by Craig Carton
My first day of work, I had a powwow with Ross about the show. He was clear that I was in charge of all show decisions, but he wanted me to consider a woman as a cohost. Apparently this woman was desperate to be on the air, had done some reporting and freelance work here and there, and was working for the company already. Ross asked me to take her out to lunch to see if our personalities could mesh, and added that he would be thankful if I could make it work with her.
I soon learned this woman had little to no radio experience, and yet had an inexplicable sense of entitlement. She had never been on the radio in any real capacity and yet felt that she should not only have a show, but also be syndicated right away. Her one claim to fame was that her parents were well-known Hollywood writers who cowrote several episodes of a popular TV show. She’d had a bit role in one episode.
We met at a restaurant for the first time, and I was amazed that she started right in about what type of show we were going to host and how she had all these plans. I engaged her for about twenty minutes, which was nineteen minutes more than I could take, until I’d had enough. The hot waitress came over three times, but she sent her away and told her that we weren’t ready to order yet. I like a strong, take-charge gal, but I was ready for some artichoke and spinach dip, a stiff drink, and the waitress’s phone number.
Finally I stopped her and said matter-of-factly, “Do you know why we are having lunch today?” She replied, “Yeah, to talk about our show.” I started to laugh and told her there was no show just yet. We were having lunch because Ross wanted to see if I liked her and if we could get along. Her entire demeanor changed. She pouted for the rest of the meal. I told her that whomever I worked with would be in a secondary role and have to play off me, and be comfortable with that. She wasn’t happy, and strangely enough, that made me happy.
After lunch, and my not getting the waitress’s phone number, I had to meet with Ross again to let him know what I thought of her as a potential cohost. I told him I thought she was high-maintenance, and would struggle in any role in radio. He responded with one of the greatest lines ever for a guy who wanted to make sure someone got hired: “I’ll give you five thousand more shares of stock if you give her a shot.” Bang, just like that we had a show that CBS SportsLine decided to call Sports Uncensored.
The only way I could get anything out of my new cohost was to empower her, and I did that by making her into what turned out to be a Robin Quivers type of character. In the last hour of our four-hour show, we would go over the biggest sports stories of the day on a national level. I gave her the task of independently preparing the stories, and sound bites, and delivering them to me on-air without any oversight.
For the other three hours, she would be a bit player and comment on or react to what I was doing in limited doses. I think she was just happy to have the job. She actually took to the role well. She and I were getting along, the show was good—not great, but coming along—and everyone seemed happy. We were syndicated through Sports Fan Radio on forty-four stations throughout the country.
As my cohost and I concentrated on our radio product, Ross couldn’t focus anymore because the company was getting ready to go public. The radio part of it was small potatoes compared to the overall picture. The only reason they got into radio was that their CEO wanted people to hear his product, SportsLine, and not have to have Internet to see it as they barnstormed around the country looking for investors and investment houses to back the IPO. As such, I saw Ross less and less. He then made a decision that changed the course of my career and life, for the worse.
He hired a program director to run the radio department so that he could concentrate on the rest of the company. The guy he hired was Charlie Barker. To me, Charlie seemed like a sloppy radio hack with limited experience as a director. Charlie was well into his thirties. He had most likely never seen a vagina up close.
My first introduction to Charlie was via a revealing conference call. During the call, Scott Kaplan, who, as I said, did a show with Sid Rosenberg, and who had as much radio experience as a leaky hose, tried to act as though he were Charlie’s point person at SportsLine and control the call. I had more experience than the entire radio department combined, but a conference call with complete strangers wasn’t where I was going to flex my muscle. I patiently listened to what Charlie had to say about his philosophy and what the future would hold. Charlie was going to start at the Super Bowl in 2008, and that would be our first chance to meet him. How exciting.
