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Introduction

A Brief History Of Sports Talk Radio

All About Rome

The Importance Of Being Jim Rome

The Long History Of Sports Talk Radio In Madison

How Madison Won A Tour Stop

Now The Real Work Begins: The Setup

The Big Day: Anatomy Of A Jim Rome Tour Stop

To The Winner Goes The Spoils

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Make no bones about it, Jim Rome is important. In fact, he's not merely important, he's significant, and there is a good reason for this: in everything he does, Rome is transcendent.

Rome is not merely the biggest name in sports talk radio, he revolutionized sports talk radio. He may claim otherwise, that it was not his intent to revolutionize anything. He has said that early on he realized that sports talk radio is pretty much the same anywhere you go and that to succeed, he needed to do something different.

And that is exactly what he did and in so doing, that is how he did revolutionize sports talk radio.

The proof of this fact can be found in almost every town that runs local sports talk programming because there's always some guy (or "local scrub" as Rome would say) who uses his lingo ("gloss" in the Jungle lexicon) and tries to imitate his manner.

Rome made sports talk radio hip. He brought Rock and Roll to sports talk radio, both figuratively and literally. The show is loud and fast paced and very much in-your-face, and music is a big part of the show. Several songs used as "bumpers" to usher in a new segments have become recognized as Jungle songs, most notably "Welcome To The Jungle" by Guns N Roses.

Rome himself has a hip demeanor and speaks in a way which one would more expect to hear at the beach than in the booth. Of course, it can be easy to be fooled. The apparent quickness of his mind and glibness of his tongue would indicate that he probably spent more time hanging with the debate time than hanging 10 at the beach.

And the show is not always all about sports, but reflects the variety of interests found in today's younger sports fans. Rome frequently blends bizarre, somewhat revolting stories taken from the several newspapers he reads daily and news bits about misbehaving celebrities along with sports. He will even do extended interview with non-sports figures if he thinks it will be of interest to his listeners.

Recently, in January, 2004, Rome interviewed Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue for more than an hour. The audience, judging by their phone calls and e-mails, was ecstatic, and Sixx, candid and forthcoming, provided perhaps the most entertaining interview in Jungle history.

It is important to realize that if it had not been Rome, it would have been someone else, perhaps doing things a bit differently, but someone, anyone would have come along and made sports talk radio different from what it was and hipper than it had been.

Quite simply, sports talk radio had to get younger or else it would loose a good portion of its audience. If the 25-54 demographic suddenly became 35-54, the genre would die. This is not to say that people in their 20s and early 30s are any hipper than their counterparts from years ago, but on the whole, today's sports fans probably are more hip than 30 years ago.

My theory about this is that when you look at the previous generation of sports talk hosts, people like Ken Beatrice or Lee "Hacksaw" Hamilton, they came from a time where America was much more polarized than it is now, in terms of politics and culture. When I think of Beatrice or Hacksaw, I flash back to a spoof of Peanuts in Mad Magazine where the kids are teenagers. It's the 1960s and the Peanuts gang is into protest, drugs, sex and Rock and Roll, except poor uncool Charlie Brown, who's vainly trying to drum up interest in a pep rally and just can't seem to understand the apathy of his friends.

This is the first generation of sports talk radio hosts, guys who were into sports at a time when it wasn't cool. Sure, I can believe that Chet Coppock is a legitimate hep cat, but Papa Joe Chevalier is the Dad who embarrasses his kids when he talks about Elvis and Roy Orbison in front of their friends.

Times are different. Today Republicans listen to Punk Rock.

Also, Rome is of the first generation that grew up, or partially grew up with sports talk radio. Rome has said he didn't go out of his way revolutionize sports talk radio; he simply knew that to succeed, he needed to do something that was not the same as what everyone else was doing. Still, I have to believe that having listened to sports talk radio as a teenager or even younger, Rome had to have been developing a sense of what he liked and what he did not like.

Rome also was a major force in making the caller a co-star of a sport talk radio show. Previously, the sports talk radio host was "the expert" and callers would ask questions and politely listen to the host's response. If callers ask Rome a question, his response typically is, "I don't know, what do you think?"

This is where Rome's credo "Have a take and don't suck" comes in. "Have a take" means bring something meaningful the table. Bring an intelligent, well constructed opinion. "Running smack" is okay, i.e. being a bit insulting, being perhaps a little less than polite, within reason.

