The Score Whips Out Its Wiener
I always love when people less competent than I am get canned. It also helps when they’re uneducated, loudmouth jackasses. So imagine my joy when I heard that, Mike North, the radio equivalent of Jay Mariotti was done at the Score. Let’s get something straight. This will not make me start listening to the Score. Quite frankly, I find sports radio infuriating. If I wanted to listen to stupid people fielding questions from even more stupid people, I’d read the Muskbag out loud. Still, it’s fun seeing a egomaniac cut down at the knees. Let’s check out what North had to say about his axing.
Hello everyone,
I am now done at the Score. I met with management this past Friday and since I wouldn’t accept the deal they offered; they told me I wasn’t allowed to be on the air anymore.
So, because you’re an overpaid douche who won’t settle for being a slightly-less overpaid douche, are we supposed to feel sorry for you?
I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye so here goes…
Me neither, so here goes…
I wanted to say my 16 1/2 years with the Score were awesome.
For you. They were awesome for you. They were terrible for us, for sports, and for the English language.
When I was on the air, it was unreal.
I agree. I couldn’t fucking believe it, either.
To be able to entertain, have fun, and sometimes get serious… well you never knew what would happen on a daily basis.
I did. You would mispronounce people’s names, berate local sports figures (unless they called in, when you’d immediately flip the switch to asskissery), propose ludicrous trades, argue in extremes, talk about your wife Be-Be as if anyone gave a shit, and then act like (1) you know a goddamn thing about politics, and (2) anyone on earth would care what a hot dog stand owner thinks about politics.
I want to thank all the listeners and callers who not only laughed at me…
The many.
…but with me.
The few.
I heard from a lot of you over the years, and good or bad, I always welcomed your comments.
Unless, of course, you disagreed with him. Or pointed out the times he misspoke. Or said Gene’s and Jude’s is a better hot dog stand than whatever the hell his used to be.
To do radio in my hometown at such a great station was an honor.
He’s from Chicago? You can barely even tell with his absurdly over-exaggerated accent.
To all the people I used to work with and I work with now, I say thank you. To the advertisers on my show and on the station who were always with me thank you for being there. Without you, there is no station. The sales staff at the Score was always second to none; we made some bucks together. Thanks to you guys too.
Pappy always takes care of HIS GUYS! Congratulations to North for being the Dusty Baker of sports radio.
You’ll be hearing from us real soon. Keep your eyes and ears open and stay tuned.
That sound you just heard was me smashing my car stereo with a baseball bat.
On behalf of Be-Be, Lucky, myself, and everyone associated with us, thank you once again.
You forgot to thank Bricks, Cookie, One-Eye, T-Bone, Dopey, Bashful, Blitzen, Potsy, and the rest of the gang. Also, you’re sort of a dick for not mentioning the equally-terrible Fred Huebner.
PAPPY
Worst nickname ever. If you were my father, I’d ask for an EXTREMELY late-term abortion.
But wait, there’s more. As an added bonus to the North canning, Mariotti managed to write the most ironic article ever written. This is seriously the exact article I would have written in Mariotti’s voice, had I been able to do so before Jay wrote the real thing. Prepare to be amazed.
We only can hope that the end of Mike North is the beginning of decency, professionalism and couth in Chicago sports radio. Oh, some desperate shop might hire him, hoping to capitalize on name recognition at the expense of dignity and wobbling ratings, but so what. This is a day of civic celebration, a chance for sanity and lucidity to reign again in a racket filled with smut.
Finally, people who desperately crave indecency, insanity, and nonsense will know that they have only one place to go to satiate their desires. That classic of all media. The printed word.
The guy lost me when he used to host “Hug A Black Day,” followed by “Hug A Jew Day,” followed by “Hug A Hispanic Day.”
Jay was pissed North never honored him with “Hug a Gay Day.”
He proceeded to lose me more when he made a clown of himself at press conferences and engaged a police officer in crude trash talk in New Orleans, an incident I observed in the French Quarter with fellow Sun-Timesman Mike Mulligan at a Super Bowl.
That’s pretty shitty to drag Mulligan’s name into it. When you were down in the French Quarter, did you throw a Zima bottle at some dude and hide behind Mulligan?
Absurdly, his antics won him a $1.5-million-a-year deal at WSCR-AM, which placed him ahead of Ben Wallace and Cedric Benson as the most overpaid performer in local sports history.
Jay is STEAMED that his own absurd antics haven’t earned him $1.5 million a year.
