facing backward. We can’t see where the road is about to go, but we can see the path that led us here and take a wild guess as to what’s next. Look far enough back on Mike Rhyner’s path, and you can see the mile markers that led him from Oak Cliff — where he was born in 1950 and lived until he was 27 — to his seat seven miles northeast, behind a microphone in the Ticket studios in Victory Park.

“I had always been infatuated with radio,” he says. “Ever since I was a little kid. I used to listen to Mighty 1190 KLIF, and it was just magic to me. Absolute magic. I would listen to those guys, and it sounded like they were really having big fun; it sounded like everybody in the city was listening to them. They were the epicenter of it all, you know?”

But to call it a simple seven-mile journey is a gross oversimplification. The last 68 years have certainly seen The Old Grey Wolf (as he is occasionally called by his cohorts and fans) traverse a greater-than-usual number of detours and twists. Long before the co-host of The Hardline was the engine behind the launch of the Ticket in 1994, he was an uncomfortable kid, trying to figure out how to be less of a misfit. It wasn’t until the British invasion brought John, Paul, George and Ringo into the national spotlight that a 14-year-old Rhyner — like a generation of others his age — had something of an epiphany.

The Music Years

“I was nowhere near self-aware enough to realize this at the time, (but) I probably saw that as my way out. Because I was a really, really dorky wallflower. I mean, I was very, very shy, and I was homely, I mean… just everything that could go wrong with a kid was wrong with me. I was a mess.”

It didn’t take long before he discovered he had a knack for keeping a beat without speeding up or slowing down. A friend of a cousin gave him a drum kit that was a “bunch of thrown-together stuff from the 1930s or 40s that had drum heads that were just barely this side of cat skin,” Rhyner relates. Before long, he started playing with local bands. As his teen years grew into his twenties, he developed enough of a reputation in the Dallas scene that he was able to make a reasonable living playing gigs, both locally and otherwise, including a touring act called Gypsy Ryder that kept him on the road for all but six weeks one year. “The agency loved us,” he nods. “You want us to go to Sioux Falls? You got it. Chicago? We’ll go to Chicago. Wherever, whenever.”

But by the late 70s, as rock and roll gave way to disco, the rock shows become more and more infrequent until a chance encounter in the parking lot of a music store gave Rhyner an opportunity to shift gears and stay in the scene. David Page, an old acquaintance from Oak Cliff, mentioned that he had been playing in country bands to make ends meet and that Rhyner should consider doing the same.

“That was just an anathema,” the 68-year old says. But after being told that Page was making about $400 per week playing six nights a week, he quickly changed his mind. “Well, okay. I’ll give it a shot,” Rhyner said. “I don’t have that much going on right now. You know, circulate my number.”

Two days later, he found himself on stage with a country band playing songs he’d never even heard before.

“I quickly learned that to do this, there were about five or six grooves that you had to have,” he recalls now. “I had a couple of them. He told me a couple more that I needed to work on, so I did.”

Two days later, another gig. Then another. Before long, Mike Rhyner was, for all intents and purposes, a country music drummer. “I did that for a couple of years,” he says now. “But all that time, I started thinking ‘Okay, what else. What else is out there?”

The Dark Period

What was next was radio. In 1979, after a few dead-end attempts to get a job, he found himself talking to Ken Rundle, who was doing the news on the LaBella and Rody morning show at KZEW “The Zoo”,

“He was about to get out of the game and go to law school,” Rhyner relates. “He needed somebody to come in there and do his shit work for him. I went down there and talked to him about it one day, and he realized that he had a fish on the line here; it took him about a nineteenth of a second to hone in on me, and that was my entree into radio … Once I was in there, I was all in. I knew that this was what I wanted to do.”

Rhyner eventually became the producer of the morning show, getting to the studio in time to ensure that the 6 a.m. show — replete with sound effects, drops, and off-the-wall commentary — ran smoothly. In old video clips of the show, you can almost see the foundations of what would eventually become The Ticket’s calling card: personality.

It was while Rhyner worked at the Zoo that — on a whim — he sent a letter to John Hinckley, Jr. who was in custody at St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Washington D.C. after attempting to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. Hinckley had lived in Dallas, so Rhyner wanted to know if the inmate remembered anything.

A couple of weeks later, an envelope showed up in Rhyner’s inbox at the station. The return address? St. Elizabeth’s.