Good callers are rewarded by being allowed to finish their phone call and perhaps having Rome say, "Rack him!" at the end of the call, meaning that the engineer should save the tape for consideration for the "Huge Call," of the day which gets played back at the end of the show. Frequent callers who win multiple "Huge Calls" may be invited to the annual "Smack Off" where the best callers, past and present, compete for the title "King of Smack."

Bad callers get "run," accompanied by the sound of a basketball buzzer (the Fabulous Sports Babe did something similar, except she used a burning fuse and exploding bomb.).

The upshot of all of this is that Rome has done a great deal to upgrade the quality of caller driven sports talk radio and perhaps can be credited with saving caller driven sports talk radio which began in the early 1970s when Eddie Andelman at WEEI, Boston started taking phone calls from listeners.

But, as sports talk radio networks formed and sports talk radio programming began to spread throughout the hinterlands in the early and mid 1990s, one had to seriously question whether caller driven sports talk would survive nationally, especially considering the disdain some network executives seem to hold toward listeners. For instance, ESPN Radio had been on the air for two years before it started taking phone calls and that was only on "The Fabulous Sports Babe" which specifically was a caller driven show. When Nanci Donnellen left ESPN Radio, the network stopped taking phone calls. Today, they will take a phone call here and there, but there are no caller driven shows on ESPN Radio.

More than likely, the attitude at ESPN is that listeners should listen. After all, why would someone want to listen to the moronic ramblings of some guy from Bumblefuck, Nowhere when they can listen to Dan Patrick.

What is lost in this attitude is that caller driven radio can be extremely entertaining because it is unpredictable. A good host is able to handle a wide variety of topics and does not need to steer the show from single topic to single topic. Caller driven radio will go in any number of directions and can change dramatically with the next phone call. And with a "ruthless taskmaster who harangues and abuses them, who forces them to stretch, to be all they can be" like Rome, as described by Sports Illustrated, caller driven radio is much more than merely watching a trainwreck, as some might believe.

Rome made his Jungle a far more accessible place for his listeners. No more was the host "the expert" or the jersey waving jock sniffer. His show works because of a strong affinity listeners feel toward Rome.

"I think one of the reasons the show works is because I am one of them," Rome said at the press conference following the Madison Tour Stop. "I think I created a show where we can have an exchange of ideas and opinions, but I am one of them and I think they recognize that I'm one of them. I'm not any better than them and I know that. I think the only difference between me and them is that I have a radio show and somebody pays me to express my opinions.

"The term 'clone' (Rome fan) is both slightly derisive, but at the same time it's a term of affection. They're my people. These are my people. I would not have a show, nor a career, nor a tour stop without my listeners. I'm nothing without these people, but at the same time, if I don't keep them in check, who will?"

Along with the Huge Call, there is the Huge E-mail of the day as well. Rome, in fact, probably reads more e-mails in a day than ESPN Radio hosts read in a month.

Also, Rome was one of the first, if not the first sports talk show host to bring the Internet to the listening audience. Rome has had a website pretty much since the beginning of his syndication that included an electronic bulletin board (which unfortunately no longer exists) and broadband treats—even before the term broadband was even being used with regularity.

What Rome's website demonstrated was that the world of a sports talk show did not have to end when the show ended.

Rome brought star power to the arena of sports talk radio. Thanks to Rome, ESPN Radio gave shows to Dan Patrick and Tony Kornheiser and Sporting News Radio, mostly a journalistically oriented network, brought in James Brown.

However, none of those hosts can touch Rome when it comes to ratings. From market to market, sports talk radio tends to be on the lower end of the ratings scale and its success is more dependent on the solid demographic than the overall ratings.

Rome, on the other hand, blows this away. Ratings-wise, Rome is in the stratosphere compared to his sports talk radio counterparts. According to research done by Talkers, the talk radio trade magazine, Rome rates in the top ten of talk radio hosts, in terms of national ratings. The study places Rome in eighth place, with a weekly listenership of approximately 1.75 million, heads and shoulders above his sports talk counterparts, and in rarefied company with some of the biggest talk radio hosts in the country.

As further proof of how far above his sports talk counterparts Rome is, consider the launching of his third television show, "The Last Word," in 2003. As we all know, Rome had a show on ESPN2 (reference the Jim Everett incident). He also had a show on Fox Sports Net.

"The Last Word" perhaps demonstrates the completion of his climb to the top of the sports talk world. When the show launched, he returned to ESPN, but what is particularly significant is that his radio show competes directly with ESPN Radio's Tony Kornheiser. This did not matter. Rome is that big that the ESPN family would embrace him with open arms even while in direct competition.