At last, his bosses came to their senses and sought to slash his salary in half, realizing his quarterly numbers didn’t begin to justify his wage and his public-relations messes. He rejected the offer last Friday. It was the best favor North ever has done for his hometown, prompting CBS Radio to yank the contract and leave him without work.
Fortunately for Jay, his own bosses are clueless retards.
This is what happens when visionary radio executives pull a schmo out of a hot-dog stand and turn him into a talk-show host. They dumb-down the city’s intelligence quotient, narrow its vocabulary to a ninth-grade level and allow insensitivity to reign.
Thus, increasing the number of people who can read Mariotti’s columns. Why exactly is he complaining?
Remember the day when he mimicked brain-damaged Terri Schiavo in her final hours?
For a guy who hates North so much, it sure sounds like Jay listened to the show often. Probably while he was trying to scrub off the shame of another one-night stand and affirming to himself in the mirror, “If this is the last time I do it, I’m not gay. Right???”
It was typical of North’s imbecilic attempts to survive in the morning-drive market, a colossal mistake by Score executives who thought he could talk politics and hard news. Hell, he had enough time earning credibility on sports through the years. Eventually, his product-of-the-streets act was exposed as demeaning to the city, and the listeners tuned him out, opting for a national alternative in America’s most parochial sports town.
Jay actually does have a point here. North was so bad, people in Chicago were actually listening to Mike and Mike. Have you ever listened to that show? It is the real-life equivalent of Bill and Marty, the KBBL radio hosts on The Simpsons.
Mike North, voice of Chicago?
Only if we’re the dopiest city in the land, which we’re not.
Well, WE’RE not…
On his Web site Tuesday night, North hailed his long career at the Score as a triumph. “I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye so here goes,” he wrote to his listeners. “I wanted to say my 16 1/2 years with the Score were awesome. When I was on the air, it was unreal. To be able to entertain, have fun and sometimes get serious … well you never knew what would happen on a daily basis. I want to thank all the listeners and callers who not only laughed at me but with me.”
Didn’t I just do this? I wish Jay would try to keep up.
Problem was, no one laughed at the end. We just cringed, especially the day when he and Ozzie Guillen — the only guy in town with a bigger mouth — locked horns during North’s show on the White Sox’ flagship station. When the Blizzard called in and showered North with expletives, angry that the host was supporting A.J. Pierzynski on a day when backup Toby Hall was in the lineup, North fired back and told Guillen to watch his language. This would be the sports equivalent of George Carlin duct-taping Chris Rock’s mouth. “Hey, Ozzie, clean up your mouth. Clean up your damn mouth when you’re talking on the radio and talking to me,” North shouted. “Have a little respect, all right? Don’t go talking to me like you’re talking down to somebody. Don’t you ever talk down to me. Don’t ever talk to me like I’m some … Yeah, you’d better hang up the damn phone.”
HA HA HA HA! “The Blizzard!” HA HA HA HA HA! Sometimes, I forget how clever Jay is. I’d have gone with “Ozzhole.” Also, George Carlin is dead.
It happened last summer. And it will be remembered as the day North lost his leverage. Before then, he was enabled by Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, who appreciated how a street kid like himself — North from Senn High, Jerry from the same Brooklyn high school as Al Davis (hmmm) — battled some of Reinsdorf’s media enemies. But when North went after the Blizzard, Jerry’s beloved manager, he seemed to lose footing at a station where the program director’s basic job is to shine Reinsdorf’s shoes and serve his every whim. It also didn’t help North that he was slurring ethnic groups at a time when Reinsdorf was working as co-chairman of Major League Baseball’s Equal Opportunity Committee. When the Sox were serving diversity by employing an African-American general manager and a Latin manager, North was on the team flagship angering the Asian community.
Wow. Jay sure went a long way for that. I would have guessed they finally axed him because his ratings were continually declining, and the Score was losing money. But I like Jay’s explanation. I can’t wait until Elvis shows up wearing a tin foil hat and flying a black helicopter.
HBO aired a wildly provocative program last month on the state of sports media. When the producers came to town and taped North, he thought he would be featured positively among the nation’s leading talk hosts, as he told the Sun-Times’ Bob Feder. Little did he know they were coming to depict him as a national embarrassment. The HBO crew interviewed me about the ills of local sports radio, and every time one of my comments was run during the show, it was accompanied by North’s ill behavior. If he didn’t know it was over then, he should have.
I’ve never seen this special, but can someone who has seen it PLEASE tell me they were also mocking Mariotti, and he’s too fucking stupid to realize it?