At the time, things with me and my partner were fine, although she spent as much time creating a mural on the wall by her desk as she did preparing for the show. I asked her what the mural was all about, and she replied that it was her wish list. Her wish list for what? She said matter-of-factly, “My wish list of guys I want to meet before I die.” The mural consisted of photos of every African-American actor who had ever had a starring role in a movie, and African-American all-stars in every sport. Always good to have goals, I thought. You go, girl!
We were going to San Diego along with Scott and Sid. My cohost flew out separately to see her folks first. Scott and Sid both thought their shit didn’t stink and that they had the greatest show in the world, although neither had ever done radio at any level prior to this. Sid had been doing customer service at SportsLine while hiding from numerous gambling debts he had back in New York. I found Sid engaging. I thought Scott was pompous.
We landed in San Diego, and Sid and I shared a cab to the hotel. He told the driver that we needed to make a stop on the way. “A stop for what?” I wanted to know. Sid said he had to pick something up, and told the driver to take him to the worst neighborhood in San Diego. He needed to find some crack. He handed the driver a twenty-dollar bill.
Time-out. I’m not going, so you can either let me out here, or you can visit the crack den after I go to the hotel. Sid agreed, dropped me off, and then went on his way. I had seen cocaine in large quantities at college, and had smoked pot, tried ’shrooms and ecstasy. But crack—come on, dude, really!
We all had to make a public appearance at a happy hour bar in San Diego. We agreed to meet at Scott and Sid’s room twenty minutes before we had to be at the bar. My cohost was coming in to town later, and after the appearance we were supposed to have dinner and meet our new boss, Charlie Barker.
I went to their room and knocked on the door. A friend of Sid’s opened it, and what I saw next stunned me. I walked into the room, and there was a smoking and dirty crack pipe, just like you’d see in the movies or on TV. Sid’s friend had about fifteen joints rolled up and on display on the table.
Who the fuck smokes crack, and who needs fifteen joints at one time? I wondered. Sid’s buddy offered me a joint. I said no. Not because I didn’t get high at the time, but because I had a rule that I would never do it in front of people I didn’t know well. Getting high might not be that big a deal, but I never wanted a stranger to be able to tell people that they saw me doing it.
Sid didn’t offer me any crack.
I told the guys I would meet them in the lobby and walked out. The appearance went well. I was particularly amazed at Sid’s ability to carry on conversation. I had a preconceived notion that a guy who smokes crack couldn’t do that, yet he carried on with ease. Impressive, I thought.
After the appearance we met Charlie, a nebbishy, poorly dressed guy who looked like he came out of a Garanimals shopping disaster. This was our new boss. We were all there except for my cohost, and that was the beginning of the end for me. I was supposed to call her and let her know where dinner was, and she was going to meet us there. Well, I forgot to call her, and she didn’t have anybody’s number or a way to get a hold of anybody, so she sat in her hotel room steaming mad that we had the dinner without her, and she blamed me for it. I think she believed I was trying to get rid of her.
She was wrong, of course, but it didn’t matter. When I saw her later that night at the hotel, she let me have it. She told me that she wasn’t going anywhere, no matter how h
ard I tried to ditch her. This job meant everything to her. It gave her a platform to prove that women could do sports talk, something important to her. I told her she was nuts. She went ballistic again and said that she would get me before I got her.
I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I should have.
For the next few weeks and months, she was cold to me, and working together became strained, all because of one missed dinner. Nothing else changed until midsummer. I had decided to placate Charlie with his need to have postshow meetings, but at the end of the day, I did the show the way I wanted. We had grown to about fifty-three affiliates.
I knew she was having a lot of meetings with Charlie without me, and she and I went a good three months without talking before our show, which was hard to do, considering we shared an office.
The company went public in the summer of 2008 and was a huge success. The stock price climbed through the teens and into the 20s, and then even higher. Each dollar the stock price rose meant $50,000 to me. I was less than two months away from vesting a portion of the stock that would have given me the right to sell about 20,000 shares. When the stock hit $30, I would have $600,000 banked. Like most people in the company, I was waiting to sell to guarantee the cash.
