Success in talk radio? Yeah, that’s The Ticket
By DAVID BARRON
HOUSTON CHRONICLE 08/20/01
DALLAS - Our tour of guy-talk radio strongholds took us last week to Dallas, where KTCK (1310 AM), also known as The Ticket , dominates its target demographic much as WIP in Philadelphia does – and as KILT (610 AM) hopes to do with a thus-far cruder variation on the model set by the Dallas and Philly stations.
The Ticket signed on in January 1994 as a hard-core sports alternative to the popular shows of the time in Dallas-Fort Worth hosted by Brad Sham on KRLD and Randy Galloway on WBAP. Its initial lineup was built around talk show host Chuck Cooperstein and a series of regular programs on such no-brainers as the Cowboys and more esoteric choices such as the outdoors.
That changed quickly with the popularity of afternoon hosts Mike Rhyner and Gregg Williams, known as the Hardline, who mixed sports talk with guy-talk staples like women and food and how tough it is to deal with credit card companies and bill collectors, all to the background of canned laughter and their own hee-haws. Two KRLD refugees, former North Texas State roommates George Dunham and Greg Miller, enjoyed similar success in morning drive.
Cooperstein departed as the station turned to guy talk over hard-core sports, eventually landing at WBAP. Guy talk dominates the airwaves from dawn to 11 p.m. on the Ticket , with the exception of a two-hour window of traditional sports talk hosted by longtime D-FW radio voice Norm Hitzges, who came from KLIF when that station dropped sports talk.
In the most recent Arbitron ratings book, according to program director Bruce Gilbert, The Ticket from 6 a.m. to midnight Monday through Friday is the third-ranked station in D-FW among men 18-34 and is No. 1 among men 25-54.
“The format works where it works for one primary reason, and that is the on-air talent,” Gilbert said. “The format is about the people who are on the air. It is very revealing, very personal, and the reason it has worked here is that the guys on the air are from here, they’ve been here, and they have a passion for what they do.”
Gilbert agrees with the recent assertion of WIP program director Tom Bigby about nonstop sports, saying its attraction is limited to “fantasy players, gamblers and geeks” and that the only way to expand the audience is by incorporating “elements in guys’ lives that they can relate to.”
As with our recent stop in Philadelphia, there was sports news aplenty in Dallas last week. The Cowboys had moved their training base from Wichita Falls to California, and owner Jerry Jones had just waived quarterback Tony Banks in favor of rookie Quincy Carter.
The Ticket ’s response was steeped in satire, thanks in large part to morning show sidekick Gordon Keith, the station’s master of impersonations. Keith on Friday offered a dead-on impersonation of Jones taking a football trivia quiz he failed miserably. He blanked out on Tom Landry’s name, for example, but remembered him as “that guy I fired,” said the Super Bowl trophy was named for Vince LaGuardia and was unable to provide the correct answer when asked to define a blitz.
“Uh, let’s see, two linebackers and four linemen, which equals six, which equals another concussion for Troy,” was his answer.
question in a dozen ways, and the Obvious Man, who asked these questions of Cowboys lineman Ebenezer Ekuban: “Do shoulder pads and helmets prevent injury?” “Do you guys really need referees, or can you police yourselves?” and “Is it just me, or are most of the running backs around here black?” Ekuban, to his credit, labored mightily to provide serious answers.
“We start out with the premise that this is not life and death,” Gilbert said. “If you accept that premise, then the natural progression is humor. Let’s have fun with sports stories without being mean-spirited, so that if you’re listening, you chuckle and don’t say, `These guys are jerks.’ ”
Gilbert does not require all his hosts to toe the company line; Hitzges, for example, hosts the same sort of show he did on KLIF, one that would not have been out of place in 1991 but still serves its purpose in 2001.
“Our morning show does a lot of bits, but there’s nothing wrong with having two solid hours of hard-core sports and statistics,” Gilbert said. “People who like that have a place to go and get it, and then before and after Norm, we provide different programming. It’s no coincidence that when Norm came aboard, our ratings went up.”
Gilbert acknowledges The Ticket ’s brand of humor can be racy. But he winced at the suggestion of a topic such as the one KILT offered last week: “Is there such a thing as bad sex?”
“That’s too easy,” Gilbert said. “If we wanted gutter humor, I could do that. There would need to be an impetus to discuss something like that. But if somebody goes that far with it, that’s ridiculous.
“You don’t need to be blatant and descriptive. There is a way to talk about things so that if your 12-year-old son is listening, it goes over his head. We like to think that guys can listen with kids in the car and a lot of times, the kid won’t know what we’re talking about.”
As for the notion of amateurs attempting on-air impersonations, he said: “I get calls all the time from all over the country asking for that secret bullet, like doing fake characters. If you don’t have somebody who can pull it off, it’s a miserable failure.”
Gilbert’s final observation is that it isn’t easy to do guy-talk radio, especially when using holdovers from a previous format.
“There have been a lot of stations – and I’ve heard them – that think this is easy,” he said. “They try to do a 180 and shock people and change what they are doing, and it doesn’t work, especially if people already have a reputation in the market for one thing or another.”
