Mike Fisher, who hosts the 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. show on Fox Sports 1190, agrees that he is doing a very different show from those at The Ticket. He also echoes the "sports journalism" tag. "The Ticket has been good for Dallas," said Fisher, a former host at KLIF before The Ticket crushed it out of existence. "They have opened up the door and shown that all sports stations can be very successful in this market. It is astounding that seven years ago people were questioning whether there was even a market for this." "But they have grown to the point where they can do whatever they want to do, and that might be the problem." Fisher continued. "It might sound petty for me to say this, but many of us outgrew fart jokes in the third grade. And we are not going to talk about what porno videos the board operator rented this weekend. If we found out which tapes Dirk Nowitzki was renting, then maybe we'd talk about that." "I kind of think of it this way," Fisher said. "If you want to listen to the fake Jerry Jones, then The Ticket is the right place to be. If you want to listen to the real Jerry Jones, and have him being funny and informative, then maybe you'll want my show. Let's put it this way. I would rather finish second and not be caught salivating over some 17-year-old girl in a half-shirt. If that is my trade-off, I'll accept that." The power of The Ticket is such that it is the big player in the market place. Gone are the days when teams and jocks didn't pay attention to them. They are the preverbal 800-pound gorilla in the market, and if you are marketing a sports team, you have to play ball with them. I contacted Mavericks owner Mark Cuban (by e-mail, of course), and asked for his comments, given that The Ticket folks make fun of him a lot and disparage the team he owns on occasion. "They do what they do to elicit a response," Cuban wrote. "I may not agree with everything they say or do, but again, that's just part of the deal. They can't, by definition, agree with me on everything or not give me or the Mavs a hard time at some point. That leads to stale, predictable radio, which leads to going out of business." The more corporate Ticket, the station that now calls the shots in the market, has led to some rather interesting alliances in recent years. The Ticket loves to bash the Cowboys, especially the Hardline. Rhyner leads the anti-Cowboy faction, and Williams trashed Michael Irvin incessantly during the former wide receiver's little imbroglio in the hotel room with the self-employed models and the cocaine. So guess who the station is paying to be the Hardline's guest this fall during their weekly football show? The Playmaker hisself. (One suggestion for the theme song: "He did cocaine in a hotel room with Rochelle/But he's found God and says he's not going to hell.") A few years ago, the Texas Motor Speedway was growing tired of The Ticket making fun of NASCAR fans by playing banjo music and talking of corncob pipes and blue-tick hounds whenever the race fans would call in. So the TMS opened up its wallet (sources say the deal is worth $500,000 a year in ad revenue), and The Ticket stopped making fun of NASCAR. "I didn't like it, but I understood it," said Rhyner of the new TMS policy. "It is not in our best interest or anyone else's to do things that are harmful to this business." Adds Bruce Gilbert: "They are an advertiser, and we have to protect that. We did research and found that a great number of our listeners follow (NASCAR). We had a conversation with the shows, and we changed some things. I don't think we lose credibility because we are being responsive to our listeners first." I wonder sometimes if the station's credibility suffers when they make such deals. But on the other hand, so much of sports media is made up of liars and sycophants. Sports journalists say nice things if players or front-office guys grant them access; they'll slice and dice if you ignore them. Texas Rangers General Manager John Hart is learning that lesson this year the hard way. The value of The Ticket, in terms of marketing, has never been higher. When the new arena football team, the Dallas Desperadoes, started this year, their marketing plan included tapping into the huge brand loyalty of The Ticket. The Desperadoes, owned by Jerry Jones' Cowboys, sought out The Ticket to be the team's play-by-play flagship station. They hired morning host George Dunham and afternoon host Williams to call the games, so that the Desperadoes would get talked about during the highly rated morning and evening drive-time shows. "When we were conceiving the Desperadoes football team, it was very important for us to have a relationship with The Ticket," said Cowboy spokesman Rich Dalrymple. "They have a built-in group of followers, and there is a lot of opportunity for cross-promotion. We have a lot of respect for how they have carved out a culture and built a brand. Jerry is a big fan of the station." Even though they make fun of Jerry constantly, having the fake Jerry tell the Musers he has changed his name to Jerry Satan? "He knows they do it all tongue-in-cheek," Dalrymple said of his boss. "Jerry believes if they are talking about you, they are building equity in the team." "Talk radio throughout the country gets sports teams' PR guys' blood pressure boiling," Dalrymple continued. "It's now a part of our culture, and it's not going anywhere. They have fun with things at our expense. But we have to have fun with it, too. Hey, and if they are talking about you, they are talking about you. "The acceptance level of fun-and-games sports-talk radio has grown not just in this market, but around the country," Dalrymple said. "But The Ticket is pretty smart about how they go about doing it. When it crosses the line, I can call Bruce Gilbert and it stops. But I can count on one hand the times I've had to do that." "We know them and know them to be good people," Dalrymple said. "And besides, they throw a great high-school dance every six weeks."
Back at Duke's, I watch Joe The Hard Drinking Engineer, he of the maniacal laugh and Charles Manson eyes, carefully roll up electrical cables. The Ticket's Girls Night Out show is off the air, but the crowd remains, trying to drink every last beer out of Duke's ice tubs. For the privilege of having The Ticket in its establishment, Duke's has paid upward of $10,000. But the investment has paid off. No other radio station in the area can draw the type of crowd The Ticket reels in. The lines at the bar are 20 minutes long. I'm sitting with a few guys who are going to the Sheryl Crow concert at Starplex that night. "I don't like her all that much, but there's going to be some [women] there tonight," one guy tells me. Then we go into a conversation that hits on the nice ass of the girl standing near our table, how the Rangers suck, the term papers we used to cheat on in college, past glory on the basketball court, how we wish more bars would serve beer in fishbowls like Fred's in Fort Worth, the problems of paying your taxes when you are self-employed, and how the little Oklahoma cheerleader Courtney was the best one of them all. And it struck me how our conversation over a few beers was exactly what The Ticket does. We like talking sports, but that's not all we do. And we are a bit seedy when it comes to women, but that's how we are wired. The Ticket has learned how to genuinely tap into the male psyche. The results aren't pretty at times, but they get it right most of the time. What The Ticket has done is much like what Rolling Stone did in the early seventies covering music. Before Rolling Stone came along, the music business was covered by Billboard, and the news was which bands were on the Top 100 list. Rolling Stone used the music business as a jumping off point to write about the larger issues of the day. The Ticket has done the same thing, using sports as a portal to get into all manner of things. I'm not saying they planned it that way, but they did it, and the rest of the media world has copied them. And as much as the local ESPN and Fox folks trot out their "sports journalism," they are doing Ticket-like bits, too. They can't afford not to. On the drive home, the Hot Spot is previewing Big Dick Hunter's "Hey Man What's Up Rodeo" ride. And of course, in this baseball summer of our discontent, they are talking about the Rangers losing their fifth in a row. It is all totally inane, all without any redeeming social value. It's radio anthrax and radio Dada. It's my vice and I listen more than I should. I can't stop. And I don't want to.
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