What’s sad is that North, deep down, has a heart somewhere. He devotes countless hours to charity. He loves dogs. His wife is a sweetheart. So why turn into such a cold-blooded lout on the air? It’s one thing to criticize the local sports teams, which he did when it was convenient to his bank account and political agenda. But he was cruel and ignorant when it came to race, like a caveman from the last century who never evolved with the times. Michael Holley, a prominent African-American writer and sports-talk host in Boston, spent a brief time in Chicago as a Tribune sports columnist. To this day, he is stunned by North’s racial viewpoints and says he couldn’t survive in many other towns.
I’m pretty sure Jay just said we’re more racist than most other towns.
So why did Chicago tolerate him for 16 1/2 years? And why would another station possibly hire him? Because radio executives generally are idiots who abandon common sense and good taste in their hunger for ratings. Why do you think Don Imus landed another gig after his “nappy-headed hos” furor? A desperate station, WABC-AM in New York, shamelessly wanted to attract a few listeners to an Imus comeback. That backfired Monday, when Imus went down the crooked racial path again — after all those weepy and sensitive apologies to the Rutgers women’s basketball team — with a regretful commentary about Pacman Jones’ run-ins with the law.
If I were Jay, I’d watch what I say. Imus has chunks of guys like Jay in his stool.
“What color is he?” Imus asked.
“African-American,” he was told by sportscaster Warner Wolf.
“There you go. Now we know,” Imus said.
He claims he was trying to defend Jones, via sarcasm, as a victim.
Which is probably exactly what he was trying to do. Whether he did it in a completely stupid an insensitive way is a matter of debate.
“What people should be outraged about is that they arrest blacks for no reason,” he said Tuesday. “I mean, there’s no reason to arrest this kid six times. Maybe he did something once, but everyone does something once.”
Please. If Imus didn’t have a lengthy record of racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism and anti-humanity, he might have some credibility. Truth is, he should be nowhere near a microphone.
And Jay should be nowhere near a keyboard. Or a Boy Scout troop.
Nor should Mike North, for that matter. I’d like to think the market has learned from its 16 1/2-year mistake. I’d like to think no radio programmer will repeat the mistake. For now, I will listen to replacements Mulligan and Brian Hanley talk about sports — sports! — and cling to hope.
Jay had better PRAY TO GOD that the Chicago media doesn’t get rid of all of its paunchy, loudmouthed, untalented, uneducated, narcissistic, overpaid horse’s asses. He’ll have to resort to sucking dick. Only this time, it’ll be for money.
Oh, and if the Score is looking for North’s replacement, Dolan was kind enough to register ChucktoChuck.com for the…argumentative…Chuck.
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Comments
al We all know where he is going to end up
The picture isnt mine I borrowed it from Killer V
North=Clown Ignorant blowhard whose only knowledge is of hot dogs and mustard. Listening to his pathetic rants against the Cubs this season and his stories of getting on his knees for the White Sox just added to my hatred of this clown and his “yes-man” Fred. The man is pathetic, doesn’t know sports, and cuts off callers who conveniently can’t respond to his arguments that are oh so clearly without merit. Good riddance.
Steve In a town with a media full of morons, you just managed to hit the two most moronic (three if you count the quick Huebner reference) - nice.
HelloWorld “Jay had better PRAY TO GOD that the Chicago media doesn’t get rid of all of its paunchy, loudmouthed, untalented, uneducated, narcissistic, overpaid horse’s asses. He’ll have to resort to sucking dick. Only this time, it’ll be for money.”
I thought Jay was praying FOR this.
level5 Wow, did Jay really write Caveman from last century? That would make Abe Lincoln a cave man, and George Washington practically a paramecium.
domer.mq I found the timing of the Mike and Mike appearance at Wrigley last night interesting. I know that they’d been planning that for a week or two. I wonder if ESPN had an inkling that Mike was going to be vacating the market/time-slot. It’s a great time to get Mike and Mike out in front of Chicago.
By the way, I like Mike and Mike. They’re like a nice glass of Hershey’s chocolate milk. I know what I’m getting every time, it’s easily digested, and I only get sickly feeling if I intake too much.
Now if we could just get a meteor to knock out the afternoon drive on ESPN 1000.
CT
bocaj
BigFlax
StPatrick
TDubbs
There’s always been this idea of what works on Chicago radio doesn’t work anywhere else and anyone that listens to it can easily see why. It’s full of ignorant douchebags that just say words instead of ever having something interesting to say. Prime examples like Steve “I did Disco Demolition” Dahl and Mancow just show how bad radio in Chicago truly is. It’s come to the point where if I listen to any talk radio here I just turn on Brandmeir simply to here him rehash everything he did in the 80’s. Yay iPod!