Hello, friends. For the first time in the history of the world, someone with a radio show asked to interview me. I excitedly said yes. As soon as I did, the terror of actually having to talk on the radio set it.
Like many of you, I have listened to sports talk radio. I listened a ton in high school, which was great because of all the no girlfriends that I had. Like many of the people who listen to that type of radio, I thought about calling in and dazzling the host and audience with my amazing thoughts and well timed jokes. The show I really wanted to call into was the Jim Rome Show. I wanted to be one of the people who won call of the day. My call would have been something like “Van Smack, pimp in the box, what’s up with Carson Palmer? He looked a seal trainer throwing fish to the seals that were the Kansas City Chiefs. War rainbow fruit roll ups. Out.” And then Rome would say “Rack ’em,” and I would go on to impress all the people in the world.
I never called Jim Rome, but I did call into the show that followed his. It was the Marc Amazon show. I really liked Amazon. He and I ended up being kind of social. Social in the sense that he was a WWF fan, and I was a WWF fan, so I would give him tapes of pay per views if he let me into the studio. Eventually, Amazon moved on to something else and Lance McAlister took his spot. I don’t remember if I ever called in to Lance’s show. I probably did. Lance let me into his studio a couple of times when I was in college. It was very nice of him.
When I was asked to be a guest on the Freak Show on 1450 in Louisville, I pictured it going down like being a caller. That’s the whole point of that back story. I was confident that I would be good. Then doubt set it. I remembered every guest I heard on radio shows who said stupid things, who was boring, who I was like “Get him off the radio, Jack,” I remembered all of the flaws. On top of that, over the weekend, ghosts stole my immune system and I fell ill. So just in time for my radio debut, I get sick. It was awful. The station contacted me on Monday, and we postponed until today. That gave me a full two days to worry about what kind of horrible non-sense would come out of my mouth. I asked people for advice. I asked players how to pronounce their names. I was sure I was going to botch something. I ran through the many scenarios of what bad things could happen with some of my friends as a way to get all of the bad thoughts out, so only good would be left. Throw in the fact you only get one shot to be a good guest and the nerves were high.
When I woke up this morning, I was cool, calm just like my mom with a couple of valium inside of her palm. I was at peace with the impending appearance. The producer, Rob Jones, called me at around 2 to tell me I would be on in an hour, and gave a general rundown of what we would talk about. That’s when everything kicked back up. I tried to take a calming shower, but showers never calm anyone. The reason you are supposed to take a cold shower in certain situations is so the other person can get the hell away from you for 5 minutes. I don’t know that from experience. I was writing the South Florida recap, going up tomorrow!, but scrapped it in honor of research. That’s how I found out I’ll know GeLawn Guyn’s birthday the rest of my life because it’s the day after mine. I also panicked about saying his name. The worst was Cheikh Mdobj. I think I asked 90 people how to pronounce his name, and no one knew. It was not calming me down.
3:20 rolled around way too fast. I got the call and was placed on hold. I heard some nice commercials. Of course the news was breaking that the Big 12 might add West Virginia and Louisville, and maybe Cincinnati, so I was thrown off completely. The host, Freak, asked me something about UC’s academics and I had no earthly idea what they were. If you asked me if UC had classes, I would have said maybe. Once we rolled into basketball talk, I feel like I hit a stride. I think I made some good points about Yancy Gates, I talked about the defense, I said the depth was a question mark at some point, and then it was over. I made a page of notes that greatly helped me out. I had the Gates 17, 7.7 after the suspension firing. I think I said something about Chek, as we all call him now, but I’m not sure. Suddenly, our time was cut due to a C-break. That’s radio talk for commercial break. Inside baseball. The only problems that I had were the host would sometimes talk too fast and I couldn’t quite understand it all, and my general stupidity regarding academics. Could I have said a plus for UC joining the Big 12 was they could play in Paul Brown Stadium? Yes. Did I think of that just now? Absolutely.
All in all, my first radio appearance was a thing that happened. I both hope and don’t hope people listened to it. My parents told me it was good. Someone on twitter said I was good. That’s all that matters. If I ever get asked back to do another one, it would be a victory. If I don’t, here is a 990 blog post about how much I sucked.
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