By Rick Kaempfer
YOUR DIME, YOUR DANCE FLOOR
T
here are now three full-time all-sportstalk radio stations in Chicago (the Score
(AM 670; ESPN 1000: AM 1000; and The
Game: FM 87.7) , and yet, even with 72 hours
of sports programming to fill every day, not
one of those stations has picked up the phone
to ask the father of the sports-talk-radio-show
in Chicago to contribute.
You may not have noticed, but he sure has.
"I've obviously been blackballed," says Chet
Coppock. "Does it hurt that nobody has
reached out to me? Absolutely." It's not like he
has left the market. He still has his fingers in
the Chicago sports-media pie. "I host the
Blackhawks heritage series – appearances with
stars like Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, Tony
Esposito, Steve Larmer, Denis Savard, guys
n't compete with me as far as getting the big
guests, so they invited everyone who was
ticked off to vent on the air. They said, we are
your open forum to express your anger. Where
they did catch lightning in a bottle was hiring
their midday show. I am number one as a solo
act – I am Hulk Hogan, Mickey Mantle, George
Halas and Joe DiMaggio as a solo act. But as a
team – [Mike] North and [Dan] Jiggetts are bar
none the greatest tag-team ever. They understood how do that kind of show, and ran with
it."
Chet went to New York to work in television for a while ("I always wondered if I could
hang with the big boys, and I discovered I
could"), but when he came back, things had
changed in Chicago. He was no longer the big
Photo courtesy: majoronions.com
Chet Coppock
like that," he points out. "I host Notre Dame
football at WLS radio. It's my 9th year doing
that, and I love that too. Win or lose Notre
Dame is always a story. And I've become a
semi-regular on Rant & Rave with Fox
(Ch.32)."
But what he really wants is one more shot
at the format he helped create. "I'd love to have
another shot at sports radio," he says, his eyes
lighting up at the mere prospect. "I think it's
excruciatingly dull right now – I mean it's
never been this dull. "
And the never-dull Chet has been around
long enough to remember. His sports-talkradio show began in the early 80s after Chet
was let go from his television gig. "Carol
Marin wanted me out of Channel 5," he says
now. "That's the reason I was let go. Plus they
had this good looking Italian kid (Giangreco)
making a fraction of what I was making working in the sports newsroom. So they farmed
my contract out to WMAQ radio as part of the
settlement."
Chet convinced management to let him do
a nightly sports-talk show. The show garnered
enough of an audience that when the Loop
was looking to start up a personality-talk station in the late '80s, Coppock was asked to
come aboard too. Coppock on Sports now had
a substantial lead-in every single night: Steve
Dahl & Garry Meier. But it was still just a program, not a format.
The landscape changed forever in 1992,
when the Score was the first station to realize it
could focus an entire radio station around
sports-talk. "I was the very first person the
Score tried to hire," Coppock says. Chet turned
them down and helped launch the Loop's own
attempt at a sports-talk station instead. WMVP
(AM 1000) went head to head against the
Score.
"What I admired the most about the Score
in those early days was they knew they could-
20 illinoisentertainer.com may 2014
dog. "I was almost hired by the Score again in
1998, but word leaked, and (Chet's former producer Dan) McNeil was quoted in the paper as
saying 'I'll go to my grave before I work with
Chet Coppock again.' I remember thinking –
Listen you SOB, I gave you your first job at the
Loop. Why won't you play ball with me?"
Fox Sports Net played ball with him for a
couple of years ("the worst two years of my
life"), and ESPN Radio (which is now on AM
1000) brought him in to host some shows there,
but he left to join the ill-fated Web radio project with Mike North. When it blew up, he
now had two sports talk stations in town that
wouldn't touch him. "The Web radio (Chicago
Sports Webio) fiasco hurt me and probably
burned my bridges with ESPN," he admits. "I
know I've burned a few bridges over the years.
Anyone who works with creative tension, and
who insists on winning, is going to burn
bridges. But every station I've ever been wit