If I was there for a full year to the day and sold my available stock at the average price, I would have pocketed $700,000. If I had sold at its peak, I would have made $1.6 million; and had I been there for two years, I would have made more than $2 million at its average price, and more than $5.5 million at its peak. I had a one-year deal by design with an option for another year.
About six weeks before my one year was up and my option kicked in, we had on a basketball player name Michael Stewart from the Sacramento Kings. The Kings were terrible, and it interested me that Michael Stewart had been an all-American at high school and a stud in college, yet had probably lost more games this one year in the NBA than he had his entire life. “What’s it like to play for a team that sucks?” I asked him.
That one question would change the course of my career. He answered the question, we finished the interview, and nothing came of it. It was an innocuous question.
After the show, Barker came to set up his daily postshow meeting and said to me, “Great show today! I loved it. Especially the interview with the player.”
Now, at this point, my relationship with Barker wasn’t great. He knew that there was nothing he was going to teach me or tell me to make me better. He knew I had worked for Bigby and been a Top 5–Arbitron rated host in three different major radio markets, and that Ross hired me directly. We were cordial, but that was it.
Right after the compliment, my partner chimed in. With a disgusted look, she said that she thought the question was insulting and embarrassing, and that we put the company in a bad light with the NBA.
I laughed. “In what way did we embarrass him or put the NBA in a bad light?” I asked.
“How dare you ask him what it’s like to play for a team that sucks?” she said. “That’s insulting to the Kings organization.”
The Kings were 27–55 that year, and a laughingstock in the NBA. Trust me, I didn’t embarrass anyone.
You could see a light—albeit a dim one—light up in Charlie’s head. He suddenly agreed with her. This was their chance to get me by claiming that I had disrespected the entire NBA by saying the Kings sucked. SportsLine would have to do something about it.
I looked them both in the face and told them that if Stewart were on again, I would do it again; and if another player from a lousy team was on, I would ask them the question as well.
The name of the show, after all, was Sports Uncensored. I reminded Charlie that thirty seconds ago, he’d told me the show and the interview were great. “Well, now that I see it through what your partner said, I take it back; she’s right,” he said.
“You ‘take it back’? What are we, nine-year-olds?”
Charlie stormed out of the room, and I left for home.
The next day, my cohost had a smirk on her face all morning. Again we did not speak before the show. Afterward, I was messing around on the computer when Charlie came into the office and asked if he could have a word with me. I said sure, and I followed him not toward his office, but toward Ross’s. When I walked in, the head of Human Resources was there and Ross was behind his desk. Ross could not make eye contact with me and kept his head down the whole time. What a pussy.
Charlie said that due to my telling him that if the opportunity arose again, I would ask a player the same question, I had overstepped my bounds. I was being fired.
I looked right at Ross and said, “Ross, you’re going to let him fire me for no reason and just sit there and do nothing about it?” Ross muttered something under his breath, like “I hired Charlie to run the radio division, so I have to let him run it.”
I looked over at the HR director, who was also a friend and was on my softball team outside of work. He said, “Craig, I have some papers for you to fill out regarding the stock.”
“Papers for what?”
“Well, since we are firing you for cause, you will forfeit all of your stock options.”
There it was! It wasn’t enough to fire me for some bullshit reason. They wanted to bury me. I told them they could all fuck off.
As I walked out the door, Ross never looked up from his desk. To make matters worse, the HR director, at whose house I had been drinking until four in the morning the weekend before, followed me to my office, watched me pack up my desk, and escorted me out of the building.
I was unemployed for the first time in my life. I seriously considered suing the company but decided to engage them personally instead, and after three years of lengthy discussions we privately agreed on a settlement. I felt vindicated, but by then I had worked for two radio stations in Denver, had been number one at both, and was now doing mornings at the legendary WNEW in New York.