Every year, Talkers publishes its "Heavy Hundred" list of the 100 most influential people in talk radio. For several years, Rome has been a regular member of the "Heavy Hundred," an honor not shared by anybody else in the genre, other than WFAN's "Mike and the Mad Dog."

While Rome distantly trails Rush Limbaugh, according to Talkers, Rome has surpassed Limbaugh and all other talk radio hosts in one area: he has gone above and beyond merely being a talk radio host; Jim Rome is a pop culture phenomenon. The Tour Stops are a concrete manifestation of this fact. When Rome came to Madison, it was more than just a celebrity making a public appearance. It was a historically significant event, at least from a pyscho-sociological standpoint.

Along these lines, to fully understand Rome, one needs to understand the concept of fandom.

Fandom can be defined as a gathering of enthusiasts, an amalgamation of people who do not necessarily have anything in common in areas like age, sex, race, ethnicity or geography, but are united by an active interest in a particular person, place or thing.

It is difficult to determine where and when fandom originated. Perhaps one could argue that Romans of a particular political stripe, who rooted for chariot racers who wore particular colors may have been the first example of fandom. Or maybe fandom originated in Medieval times around joisters.

In the United States, fandom originated in the early 20th Century. It is my sense that in may have begun with the origin of professional football in the 1920s. Unlike baseball, which was a daily way of life, football was a major weekly event, and early professional football teams were tightly intertwined with the growing movement toward boosterism in most American cities and towns in that era.

The boosterism movement sought to facilitate a greater sense of community by promoting civic pride in individual cities and towns. These early professional football teams provided an entity for citizens to get behind and support. They provided an identity. Pride in one's municipality then was strongly tied with the success of its football team. Thus these early professional football teams were especially important in the smaller cities that had teams in those days, cities like Green Bay, the last small city to have an NFL team. Chicago did not necessarily need a football team to enhance its prestige, but Duluth did.

Fandom as a term came into use in the science fiction community in the 1920s and 1930s, spawned from letter columns in the science fiction magazines of the time. Through these columns, science fiction fans began corresponding with each other and with the professional writers of the day. Science fiction societies came next. The Scienceers was formed in New York in 1929 and in 1930, the first British science fiction society was formed, the Ilford Science Literary Society.

Science fiction fans quickly started their own publications, known as "fanzines" as a means to correspond with other science fiction fans. The Comet was the first fanzine, published by Ray Palmer in 1930 for the Science Correspondence Club.

Amateur Press Associations (APAs) formed, where members would send in a set number of copies of their fanzine, usually produced specifically for that APA and generally referred to as an "APAzine," to the association's Official Editor who would collate these submissions into a super-zine and mail copies to each member.

Within a few years, the science fiction convention was born. The first American science fiction convention was held in Philadelphia on October 22, 1936. On January 3, 1937, the first British science fiction convention was held in Leeds, but some fans claim the Leeds con was actually the first really convention because it was a public function, that attracted fans from all over the country and had an actual planned program, whereas the Philadelphia con was an informal private gathering of New York and Philadelphia fans held in somebody's home.

Science fiction conventions grew quickly in popularity and number. In 1942, the first World Con was held, where American and British science fiction fans were able to get together in person for the first time. World Con is held every year, in a different city and has been held in several different continents over the years. At each World Con, attendees vote on the highly coveted Hugo Awards.

Science fiction fandom provided the prototype for the wide variety of fandom that exists today. Fandom exists around television shows, movies, Rock and Roll bands, anything you can possibly imagine. There are railroad fans. I went to a tattoo show several months ago and saw a tribal, very fannish culture. The Internet has dovetailed well with fandom and probably has done a great deal to facilitate even greater growth of fandom.

I remember a friend describing listings in the zine, Factsheet Five, which essentially is a comprehensive index of zines. She said she used to think that most Americans were pretty mainstream, but after reading Factsheet Five, she came to the conclusion that most people are out on the fringes, in terms of their interests, and that the people who sit in the mainstream, are in the minority.

Social scientists who study mass media knock themselves out trying to quantify any kind of effect mass media has or has had on people. They've examined violence on television and attempted to see if it leads to violent behavior in real life. They've studied children's shows. They've studied political advertising.

One area where it is clear that the mass media has had an effect is fandom. The origin and growth of fandom was a very 20th Century phenomenon and the mass media had a great deal to do with. The mass media provided many of the subjects of fandom, i.e. literature, movies, television and music, and provided the conduits for fannish communication through zines and magazines and later the Internet.