“I’m like ‘Shit, man, could this be from John Hinckley, or am I in some kind of trouble here,” Rhyner recalls. “Have I violated the law in some way, or what? And I opened it, and sure enough there in his handwriting … he said ‘Yes, I remember The Zoo from my days in Dallas. He said he used to go to Peaches, which was a big record store over on Fitzhugh and Oak Lawn. And, god, he said he used to listen to — he mentioned a couple of songs he used to listen to when he was stalking Jody Foster — because it put him in a strange mood.”

It may not have been intended as a publicity stunt, but it worked as one. Hinckley’s letter made the rounds on local TV newscasts for a couple of days. Rhyner still has a copy somewhere but says the station General Manager kept the original.

The Zoo was sold in 1986, and Rhyner was looking for a job again. After a short stint at KZPS, he was hired at WBAP 820 AM.

“I was in the sports department there,” he says. “That was my first taste of real legitimate sports. They had two guys there, Bill Coates and Steve Lamb, and I did whatever they didn’t want to do. Occasionally, they would toss me a nice fill-in shift on the air, and it was alright.”

It was around this time that Mike and his ex-wife Renee had a daughter, Jordan. Between parenthood and hopes of climbing the radio ladder, he gradually stopped playing shows until one day in 1988, he realized his days as a working musician were over. “Okay, I’m done with this,” he thought. “I’m never going to do another band again. That’s that.”

And for a while, he was.

“I was not real aware that I was doing this at the time, but long about the time that my daughter was born, which was 1988, I kind of zoned out of everything,” Rhyner says now. “Everything that I had ever known. I stopped listening to music. I mean, any time I heard new music, I thought it was just shit without even giving it a chance or listening to it, or trying to evaluate it intellectually, the way I otherwise would. And it was the same thing with everything else. I paid no attention to movies, I didn’t watch TV. All I did was sports. That was the only thing I didn’t zone out of. And consequently, there are some pretty substantial gaps in my knowledge of stuff from that period. Occasionally, I’ll get caught with my pants down on that. It’ll be apparent that I don’t know anything about it.”

Was that a bout of depression? Mourning the loss of something he loved? Rhyner says it was the latter, “Even though I didn’t really want to do it anymore, you know? But I think that I had a little bit of the mentality that if I can’t do it, I don’t want anybody else doing it either. So I kind of walled myself off. A lot of it was bitterness. I wish I had been more successful. I also wished that I had been able to change with the times a little more than I did.” 

The Seeds of a Dream

With music and other entertainment on hiatus and his radio career providing only marginal success, Rhyner did what he had always done: questioned what was next.

“I KNEW THERE HAD TO BE SOMETHING ELSE OUT THERE. I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT IT WAS.”

What was next was still not The Ticket. In fact, it wasn’t even radio. Instead, it was a short-lived experiment that existed in the last few years before internet access became widespread. GTE On-Call allowed customers to call a number, make their selection, listen to an ad, then hear 3-4 minutes’ worth of Mike Rhyner giving them a recap of the most recent game just minutes after the score was final, getting an overnight jump on the newspapers.

He covered the Cowboys, Mavericks, and Rangers, but with the baseball schedule carrying twice as many home games as the next-closest sport, the auxiliary press box at old Arlington stadium proved to be the garden from which the Ticket grew. Rhyner met Craig Miller (who was working at KRLD 1080) and Greg “The Hammer” Williams, who was working at WBAP 820 answering phones for Randy Galloway’s “Sports at Six” show. The three were almost instantly friends, and spent most Rangers games riffing off of one another’s commentary — sometimes about baseball, but more frequently about whatever other topic ran through their minds.

“We were pretty loud; we were laughing a lot, we were cutting up, we were amusing each other,” Rhyner says. “And just having fun amongst ourselves. Over a period of time, I began to notice the others around us. And I noticed that some of them were looking down at us like ‘Man, I wish you guys would shut the fuck up.’ And others would look at us like ‘Wow, you guys look like you’re having some fun. I think I’d like to go down there and hang with you.’

“It wasn’t long before we had established an identifiable clique, in that you very rarely saw one of us without at least one of the other two close by. But I started to realize that these guys are listening to what you’re saying down here, what you’re doing, and they’re reacting to it in some way. That kind of made me pay a whole lot more attention to it. Okay, they’re reacting to it, but why? We’re just kind of amusing each other. Why are they reacting to that? It took me a long time to come to this realization … there was a workable, identifiable chemistry being formed between us.”

