A Threefold 'Thank You' to Los Angeles
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A Photo Gallery of the Things I am Grateful for This Year
Canter's & Ice Cream Sandwich Could Live in Perfect Harmony
Dear Los Angeles: I'm Thankful For...
I LOVE L.A.! My Thanksgiving Thanks
I like AM radio. I like sports. So when you combine the two forces and create sports talk radio, I am in heaven. Last October Mancow mania finally faded into oblivion, so when KLAC AM 570 teamed up Fred Roggin, Tracy Simers, and L.A. Times Sports Columnist T.J. Simers for the much coveted 6-9am time slot before The Jim Rome Show , I gave it a chance. It couldn't get any worse, right? Roggin and Simers2 (squared) is absolutely the worse thing in the Southern California airwaves (worse than Ryan Seacrest on KIIS-FM). Not only is T.J. Simers a nasty, annoying, and witless personality, but it makes it worse that he drags his daughter, Tracy, and our beloved Fred Roggin into this sloppy mess.
Fred Roggin has been an LA institution with KNBC for over two decades (remember Roggin's Heroes), pairing him up with these two have made him into nothing but a traffic cop. Roggin spends most of the show defending their guests from Simer's confrontational and mindlessly abusive questions. While Tracy waits for an opportunity to talk, as her father goes on and on about whatever. Not only is this show a depressing, witless, and pathetic excuse for a program, but it is boring. Good radio sports talk shows should have entertainment (see The P.M.S. Show), listener interaction (see The Loose Canons), hard-hitting interviews (see Jim Rome) and intelligence (see Lee "Hacksaw" Hamilton). This show has NONE of those. The program is so bad that they don't even take phone calls from listeners. All they do is interview retired C-Level sports celebrities and other sports media personalities, as they fill in the gap with their mundane opinions about everything. T.J. Simers has been alienated by almost every single active athlete and coach in Southern California, which has made him irrelevant. How can someone be a sports columnist for the L.A. Times and host of morning radio show, when no one wants to talk to him?
Since KMPC 1540AM became a Korean language radio station, there has been a weakening of local radio sports talk. I don't like to see anyone lose their jobs, but we have to some standards. There are plenty of other intriguing sports talk hosts out there that deserve a chance in this time slot (see Roger Lodge, Lee Cline, Dave Smith, JT The Brick, etc.). Face it this experiment is over. So why is this show still in the air?
Photo by James Acklin via Flickr
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Amen to that. The show is awful. Rogan alone is awful. At least theres Cowheard to turn to...and its always a good thing to tune in Friday mornings for his picks to bet on college on Saturday.
-ryan
get Sirius. cant top Howard and NFL channel.
also got Coherd and a bunch of other sports talk dudes
I actually really like the show, specifically TJ Simers. I know I'm in the minority on this, but that's just how I feel. I mean I really enjoy the interviews he does with Luis Gonzalez and Jeff Kent. Priceless I tell you!
I can't stand Colin Cowherd. He steals stuff from blogs for his bits, and in general he's just a tool.
I for one love the show. T.J. Simers is the only personality on L.A. sports radio who actually does original reporting once in a while, and the bickering between him and his daughter (who he really seems to love) and his puncturing of Rogan's vanilla sports-guy act is incredibly entertaining - especially when contrasted with Cowherd's tiresome and hectoring fourth-rate Romeismo. It would make a first-rate sitcom; it does make first-class sports radio.
I disagree with Simers, but I think the show is OK. Who cares about listener calls? Seriously, they cover all the topics, what's a listener got to add? 99% of the time, nothing.
And sweet Jesus Dave Smith?! That guy is a pompous, mysogynistic bigoted ass. I can't stand him.
-cephyn-
Amen, brother. The show is so bad I really have a hard time believing (3) and (4) above are real.
One of my favorite sports talk shows--going way back--was Newey Scruggs and a Dave something-or-other in the afternoon slot.
if you're gonna cite intelligence, you should have said Lee Klein, not Hacksaw. Hacksaw is not stupid, but he's certainly not a fluid thinker and debater like Klein. He's completely crippled without callers to carry his show and he's the classic "hang up when you take him to task and then trash you after" host.
TJ Simers is a dinosaur and a coward. At least Roggin has adapted and embraced the change in media since he began. It's no longer a "take it or leave it" era like TJ came up in. He trashed bloggers, he trashes callers, he trashes those with dissenting opinions and he does whatever he can to control people's access to them. He needs to accept that papers are over. There are several alternatives (internet, blogs, 24 hour networks) and being a jerk 24/7/365 gets boring. The show is the same every day. As many b or c list interviews as they can get to fill time, criticism of the station or other shows when they don't have anything to talk about, and endless debates about how they should do good radio without actually doing it. TJ Simers doesn't take calls and doesn't interact with the public because he's simply not intelligent enough to have to debate as opposed to preach and use his show/column to frame things just the way he wants without an opposing viewpoint. We all know Fred doesn't want to have to work in a confrontational environment everyday so he just sits back and takes it.
His daughter is just lazy, uninformed, and incapable of making her own way in the business. I heard her complain that she had to work five hours a day because the commute was two hours and the show was three. Fortunately, she has that blowhard for a father to get her a morning radio gig. Please let this show die.
Bravo Petros and Money. Bravo to the Cannons and Joe McDonnell in doses, and best of luck to Lee Klein on finding an employer who realizes how intelligent and even-keeled he really is on-air.
(1) I offered a number of comments in a blog post on this topic, but suffice it to note that perhaps the reason that the active athletes and coaches like the other so-called "journalists" so much is because they toss such softball questions. Let's face it, when Kobe Bryant tells T.J. Simers,
"You're the only one who is asking about the Lakers....Let it go."
you gotta wonder what the other so-called "journalists" are asking Bryant about. He spent several weeks granting dozens of interviews on wanting/not wanting to be traded, and all the rest of the journalists have quit asking?
(2) One thing I didn't address in my blog post is your assessment of the other radio broadcasters. PMS is entertaining, and the Loose Cannons are also entertaining (assuming that you can tolerate Petros and Vic, respectively). And I've enjoyed Dave Smith when I've heard him.
But I'm mystified as to how someone can praise Rome for being hard-hitting while denigrating Simers for effectively doing the same thing. And listener interaction? The calls to Rome are among the worst things on radio!
Hamilton is tiring, between his "ladies' line" and his berating the audience when they don't call. (I won't address the claims of his reporting old news as new, because I don't have any direct evidence of it.)
I haven't heard enough of Roger Lodge or Lee Klein to venture an opinion, and I've never heard JT the Brick. I rarely listen to Cowherd, and I ended up tiring of Tony Bruno even before the Korean switch.
My two cents,
Ontario Emperor
I agree with ontario...simers is the man. always pushes the buttons the other reporters are afraid of. His Kobe column today was great, these millionaire sports babies are worse than the celebrity trash that we can't avoid.
if you haven't read it yet...
http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-simerscol16,0,4562154.column?track=mostviewed-storylevel
Are you kidding me the Jim Rome with "hard hitting" interviews. Rome is such a kiss ass with a man crush on anyone who come on his show. NASCAR went from the derided "Left turn only circuit" to great entertainment as soon as he went national and got some drivers on his show. But what losses this guy complete credibility is claiming that Hacksaw's ramblings are intelligent. The Cannons would be fine if they got rid of Vic "the brick for a brains" Jacobs. The Simers and Roggin were good and they will be missed.