And what the hell, if you're going to allow women into the tree house, you might as well make all the Courtneys of the world show their stuff and give the loyal listener something to look at. The contest, as thinly veiled as it can be, has the women trolling through the bar asking the men for a poker chip. Each male gets a chip when he comes in the door, and each Courtney tries to persuade him to give it to her. The woman with the most chips wins the trip. The whole time I'm there, I think back to those few times I have ventured into strip joints. Lots of beautiful women, all after my coin. I walked out broke, but with a smile on my face. Here, I keep my money but still have the smile on my face. And that's the genius of this event. The Ticket has simulated the strip-bar experience, in a playful, and slightly less seedy way. The station has become one of the most popular in the history of DFW radio, not merely by pulling high numbers (though they do), but because of their edgy combination of humor, sports, and sex. Their loyal listeners are known as P1s (a radio marketing term for those who punch in on that station, and that station only), and what the P1 wants, the P1 gets. No station in the Metroplex knows its audience better, and no audience knows more about their station. And on this night, the P1s have come out to watch women barely out of high school trolling through a bar barely dressed. As I sit and have another beer, some 45-year-old telecom guy, graying and leering, tells me one minute about how much he's lost in the telecom market; the next minute he's going on and on about his last trip to Guadalajara and how they have the best whorehouses he's ever been to. Smiling slyly, he hands me his poker chip. "Go buy yourself a piece of ass," he laughs, pointing to the Courtney in front of me, her boobs standing at attention, blonde hair falling over her bare shoulders, looking like a high-school cheerleader who has Michael Irvin as her wardrobe consultant. And so it goes. We sweat, buy more beers, talk of telecom and whorehouses and sports, watching the best North Dallas has to offer hoofing it around for the little Ticket. By 7 p.m. there are about thousands packed inside and out, the crowd so loud and boisterous that we can't hear the announcement of the winner. The crowd presses toward the table where the Ticket hosts are broadcasting. Suddenly one of the Courtneys shrieks. Insanity pervades the happy den. "Who won?" the whorehouse telecom man asks me over the din. "I think it was Courtney," I tell him, taking a wild guess. "Shit," he says. "I was hoping it was going to be that [one] with the pimple on her chin. I would do her in a heartbeat." I can just imagine the whorehouse telecom man's fantasy tryst. A divorced guy's cramped apartment, dirty sheets on the bed, a six pack of Busch tallboys on the nightstand, an ashtray full of Marlboro Lights butts, the Percodan-induced vacant stare of the pimple-chinned Courtney. The radio will be tuned to The Ticket, where Rhynes and Greggo of the Hardline will go on about suicide bunts and grooming issues, the fake Jerry Jones will be forever in his dress blues, Corby Davidson will be overcussing and redundifying, disgruntled bikini girls will be showing their spanking new store-bought chests, and Psycho Dave will fire off fart sound-effects. We can only dream.
Gather any group of North Texas guys from age 20 to 40, and you'll find guys who know about "The Ticket." They know what a "spare" is (something nonessential, like a spare part or a mediocre player), they might greet each other with "baby arm" (more on that later), and might just blurt out "grab a fajita" (impossible to explain) without notice. Whether these men prefer Dunham and Miller (the Gentle Musers) in the morning, or Mike Rhyner or Greg Williams (The Hardline) in afternoon, the P1s know what The Ticket is up to on a daily basis. The midday shows have their following as well: longtime sports-talk veteran Norm Hitzges adds the "sports" to the sports-talk lineup in his midmorning slot, and Bob Sturm and Dan McDowell are pulling good numbers in mid afternoon (the rest of the lineup, evenings and weekends, are pretty much "spares.") About a year ago, ESPN and Fox entered the Dallas-Fort Worth radio market with mostly nationally syndicated shows that are heavier on sports than The Ticket. Many of the veteran sports-media folks thought The Ticket would finally get knocked down a few pegs. The thinking all along, pretty much since The Ticket first started in 1994, was that its blend of entertainment and shtick and sports would never work when put up against a real sports station. Sports fans wanted to talk about the game itself between the white lines, and only between those white lines, went the conventional thinking . The numbers are in, and it looks like DFW sports fans want the entertainment and the shtick along with their sports. During the last Arbitron book available, for winter 2002, The Ticket topped all radio stations in the male 25-54 demographic, with a 7.3 share. KESN (103.3 FM), the ESPN affiliate, ranked 28th in the male demo, with just a 1.0 rating. Fox Sports AM 1190 didn't even draw enough listeners to register. Besides the vote for more shtick, the numbers show that the national sports programming on ESPN and Fox doesn't make a dent when going up against the strong local programming of The Ticket. Though ESPN has nationally known sports hosts like Dan Patrick and Tony Kornheiser, men in this market don't seem to be interested. Even KESN's locally produced afternoon drive-time show, with former Ticket host Chuck Cooperstein and Channel 5 sportscaster Newy Scruggs, has barely registered in the local market. Over at Fox, national afternoon host Jim Rome draws huge number across the country, but can't pull any here. ESPN has more than 600 affiliates, Fox has about 150, and both organizations have huge resources: They can draw top national sports celebrities to yak it up with their hosts and cover sporting events around the globe. But they can't have the fake Jerry Jones answering questions about his face lift, they can't get the Rangers' Gabe Kapler speculating about whether he wants to get his scrotum pierced, and they can't make fun of former Cowboy Darren Hambrick when he asks the rhetorical question, "What do voluntary mean?" ESPN and Fox don't replay interviews and make a competition out of counting the number of times the sports celeb uses the verbal crutch "you-know." As any Ticket listener will tell you, the great Dixon Edwards, former Cowboy linebacker, is perhaps the champion "you know" talker of all time. Stand and face the north. "We can do what they do, but they can't do what we do," is the mantra of Ticket- founder and 51-year-old Hardline host Mike Rhyner, meaning that The Ticket could do regular old sports talk if it wanted to. In the old days, a sports-talk show host would ask the question, "Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame, yes or no," and start taking calls. Name your three favorite Dallas Cowboys of all time. Would you trade Player A for Player B. The old format of sports talk radio was X's and O's and completely caller driven. But the fact is that callers are boring, and only the most hardcore sports nut cares about all those batting averages and the plus/minus number of Mike Modano. |
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