Meanwhile, thanks to an introduction from Renee, Rhyner met Geoff Dunbar. As the two began talking, Rhyner realized he had — after hearing all-sports talk radio stations in places like Seattle and Boston — subconsciously been thinking a lot about starting one in Dallas. Every time the two of them spent time together, the topic would resurface. Then one day in late 1992, Dunbar called Rhyner on the phone.

“Meet me for lunch at the Dixie House in Lakewood today,” Dunbar told him. “I’ll tell you when you get here.”

When Rhyner showed up, he was informed that Dunbar had made a connection with Spence Kendrick, an investment banker who was a big sports fan. Dunbar thought there might be a chance to make their conversations a reality, so he pulled out a legal pad and a pen and told Rhyner to go over everything again.

It worked. They got a green light from Kendrick, who began seeking other investors, and the chaos began.

The Chaos

“(This) was a promise I made to myself when I started this thing,” Rhyner says now. “This time, I was going to do this my way. Every other time, I’d taken my marching orders from somebody else. Here was a time when the slate was clean and I could do it however I wanted. I was going to take advantage, and I was going to ride or die with it.”

It’s easy to say in retrospect that the answer would always end up ride.

But it could have easily been die.

“My job was to handle the entire broadcast operations side,” Rhyner says, then raises his eyebrows to ensure the dire point is made. “Which I knew nothing about.”

He repeats the final word for emphasis. “Nothing.”

One thing he did know: he wanted the chemistry of his auxiliary press box buddies to make it to the airwaves. Greg Williams and Craig Miller (who by this time had been christened with the nickname “Junior”) would be his first two recruits. So on June 25th, 1993 — after a rainout between the Rangers and the Athletics — Rhyner asked Miller to come with him to the nearby TGI Friday’s.

“I will never forget the look on Junior’s face when I told him ‘I got a guy that wants to play sports radio, and I want you to do this with me’,” Rhyner says with a grin. Miller’s face went from an eyebrows-raised look of shock to a wide-eyed look of disbelief before finding the right response:

“ARE YOU CRAZY?!”

Williams hadn’t been at the game that night — he was still bartending occasionally — but a few nights later, in the middle of the game, Rhyner stood up and quietly motioned with a head-jerk that his friend should meet him outside. Upon hearing the plan, Williams responded in a similar fashion.

“They both had all kinds of questions,” Rhyner remembers.

“Okay, what’s the signal going to be?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who else is going to do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“How much money is involved in this.”

“I really don’t know.”

“I didn’t know shit,” Rhyner concedes. “I just knew that I wanted to do this, and I wanted them to do it with me, and they were just peppering me with questions. And it finally got to the point where I said ‘Look, man – are you guys in or not?’ And they both said ‘Ohhh oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah! Yeah, we’re in!'”

Next to join the fold was George Dunham.

“We actually go way back,” Dunham says with a smile. “He ran a battle of the bands competition that I was in when he was working for the Zoo and I listened to him in the morning on Labella and Rody so I knew exactly who he was and went up and met him.”

Dunham covered the Rangers and Cowboys for KRLD but had largely stopped covering games by the time the Rhyner / Williams / Miller trio began taking over the auxiliary press box. It was Miller who suggested that Dunham be added to the roster. It took Dunham about a week to decide to take the risk and join the fold, Rhyner recalls, but there was never any question in Dunham’s mind that he wanted in.

“I really thought it could work, and I didn’t really know too much about the success stories of some other sports stations at that time,” Dunham says. “I just heard that there was such an animal as an all-sports radio station, and I knew this market and thought there was a niche for it. I guess my only doubt was my own ability to do it because I just hadn’t done a talk show before … but the prospect of doing a show — and not just doing a show with anybody but doing a show with Craig — that was really attractive. I thought, ‘man, if nothing else, we can tell funny stories, and (I think) crack people up.’ So it’s worth a shot.”

With Williams, Dunham, and Miller in the fold, it was time for the Ticket to go fishing for name recognition.

Chuck Cooperstein was in Philadelphia at the time but agreed to join the fold. He put his house up for sale and made plans to move back (though he removed the sign when old friend Brad Sham came for a visit, so as not to reveal that anything was going on).

Next up, Skip Bayless.

