Ooh, child, things are going to get easier…
When I was crusing up and down the radio dial a few years ago, I happened upon a Minneaplois radio station that had what amounted to a repeater signal in Bismarck/Mandan, N.D.
Through the airwaves I heard a man whose voice didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard or expected on talk radio or sports talk radio. The Common Man Dan Cole was the afternoon guy in a way that intrigued me. It was like listening to David Letterman, if Letterman took himself less seriously and his golf game way more seriously.
Regina commercial radio and the bigger cities in Canada have talk radio that seems to include one hours of one person’s opinion, one hour of people agreeing with that person and one hour of commercials.
The concept of talk radio for news is to find something to be outraged on that and pick at its festering scab for weeks. The concept of sports talk radio is to find one or two reliable topics that will get everyone riled up and get a few regular recognizable national callers in to talk about other things. I’m glad we have neither of those things locally.
But Cole is and remains different. He had regular callers that were given monikers rather than names. He called some of his callers ‘rubes’, and yes, it was a touch on the mocking side.
Like most of the sports talk guys in this province, there’s little preparation beyond the lifetime of experience but there’s a bit of a rebellious streak. He’s not as prone to the ups and downs of any sports season – and in general you’ll find far fewer actual sports talk on his show than you’ll find in most programming on a sports talk radio network – and through that, one can cut through the typical cyclical takes. The home team isn’t doing very well. Oh, look they won a few games, now they’re going to win the championship, etc.
More than once after Minnesota Vikings wins, there would be Starship’s ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’ played mockingly over other host’s overly positive takes and the home broadcaster’s play-by-play explosions over great plays. Or after losses, there would be the Five Stairsteps’ ‘Ooh Child’ with the similar negative takes and bad plays.
It was a not-so-subtle reminder of all that sports is and can be without the whole idea that it’s life or death. For fans, it’s happy sometimes and it’s disappointing other times and it always will be, but it’s not something to talk hours about dissecting defensive line footspeed of late round potential draft picks down to the 100th of a second.
Even at the professional level, it’s entertainment and the minute it stops being like that is the minute you’ve crossed over the line and you’re into mockable territory. It’s an odd kind of person to be on a sports talk radio, and he certainly got a lot of people upset with him for this idea but it’s also kind of a necessary take.
Or else we slip into the Saskatchewan habit of only having strictly the sports-iest of sports takes, for the most easily outraged audience possible, and the hosts can’t possibly be bothered to have other people they might not agree on for an actual discussion of issues beyond ‘the team is good’ vs ‘the team is bad.’ But they can’t even bring themselves to do that, lest they offend any of the fans who wish to hook Riders’ minutia into their veins.
We have hours and hours of space on the commercial radio stations in this province dedicated to sports talk every week. It would be refreshing if some of those hours would be used to take itself less seriously.