A buzzword in mass media studies is "the global village." Fandom breaks through the barriers of geography, as well as sex, race, age, class and ethnicity to form new kinds of communities in the Brave New World of the 20th Century where the static, agrarian society was supplanted by a mobile, transient, industrial society. People don't know their neighbors, so they create neighbors; they create a community of their own.

Fandom is about inclusion. One may be alienated at their job and in their neighborhood, but they find acceptance in fandom. This is true in sports fandom as well. Sports fans are united by mutual rooting interest in a particular team, but they are also united by the fact that they are football fans or baseball fans or sports fans in general. This extends to sports talk radio as well.

Jim Rome's Tour Stops exists as the most dramatic example of this notion of the inclusive nature of sports fandom. A Tour Stop has a rock concert atmosphere, but comes off more like a pep rally, and in various ways is a lot like a science fiction convention, or even a Star Trek convention, while at the same time it feels like a Grateful Dead show as well.

Interestingly enough, initially the Tour Stops were no different from any other sports talk host's personal appearances.

"It was never my plan," Rome said of the evolution of the Tour Stop. "I never thought to myself when I started, 'you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to be this guy who will show up in arenas, interview a few athletes and talk a little junk and maybe crack on bowling and maybe ten-thousand people will show up.' I never envisioned it going that way.

"When I started in local radio, like in this market and every other market, they take their talk show host and they send him out to restaurants and they have him do a show and sell it to the sponsor and that's how they generate traffic. It's good for everybody.

"We started doing them, but luckily, at the time, the show was different. People started to take to it and pretty soon when there were ten people at the bar, there were fifty people at the bar. And when there were fifty people at the bar, there were a hundred and then five hundred and as the show got national, there was a bigger pool of people to pull from. There were more listeners and then we could come from an area like this and pull from surrounding communities.

"In terms of there not being anything like it, I guess not, probably not and I get a charge out of doing it. I love doing it. I love to go to the different markets. I love to do a show and I get a kick out of it. This was never my plan. I never saw it going this way.

"If you were to say to me, ten thousand people came today to see radio man? Why? It's free. There's beer."

The degree to which the Tour Stops have evolved is apparent in the contrast between the Madison Tour Stop and the Green Bay Tour Stop of 1997.

"It's just a lot bigger," Chris Schuster said, comparing the two Tour Stops, both of which he attended. "That's not to say it's better or worse. There (Green Bay) you actually had the feeling you could actually meet him. You're not going to get close to him now. That (Green Bay) was in a banquet hall primarily where you have weddings. That's how small it was. I stood right next to him. In fact, my buddy bought him a shot. He did a shot with my buddy."

Schuster said Rome went barhopping with his producer and some local television guys after the event. He said he was in a bar and a woman came in who had a Jim Rome autograph on her breast and said he was right across the street.

Today, the $64,000 question has to be why anywhere from 10,000 to 18,000 people would attend a Tour Stop, and the reasons must run deeper than merely the fact that admission is free and there is beer. After all, I'd be willing to bet that Rush Limbaugh, who gets considerably higher ratings than Rome, could not attract anywhere near as many people if he were to hold similar events.

There are numerous reasons for that which are pretty obvious. For instance, there's probably many more people in Wisconsin who would want to see Fuzzy Thurston and Jerry Kramer than state Republican majority leaders John Gard and Mary Panzer.

The Tour Stops are first class shows. Production value is topnotch. Celebrity guests tend to be A-list aggregations of the most beloved sports figures of a particular city and state.

The Tour Stops are well publicized. Every Jungle listener knows about the Tour Stops and know where and when the next one will be held. They receive so much attention on the show that they have become legendary, merely for that reason. Scarcity adds to the mystique as well. Rome does four Tour Stops a year. Madison was only number 29.

If a Tour Stop comes to your town, it is a special honor because Rome chose to come to your town. He does not go everywhere. When he decides to discontinue the Tour Stops, an overwhelming majority of affiliate cities will never have been able to play host.

And each Tour Stop is different. Rock concerts are pretty much the same no matter where the band is playing. A Tour Stop is customized to each venue, not just with the guests, but also with Rome's performance. In Madison, Rome cracked on Illinois, as well as the other border states. If he does a Tour Stop in Chicago, he'll probably crack on Wisconsin.

These are all logical reasons, yet how does one explain Andy Seidel, who bellowed excitedly into my tape recorder:

"I'm waiting to see Rome! I'm waiting to get him to sign my shirt! War Kewaunee, Wisconsin! Out!"

