Around the Dial...

So I'm driving around L.A. tonight, as I'm wont to do, listening to tunes. I used to listen to sports talk radio on these drives, but after some personnel changes on "the sports leader," well... I went out and bought myself a new mp3-capable CD player for the car. That's been a year ago now...

And tonight about 9:00 or so, the CD player starts buzzing, and humming. Not good...sounds like Ashlee Simpson's electrolysis lab. Then it starts to clunk and grind, like a garbage disposal. Then it does nothing. Somehow the nothing is more ominous than the buzz and hum and clunk and grind.

Damn. I start pushing buttons... can't get the CD out, but at least the radio still works. I start scanning for some music... but my now-acrid-smelling unit won't switch out of AM. Double damn.

So I start scanning AM, and I hear it. Familiar voice. Can't be... probably just sounds like him. Then he laughs. Son of a gun, it's him. Way down there on the other end of the dial. Son of a gun. Todd Wright is back on the air.

His departure from ESPN radio (almost exactly a year ago) is not something I have any inside info on, but apparently his contract was up, he was tired of working the ‘third’ shift (after nine years), tired of the network interference into his show’s elements, and they were tired of hearing him complain. So one night he was just flat out gone, like the DJ in the Kinks ‘Around the Dial,’ and there was a new guy in his chair. I was shocked, shocked, to find things like that happening in the radio business…

So it's great to have him back, even if it’s on the fiscally-precarious Sporting News Radio Network. Hopefully he'll have some resources and some freedom to shape the show to his liking, although his carefully worded barbs at his overseers in Bristol (he did his show from Florida) used to be pretty funny. You know, there is a theory out there that the best art arises out of adapting to the constraints put on it...

Anyway, I hope he’s having fun. And I'll probably get my CD player fixed, but now there's really no rush... so if you're in LA, he's on AM 1540 from 7-11 pm Sundays-Thursdays.

PS: and speaking of those who make their living from sports without being able to play a lick, Bill Simmons is diarying (??) his way through the baseball playoffs. I might give up a body part to write like Simmons, as long at it was something like an earlobe or my Isles of Langerhans.