“The only reason we got Bayless is because, at that time, he had burned about every chit in town that he could, and was pretty much on the beach,” Rhyner says bluntly. “I mean, he had run through both newspapers, he had run through KLIF, and at WBAP, Galloway hated him. He was persona non-grata there. I can’t remember whether he had run through KRLD or not; I don’t think he ever did, because they were probably on to him, too. But he had the one thing that we did not have: and that was a name. He was a known commodity. Now, everyone hated him, but he was still a known commodity. And he was pretty desperate at the time, and he wanted to do it. So he came on board.”

skip-quote-card.jpg

The last one to officially come on board was current FOX NFL Sunday host Curt Menefee, who was working for CBS affiliate KTVT. One catch: Menefee didn’t have permission from KTVT to host the show until the day before the station launched.

Meanwhile, as Rhyner worked to secure talent, there were other factors that had to be dealt with, primarily by Kendrick and Dunbar, though Rhyner was involved. A sales team was cobbled together from old acquaintances who were out of the business and wanted back in.

Of course, to be a radio station, the Ticket needed a signal. That would require a call to the Church of Latter-Day Saints, who owned the station through Bonneville International,

“I don’t know if this is true or not,” Rhyner says, smiling and shaking his head. “I suspect this is a joke, some kind of radio joke; but I’ve heard that this is true. I heard the whole idea behind the Mormon church getting into radio was that they wanted to acquire an AM and an FM signal in every major city in the nation and set up a network, so when the second coming rolled around, they could broadcast it.

“I thought that if it was true, that put it out of play for us, and if it wasn’t, that they would want way, way, way more money than we could come up with. I figured that we wouldn’t be able to go for much more than a million and a half, which would just get us a little shit signal, but hey, that’s okay. I would fight through anything back then.”

Three million dollars later, The Ticket owned a signal and a transmitter. “We probably way overpaid,” Rhyner says. “And I didn’t care.”

One problem: the transmitter was in desperate need of maintenance. In fact, Rhyner says, he thought it hadn’t been maintained since the 1940s; about the same era of that first drum set all those years ago. 

Enter Tim Walker. “I knew the signal sounded kind of lousy, but I didn’t know how lousy,” Rhyner says. “(Walker) did. His first time out there, he just came back and told me ‘Man, that is a disaster out there.’ I asked ‘Do you know what to do about it?’ and he goes ‘Oh yeah. I’ll get it as squared away as it can be’. And he did.”

Walker hired a team of engineers and within a couple of months of his arrival, the Ticket was fully incubated and ready to be born. A couple of billboards announced the coming station, one with a giant jock strap, and the other declaring the Ticket to be “Your wife’s worst nightmare”.

Rhyner and Williams would go on from 11 a.m. – 2 p.m. under the moniker “The Hardline,” named after the Terence Trent D’Arby album. 

1310 The Ticket

“It is 6 a.m. on January 24th, 1994,” revved the treble-laden and determined voice of Skip Bayless. “Good morning. And welcome to history. You are listening to the first breaths of the first all-sports radio station in Dallas history. You are listening to 1310 AM, which will become known as The Ticket; your ticket inside Dallas Fort Worth sports. My name is Skip Bayless, AKA Doctor Bay, and my show 6 to 9 weekday mornings is called The Wake-Up Call. Welcome to The Wake-Up Call! I will wake you up in more ways than one! Go one on one with me right now! Our number here at the Ticket is 787-1310, that’s 787-1310 And while you are dialing me up, I have a prediction for you — move over, Jimmy Johnson! — I have a promise. You can put this one in 33-inch headlines. We will win our ballgame! This station will kick all the other stations’ butts! We will kick KLIF’s butt! We will kick WBAP’s butt and KRLD’s butt! We will, because we have the best team in this city!”

“I remember that first day,” Rhyner surmises, 25 years later. “Spence and Geoffrey and I; it was probably our last happy moment together. We were all in a production room, it was 6:00 in the morning, we were ready to hit the air, and we couldn’t believe that this was really about to happen. I just knew that something was going to go wrong, something was going to happen, and it was going to crater the whole thing. But it didn’t. They started playing the sounder and Skip Bayless came on, and we were in there listening, and he started taking calls about ten minutes in, and he had calls. He had callers, and the callers all seemed to know what to do. It was not like they’d never heard this before. I had a very strange feeling come over me that for all the chaos and all the mess and all the shit that we were swimming through right now, in the end game, some way, somehow, this was going to be alright.”