Mark Grantin, former program director at The Team, Madison's first all-sports station, once told me a story about the 2000 NCAA Final Four. He said he took a walk down "Radio Row," which one can find at the major sporting events like the Final Four and the Super Bowl. On Radio Row, just about all the national sports talk radio hosts do live remote shows.

Grantin said he watched Rome do a show from Radio Row, in front of an absolute mob of people. Dan Patrick, on the other hand, had pretty much nobody watching as he did his show.

What does Rome have that these other sports talk radio hosts don't have?

Patrick and Tony Kornheiser probably come off too smug and elitist. They certainly do not promote much in the way of affinity with listeners by not taking phone calls and reading few, if any, e-mails.

Papa Joe Chevalier attracts large crowds in his bar appearances, but they are still bar appearances. He brings a self-consciously populist approach to his radio show, but it is rooted in an effort to bringing people to his point of view which is much more fringe than pluralistic.

Rome, on the other hand, achieves plurality through a much more gentle and organic process. As Rome said regarding when he went into the broadcasting business, "I'm not a former pro athlete. I don't really know anybody."

Rome claims he is no different than his listeners. While that may not necessarily be true—he's smarter, richer, better looking and more successful than most of his listeners—he at least is the guy they want to be and perhaps to a certain extent, the listeners believe he is like them and frankly whether or not that is really true, I certainly feel that the notion is genuine on both sides. Rome appears very sincere about being simpatico with his listeners.

Rome does not San Donaldson or Mike Wallace his interview subjects; he raps with them the way his listeners feel they would like to. When he expresses disdain or angry, he is provoked by the same kinds of things that would piss off the average listener. The infamous "Chris" Everitt incident probably still endears him to his listeners because many of them would have liked to have done the same thing, even though media counterpart all over the country denounced Rome as a punk.

He develops on-air friendships with athletes that are exactly the kind of friendships his listeners would want to have. When Mark Grace told Rome about the baseball secret of "slump busters," that was just the kind of thing one buddy would tell another buddy, in terms of a confession that only comes through platonic intimacy.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that Rome allows the listeners to actively participate, both with phone calls and e-mails. As Rome has said on numerous occasions, "The biggest subject in the Jungle is the Jungle itself."

Often, the Jungle is a metashow. It is a show about itself because sometimes what is happening on the show is more interesting than anything happening in the real world.

The Jungle provides a sense of community and in so doing has evolved into a genuinely distinct culture. I would define a culture as having three distinct things: language, history and its own set of customs and traditions.

The Jungle clearly has all three of those aspects. The "Jungle Gloss" refers to the show's slang. A current list on www.jimrome.com, the official Jungle website, numbers close to 1000 and is still growing. The language is unique to the show and instantly recognizable.

The show has legitimate history, and it is not just that Rome graduated high school in 1982 and that his show was syndicated by Premier in 1996. It's the banishment of former caller, the Mayor of Poway. It's John Tournour, who Rome glossed JT The Brick because he was a Knicks fan, winning the first Smack Off and parlaying that into his own radio career. It's a caller named Pancho who identifies himself as African American, and leads to a spate of callers named Tyrone, who, with badly faked Latino accents, say, "If he can be called Pancho, why cannot I be called Tyrone?"

It's the exploits of a decade's worth of legendary callers. It's slump busters. It's golfer Steve Elkington talking about fellow golfer Colin Montgomery's "sweaty undies." It's legendary flame-outs.

It's a rich variety of shared experience which binds Rome and his listeners together.

And don't forget about tradition and customs as well. For instance, if Rome introduces a caller and the callers starts by saying, "This is so-and-so from such-and-such," they will get run immediately. The caller who self-glosses gets run. The caller sounds like they are reading their take will be made fun of and perhaps might get run. A caller who played a pre-taped take was not only run, he was barred for life.

As Tevia said, "Without tradition, we would be like a fiddler on the roof." Cultures tend to have clear boundaries which are circumscribed through custom and tradition, and the Jungle is no different. One could argue that it is these boundaries that heighten the sense of belonging because they are not the doors that keep you out; they are the doors that keep you in.

But rather than blather on any further with half-baked theories, I'll tell a little story.

I make my living here in Madison as a taxi driver. A few years back I had a call at the University Hospital. The passenger was a guy about 30 years old. He wore a University of Nebraska sweatshirt. I asked him where he was from. He said Omaha.

"You mean Bugaha," I replied, quoting Jungle Gloss."

The guy smiled and answered, "You listen to the Jim Rome Show, don't you."

When it's all said and done, I think that's what it's all about.