I met my wife, Kim, back in 1996 at Labradors Pub in Philadelphia. I owned and operated Labradors with three friends as an $80,000 investment that we all shared. We named it Labradors because we had two black Labs named Mason and Jordan, named after Anthony Mason and Michael Jordan. We had a huge wall that our patrons adorned with pictures of their Labs and other dogs. We opened on November 2, 1995, and were the single hottest bar in all of Philly for nearly two years. We made good money, but not great. We treated the bar as our own personal match.com, and there I had two of the most memorable social years of my life. And then one day Kim came in with her best friend. Her friend was a huge sports fan and had a crush on me, having become a devout listener of my radio show on WIP.
She heard that I had opened a bar, and asked Kim to be her wing woman one night because she wanted to see me. When they walked into the bar, I was knocked off my feet by Kim. Her friend had no shot from that moment on. Kim acted forward in getting me to go out with her friend. I kept turning the conversation back to her, but she chewed on a straw while telling me she had a boyfriend. She did have a boyfriend, but I didn’t care, I was hooked.
I got the girls their drinks, and Kim was having vodka and grapefruit juice. Our juice came out of the soda gun. It wasn’t fresh by any stretch. When she complained about the taste, I told her that if she ever came back in, with or without her friend, I would have fresh grapefruit for her and personally squeeze it into her drink.
After that night, we started to talk frequently on the phone, but since this was before I had a cell phone, I either had to call her from home or, to avoid her boyfriend knowing it was me, I would call from random pay phones throughout Philly. After months of going on day dates like Rollerblading, it was clear that she made me feel different than I’d ever felt before. Not only was she beautiful with a great personality, but she played hard-to-get. The combination was irresistible. Sadly, though, she had a boyfriend, and I wound up moving to Florida before I ever found out if we worked as a couple. We didn’t talk for six months after I moved, but I thought about her all the time. I hadn’t ever done
that with any other girl. I’d never had a girlfriend. I’d only had tons of one-night relationships. These new feelings were weird to me, but so real that I could not ignore them.
On my birthday, January 31, 1998, I got an anonymous gift in the mail; a cool candle, a candle holder, and balloons. I tracked down where they came from and called the store in Philly that sent them. The owner told me he had strict orders from the customer not to say anything about who she was. I said, I just have one question then: was she wearing Rollerblades? He said yes, and I knew they were from Kim. She basically lived in her blades. I lit the candles that night, so that she could be in my house with me on my birthday. Unfortunately, I put the candles too close to my ceiling, and while I wasn’t paying attention, they ignited the paint. I had a full-fledged fire in my house. I laughed and figured it was meant to be.
Shortly after that, I got word through one of her friends that she was coming down to South Beach for a wedding and wanted to get together. We met at an outdoor bar with all of her girlfriends and a few of my buddies. I was nervous walking into the bar, and when I saw her, I felt something that only she made me feel. I think you call it love—or lust—I don’t know for sure, but I felt it. We spent the next night together, and I did the dumbest thing ever. She told me she would sleep over so we could maximize our time together while she was in town, and I felt that I had to take control of the relationship. Since she had a boyfriend and thus had control of our budding romance, I figured I needed to let her know that I now held the reins. I told her I didn’t want her to stay over, and drove her back to her friend’s house. She was pissed. She not only refused to see me the next day, she moved her flight up. We didn’t talk again for almost a year, and I felt like an asshole to have let her get away.
A year later I was in Denver, Colorado, bored and alone on Christmas Eve, when I decided to call her out of the blue. She called me right back. We talked all night, and she agreed to fly out to Denver to see me. I had a better idea. My friend Marc Lawrence and I had started a company called Vegas Experts, and he called me to tell me a huge advertiser wanted to guarantee us $1 million, and we needed to meet with them in New York City. I told Kim to meet me at the airport in New York, and that we could go out in the city.