Fortunately for the Ticket, they just so happened to launch in Dallas in a year that the Cowboys were headed to the Super Bowl. As part of their first month, they sent a crew of rag-tag hosts to Atlanta to talk, joke, annoy, and otherwise run amok; much to the delight of their new fanbase.

But if the Super Bowl was a bit of good luck, what came next was a golden ticket:

“THERE ARE 500 COACHES WHO COULD HAVE WON THE SUPER BOWL WITH OUR TEAM.” – JERRY JONES, MARCH 29, 1994

“Man, you have no idea how that played into our hands,” Rhyner says of the Jerry Jones / Jimmy Johnson split. “Because that transcended sports. That was all anyone was talking about, that was all anyone wanted to hear about.” 

While the other stations continued to have their usual daily programming, The Ticket was free to spend all day every day on the rift. Their listenership went through the roof. By the time the ratings came out in August, The Hardline was the highest-rated show on the Ticket, and the Ticket — fulfilling at least part of Bayless’ prediction — was ahead of KRLD and KLIF. The station shot to prominence both locally and nationally.

In short order, ardent listeners were identifying themselves as “P1’s,” something Rhyner says was not an intended effect, but quickly caught on.

“That is a term that is used throughout the business,” he informs me “The P in P1 stands for preference. If you were a P1 of a certain station, that means if your radio is on, it’s probably on that station. P2 is a couple rungs lower than that. P3 is a couple rungs lower than that. But it’s an inside radio term. If you go to any radio station in the nation, anywhere and start talking to them about their P1s, they’ll know exactly what you mean, you won’t have to explain or anything.

“But one day, I started thinking about this, and I was promoting some event or something on the air, and I remember saying ‘You may be thinking to yourself, how can I, the P1, get in on this…’ I started thinking about what I had just done, and I started trying to apply that tag elsewhere as much as I could, and it caught on.

“I don’t remember the first time it happened, but it wasn’t long after I’d said it a few times before somebody self-identified as a P1. I knew we had come up with something. It’s a little thing that turned into a big thing. They (listeners) are the ones that assumed the mantle. I never told them to start identifying as P1s or ‘Call yourselves P1s’ They just did it!”

Over the next few years — as the relationship between the younger members of the on-air talent was forged in the beer-fueled party house known as the “Ticket Compound” — the relationships between the older members (Rhyner and various members of management) became a bit more prickly. The dust-ups usually came from an edict to “stick to sports”.

“There came a point where (Kendrick) had to go out and start rounding up some investors, and a couple of these guys wanted a say in the thing,” Rhyner says. “He would try to get us to stick to sports, and he started going around me and telling Dunham and Miller in no uncertain terms that they should stick to sports, too. ‘You guys should knock off this bullshit’. Well they wouldn’t stand up to him, they felt like they were on really shaky ground, so I did it for them. I told them ‘No, we’re on the right track! People love what we’re doing here; they love everything about this thing. What we need to do is just keep going like we are!’

“We butted heads many times over that, there were many times when I thought he was going to fire me, and really, after a point, (he) was just finished with me. Probably the only reason he didn’t (fire me) was that he knew that everybody would follow me out the door because their loyalty was to me. That meant that he would either have to do it himself or find somebody to go out and round up a whole new crew after this thing had already been on the air for a while, so none of that ever came about. I guess there, better judgment took the day eventually.”

While Rhyner believed in himself and his vision for the station, he says it wasn’t until Kendrick sold the station and new Program Director Mike Thompson arrived that someone in management also saw the vision.

“He became our biggest advocate,” Rhyner says. “He didn’t want people talking sports all the time. He said ‘You guys just do what you do, let your personalities develop. If you want to talk about shit beyond sports, that is fine with me, I will never say anything to you about it.’ And he didn’t! … He was the first guy that we really had that really enabled us. And showed us that ‘Look, what you’re doing here is good, man. Keep doing it.’ His place in our story, for me, is huge.”

But while the early turnover was fraught with turmoil, nothing could compare to the fracture of 2008.

Where’s Greggo?

It’s that time of the interview. I have to ask. “Mike, what happened with Greggo?”

He sighs and nods.

“Believe me, I have huge, huge regard for what we did,” he begins, taking a big pause before launching into the story.

