Pickle Barrel
IT’S JUST ANOTHER drive-time edition of the top sports talk radio show in the country: The FAN 590’s Prime Time Sports. Bombastic host Bob McCown, wearing his trademark shades, banters with co-host Jim Kelley. The two old friends are locked in an ersatz duel of idle BS where the first to laugh loses.
And this is the truly difficult thing about McCown. It’s almost impossible to tell if he believes the arguments he’s making. Beneath those sunglasses is there what poker players call a “tell,” a dead give away he’s lying?
“I have strong views,” he says. “But what people don’t seem to understand is that what we do is show business. I’m in character — no less than an actor playing a role in a play.”
According to PTS producer Ryan Walsh, nobody plays the role better.
“You should see it. Bob will say he hates soccer and the phones will go crazy, he’ll say something about the Maple Leafs and people freak out,” Walsh says.
A few minutes later, as if on cue, the man known around the station as Showdown Joe, bursts into Walsh’s control room looking confused and nervous.
“My Blackberry and email are going crazy! What did he say this time!?” Showdown asks Walsh.
“He was talking about [ultimate fighting] and said that they’re all steroid freaks,” says Walsh.
Showdown, who hosts The FAN 590’s ultimate fighting program, pauses for a moment processing the potential fall-out from McCown’s inflamatory comments.
“Oh... Is that it?” he says, relief washing over his face.
Apparently debunking the integrity of Showdown’s beloved sport isn’t even close to the worst thing McCown could have said.
That’s the kind of influence McCown wields. One simple off-the-cuff statement sends thousands of offended sports fans into a lather and running straight to their phones and computers to register how hurt their feelings are.
Which is exactly the point.
“The idea is to evoke emotion,” says McCown the next day, from his home in Bayview. “I don’t care if 50 per cent of the people hate me and 50 per cent love me. What we don’t want are people who don’t care. I know that the guy who hates me is just as likely to listen as the guy who likes me.”
And they are listening in droves. Prime Time Sports, which airs on the the radio from 4 to 7 p.m., and on television from 6 to 7 p.m. on Rogers Sportsnet, consistently beats out rival shows in the same time-slot including heavy hitters from the U.S. like ESPN’s Pardon The Interruption [PTI], making it one of the top five most listened to sports talk radio shows in North America.
McCown doesn’t seem particularily proud of that fact. He just sees it as fact. “
We’re beating those [TV] guys with a radio show,” he says. “And they have a three camera set-up, a staff and producers out the wazoo. And some of those guys learned it on my show, and went over to PTI. At least two of them. So you figure it out.”
To figure it out, as he puts it, all you have to do is look at McCown’s bona fides as a broadcaster. While most of us know him best as the reigning voice of contrarian sports punditry, McCown has been one of this country’s top dogs for years.
In 1974 McCown’s career kicked off hosting Canada’s first sports talk radio show on the now defunct CKFH. (He also moonlit as the the first public address announcer for the Toronto Blue Jays in their inaugural season in 1977.) At the time, talk radio — let alone sports talk radio — was a format Canadians were unfamiliar with, and it didn’t quite catch-on.
“I was fired,” McCown says, unashamed. “The station was sold to Telemedia. The first thing they did was fire me. That was about a nanosecond after they took over.”
Not discouraged, but looking for a change, McCown accepted a job in Miami and was practically out the door when he received the call from Global TV, that would change his life.
“They asked me if I was interested in a horse racing show,” he explains. “I met with them and by the end of the meeting I had taken the idea of a 15 minute horse racing show and I turned it into what became Sportsline, which was the first magazine style nightly sportscast in the country.”
Sportsline was a home run, returning McCown to a format he helped pioneer, but in an unfamiliar medium. So when The FAN 590 made the switch to an all sports radio format, McCown was their choice to host their flagship show: Prime Time Sports. And that’s where he’s been for the last 15 years.
The rest, as they say in sports, is academic.
However, the only academic thing people seem to be interested in these days is arithmetic, chiefly, how much money McCown has managed to pull in over the years.
This past fall Bill Houston, a writer for the Globe and Mail, reported that McCown had signed a five-year $2.5 million deal with The FAN 590. “Don’t believe everything you read,” McCown says. “Let me tell you. Bill Houston in the past year has written that I’ve made $500, $300, $200 thousand. Every time he asks me I tell him ‘it’s none of your damn business.’”
This subject seems to ruffle McCown’s normally unflappable feathers. Sensing he’s about to be asked about money by this reporter he intercepts the question. “All I can tell you is do yourself a favour and don’t try and guess. ’Cause you’ll be wrong.”
McCown may seem slightly defensive about his earnings, but he’s not upset in the slightest. He really has no right to be.
Prime Time Sports isn’t your average Joe, bar-room banter, call-in show. It’s a show about money; the business of sports; who is paying whom to do what with a puck, ball, or bat.
“Our audience is mostly male, 25 to 54, white collar professionals,” he says. “They are decision makers and power brokers. The business guy eats this up because we’re all interested in people making a lot of money.”
It's true. You’re curious how this king of jock-talk made a fortune and ended up in Bayview.
“We moved here about seven years ago when I got married again,” McCown says. “We liked what we saw, so we decided to focus on the area. We really didn’t look at any other part of the city.”
McCown is certain — like he is about most things he says — that he made the right choice.
“I love living here. It’s very convenient. I’m three minutes from the 401, it takes me maybe 15 minutes to get to work. We love the amenities. We like the shopping, we like having almost everything we need,” he says.
But the real question most sports fans want to know is, which bar in Bayview offers the best bet to find McCown sipping an adult beverage and debating the finer points of Toronto Maple Leaf goaltending.
“I don’t get out too much,” he says. “I’m pretty much a hermit. It’s not that I don’t like people, but it’s when the guy pulls up a chair at our table and sits down and wants to discuss the plight of the Toronto Maple Leafs with you. I can do without that.”
McCown leaves most of his arguing for the radio as well as his new book, McCown's Law: the 100 Greatest Hockey Arguments. It’s a counter-intuitive and systematic debunking of the most dearly held truths about our nation’s favourite sport.
“There is very little in this book that’s obvious,” he says. “You won’t get a predictable response from any of these arguments. But there will be some you agree with, and probably more that you don’t.”
Agree or not, Walsh thinks most of the time, no matter what the topic, McCown is right.
“The most amazing thing about Bob is that no matter what the question, he knows the answer,” says Walsh. “It may take him a second, but he gets it. People think we prepare Bob for the show, but I don’t talk to him until he gets here at 3:55 p.m.”
For McCown this is the key to his success — and sanity.
“I turn the switch on at 4 p.m., and I turn it off again at 7 p.m. I have to. I’m actually the complete opposite of an athlete. They’ve all gone to media school and they’re taught to be humble when the camera is on. But inside you know they believe they’re [freaking] the best ever,” McCown says.
“Me, I’m actually a humble guy, but
when the tape rolls I have to be a total
ass.” 
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