“As we were putting this thing together in the formative days, months, and even years, I tried to ask myself every possible question I could. Like, if this happens, what would you do? If that happens, how would you react? What if the station gets sold out from under you? How are you going to navigate those waters? And I think that I did a pretty reasonable job at it. I was ready for just about anything that I might have to stand up to or get involved in.

“There’s one question, though, that I didn’t ask. And it was so far outside the realm of possibility, not only did I not ask it or think about it, I didn’t even consider it as any kind of even remote possibility. And that question was: what are you going to do if this thing goes off-the-wall successful? How are you going to react then, and how are all these other guys going to react to this? As things turned out, all of them reacted to it just fine. I reacted to it just fine. Greggo didn’t. He just could not handle it.

“He was the first big breakout personality at the Ticket. I mean, really, for a good couple of years or so, we were all kind of riding on his coattails. He was the one people were talking about; he was the one people listened to, and I was just kind of along for the ride because I was still trying to find my persona. Mine was not anywhere near as well-defined as his, and neither was anyone else’s … It never bothered me how much attention he got; I loved it! But once that started to shift, it was difficult for him. And then drugs came in, women came in, he began to be a little less inclined to do the work of the job. He just got, um… he got a lot more eaten-up with all the ancillary stuff, and he just wouldn’t listen to me anymore, and that was it, man. It just kind of dissolved from there, until the drug use became such an issue that we just couldn’t continue with it.”

At 2:58 p.m. on Friday, October 12, 2007 — just fifteen days after The Ticket won their first Marconi award for Best Sports Station in America — a cross-talk segment between the Bob and Dan midday show and The Hardline began. Bob Sturm was in the studio, Dan McDowell, who had to leave early to get to a doctor appointment, was on the phone, and The Hardline was broadcasting from a remote location.

Greggo was nowhere to be found.

Six minutes later, his voice finally made it on-air.

“Where the hell have you been?” asked Corby Davidson.

“I — believe me. Car and — full chaos.” Williams said rapidly. “I just hope I’m on, I’m using my OnStar; this is the first time I’ve ever used it. I didn’t know if I was on or not. I don’t have a cell phone. My cell phone’s lost.”

“Mm.” Rhyner can be heard saying in response.

“So I’m just hoping my OnStar is working in my car.”

“Everybody was on to him,” Rhyner says now, woefully. “He’d been warned by management, and it just rolled into, just a big, downhill, rolling shit-ball that nobody knew how to stop.”

Williams stuck around for another segment of the show, in which The Hardline talked about wanting to learn another language. “They told me years ago I’d regret it and they’re right,” Williams can be heard saying. “I so wish I’d learned to speak another language.”

When the show came back from the next commercial break, Rhyner and Davidson dove into a discussion about an upcoming Texas A&M vs. Texas Tech football game. Williams was nowhere to be heard. He had been removed from the broadcast.

“So a couple days after that — and this was a shit way to handle it — we had an all-hands staff meeting,” Rhyner recalls. “Out of that came the decision that he was no longer going to be a part of this. That didn’t need to be done in front of everybody. There were a lot of people in that meeting, like Bob and Dan, who had no business there. Because all of this stuff went on well before they were a part of things.”

“Well, you have to understand, it was going on for probably three years prior,” Davidson says. “I mean, three full years of he would show up, wouldn’t show up, he would be sick, he wouldn’t be sick. And so him being gone, even though we kind of knew that that was the last straw, it was almost a relief and it was really easy. I mean, we worked without him so many times. You’re talking about a guy who would miss six weeks at a time so it wasn’t that big of a deal and really, when it all went down and the way it went down, and I knew pretty quickly because my bosses were calling me and were like, ‘Here’s what’s happening, here’s what’s going to happen and here’s what he has to do. He’s got to take a drug test, blah blah blah.’ I’m like, ‘That’s it; it’s over.’ So it was almost one of those deals where you felt the weight of the world off your back. It was weird, I mean very, very weird but it was almost like, ‘Okay, here we go.'”

While the Ticket staff knew what had happened to Williams, the listeners weren’t told officially until months later.

“I don’t know if I would have survived that, had social media been around back then,” Davidson says. “People were out for blood; they wanted answers, we didn’t have any answers, we couldn’t say much because of HIPAA laws and all of that. I mean, I could feel the tension from the outside pushing in.” 

Williams went on to be hired and subsequently fired from 103.3 ESPN Radio and 105.3 The Fan. I asked Rhyner if he has been in touch. He shook his head.

“He’s toxic to me.”

After a long pause, he leaned back in his seat.

“Now, that said, I hope he comes to Ticketstock.”

Was he invited? “Well, I put it out there on social media and said it on the air that if he wants to come on… I hope he does. Because he was a big part of the thing at the start, and if he wants to re-live that time again, then I think I’d like to have him there. And I mean, I haven’t gone so far as to reach out to him; that I won’t do, but I put it on social media. He’ll see it. I’m sure he knows it … Much to the chagrin of the others who don’t think he should be there, I want him there, and I hope he comes. Now, he may be hearing from the others, saying ‘No, no, don’t come’ I don’t know. We’ll see what happens, but I have assured him that — just for this one day — I will play nice.

“I’m not doing it to be magnanimous, I’m not doing it to be big. I’m doing it because I think he belongs there. Because I recognize what he was to us back then. And if he wants to commemorate the occasion with us, he should be able to.”

 

What’s Next

Mike Rhyner is 68 years old. He is not the oldest on-air personality at the Ticket — not since Norm Hitzges joined the fold in 2000 — but he is still as relevant as ever, in part because of a lesson he learned from his days in music: adapt.

“Partly, has been me realizing that I had to do it,” Rhyner admits “And I think partly, it’s because everybody up there was a generation younger than me; that’s helped. But the thing about it is, they’re all getting younger too. So, they’re going to be facing the same thing I was back then.”

“Those people who were listening to him in their 20s back then, they’re now 25 years older, see the world differently and they changed and evolved just like Mike has,” adds George Dunham. “I guess that’s one thing I didn’t realize; just the overall depth that Mike has. He has an amazing knowledge of sports and sports history that I didn’t realize when the station first started. I just heard he was kind of a sports guy on an FM wacky morning show … but you know, Mike’s really like all of us; he’s passionate about sports, he’s passionate about music and he has interesting takes. Part of the thing that’s made The Ticket work, he’s an interesting person. I think there’s a lot of different layers to him, there’s a lot of quirks to him.”

Davidson thinks Rhyner’s ability to stay relevant has been due in part to another strength: his willingness to allow — if not outright insistence upon — his co-hosts’ personalities shining through.

“He’s basically let Danny (Balis) and I walk into a situation and be ourselves. I mean, we go at it back and forth, no doubt about it, we bicker all the time and it’s like an old married couple, but it’s all good. He’s the one that had to allow it to work initially and kind of let it grow and yeah, it was all his thing, for sure.”

Does he have an exit strategy?

“No. I don’t have any idea how much longer I’m going to be doing this,” Rhyner muses. “I could be doing it for another — if everything goes according to Hoyle — ten years, fifteen years, hell, I don’t know. Or I could go in there tomorrow and say ‘Fuck it, man. I’m done’. Both of those are pretty extreme cases; the truth is probably in the middle somewhere there. But it’s not something I’ve really thought about.

“I enjoy the work of the job; I enjoy the day-to-day of it. In fact… for the last couple of years, at the end of the year, I’ve wound up with a lot of (vacation) time (that) I had just gone through the year not realizing I hadn’t used, you know? In 2017, I had about two weeks off, which is a good bit. This year, it was even worse. My last day was December 7th, and I didn’t go back until the end of the year. (But) I did okay with it. I did okay with it this year, for the first time ever. For both of those two years, I’ve been okay with it.”

Those last five words might not sound significant, but there’s something heartwarming about hearing such a contented phrase from the guy who kept asking “what’s next” for all those years of awkward childhood, playing drums — first in rock and roll bands, then in country bands — working at a morning show, then another morning show, then yet another morning show, reading game summaries for a pre-internet crowd, and then fighting tooth and nail to see his vision become a three-time Marconi-Award-winning radio station. Those are the phrases you take when you can get them.

“I’ve been okay with it.”

 

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threesheets

threesheets 1672

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This whole day is like a long reenactment of that Beatles circle jerk story they love to tell so much.  Except instead of spitting out names of famous hotties, they just say something about themselves to make everyone jerk it more furiously.

But as a minute one P1, I can't help but enjoy the nostalgia.

And Rhynes is orchestrating some Washington-level narrative control in growing his legend as the sole "mastermind" behind the Ticket.  

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