Growing up in Lynn, Massachusetts, in the late 1950s and 1960s, Glenn Ordway didn't aspire to be a sports-talk host on the radio. That job didn't exist. If you talked about sports for a living, it meant you were a play-by-play announcer. Neighborhood kids imitated the smoothly erudite Curt Gowdy, who broadcast games of the hapless Red Sox. Or Johnny Most, whose heavy-machinery rattle narrated the details of each Celtics championship.

In a more metaphysical sense, the voice of Boston's sports scene – like that of every American city – was one or another newspaper columnist. Not limited to game details, permitted to express opinions on four or five issues a week, the likes of Harold Kaese and Ray Fitzgerald served as the editorial tuning forks of the sporting community. When fans gathered for beers at Charlie's Kitchen or the Eliot Lounge, their daily columns in the Herald-Traveler or the Globe or the Record-American served as the starting point. Theirs were the opinions that were parroted – or disdained.

No longer. These days, Ordway's baritone is the voice of Boston sports, literally and figuratively. For 20 hours a week, he presides over a radio roundtable – the "Big Show," on Boston's WEEI – that bears more than a slight resemblance to those barroom gatherings. He sets the topics, moderates the discussions, makes the pronouncements. Sure, columnists on the Globe and the Herald still entertain and inform newspaper readers, and play-by-play announcers have their followings. But Ordway's opinions, in conjunction with those of other popular hosts on the station, start the conversations now.

Such is the importance of sports-talk radio, in the Boston market and across the country. As of last summer, WEEI was attracting 270 percent more male listeners aged 25 to 54 during Ordway's afternoon broadcast slot than any other station, music, news or talk. No other all-sports station in America is quite so successful, but more than 600 are currently in operation, from New York's pioneering WFAN to San Diego's south-of-the-border Mighty XX. And while syndicated talkers such as Jim Rome or ESPN's Dan Patrick can be heard in most markets, intensely local programming like Ordway's Big Show usually lead ratings books in the cities that matter most.

The reason may be deeper than you think. In an increasingly homogenized urban environment, with the same stores and restaurants stocked with the same brands filling nearly identical malls everywhere, sports-talk radio is one of the few authentic manifestations of local culture that remains. Newspapers are dominated by wire stories. Most of cable television and the Internet succeeds by constructing a virtual community of like-minded aficionados from anywhere. Even political radio is dominated by national personalities.

Sports is different. Each major city has its teams, with distinct histories and cultures. They put the name of their city (or region) across their shirts, and go forth to do battle with the outside world.

As a result, sports talk remains relentlessly local – and locally informed. "The callers have a tremendous amount of expertise," the linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, a frequent listener to the format, told the Financial Times last year. "They have detailed knowledge of all kinds of things. They carry on ... extremely complex discussions." So complex that they can be indecipherable. Try to listen to sports radio from a distant city and it's like you've crossed a national border. Their issues aren't your issues, not unless you're a transplant. Their personalities would be unlikely to succeed in your hometown.

Sports-talk hosts rarely switch markets successfully. Even Pete Franklin, who might be said to have perfected the genre of the sports call-in show when he worked at Cleveland's WWWE in the 1970s and 1980s, flopped in New York at WFAN. As Tom Tolbert, the former NBA player who now co-hosts the "Razor and Mr. T" show on San Francisco's KNBR puts it, "This show wouldn't make sense anywhere else." That, in a phrase, is testimony to the show's relevance – and, one might even say, its beauty.

* * *

Sports-talk radio as we know it appears to have originated in New York in 1964 when WNBC's Bill Mazer took its first listener phone call. (The first caller to propose a one-sided trade, with all benefit going to the home team, doubtless occurred within minutes.)

Sports commentaries and discussions already were being broadcast in many markets. Boston's WBZ is believed to be the first station to do a nightly sports show when Guy Mainella began Sports Huddle in the early 1960s. But that effort, and others before it, consisted of announcers talking at listeners, not with them. Putting callers on the air made them participants in a way that newspaper readers or television watchers could never be.

More than three decades later, listener calls remain the centerpiece of the format, though few hosts let callers drone on like they used to. Jim Rome, who parlayed local success in Los Angeles into a national cult, has taught his callers to provide their own well-crafted opinions – what he calls "takes" – on various topics, but what they gain in focus and verve, they lose in spontaneity. Other national shows, such as Patrick's, may not take a call for hours.

The best local hosts combat uninspired callers with humor, even insults and cruelty. If a caller can't be great, they know, it's better if he's downright awful. In Miami on a Wednesday afternoon, Ron is calling from a mobile phone. He asks Hank Goldberg, the host of the afternoon show on the all-sports WQAM, a complex and stunningly boring question about football. Goldberg rolls his eyes and offers a biting response.

"Well, I just wanted to know what you thought about it," Ron says. "And, number two ..."

"I [ital]don't[end] think about it," Goldberg says, disconnecting him. Then he tosses off a bit of scatological wit: "And you're number two."

Goldberg, 66, is a throwback to a generation of sports journalists that loved boxing, horse racing, and gambling. Miami, one of the few places that still actually thinks about sports that way, is perfect for him. He has reported for ESPN on various topics since 1992, broadcast football on the radio and written for Jimmy the Greek, but his true metier is local talk. "I couldn't do a national show," he says. "I've stayed away from it because there's no passion. Even on the best of those shows, 90 percent of what you hear is of no interest to me in Miami."

The son of a Newark sportswriter, Goldberg worked the 1960 presidential election for CBS while in college and fell in love with broadcasting. But the Army intervened, and when he got out, in 1963, he landed in advertising. He moved to Miami for a sales job and spent Sundays helping the nascent Dolphins in the press box. In 1967, he started filling in on the radio. He did lead-ins to boxing broadcasts, even hosted a "half-assed sports show on Tuesday and Saturday nights."

For forty years, on and off, he has had some kind of sports show on Miami radio. But until 1991, he kept his job at a local advertising agency, working two national labor accounts. He wasn't getting rich doing radio, "and I wanted to make a difference," he says. Now that he's probably the premier radio personality in Florida, his financial security is assured – and he makes a difference by saying what he thinks. Most fans in town know his opinions like they know their own.

In 1978, Goldberg replaced Larry King as the color man on Dolphins broadcasts. King gave him this advice about hosting a successful call-in show: "Don't suffer the fools. Nobody wants to hear those people." Relating this, Goldberg smiles. "That's why my on-air persona can be abrasive," he says. "I took it a lot further than Larry ever did."

On the air, he's as hard-boiled as a Damon Runyon character. Wearing a golf shirt over his ample belly, he reads most of the advertising copy himself, like Paul Harvey or Arthur Godfrey. The opinions roll off his tongue. "Arizona has a better future than the Dolphins," he tells one caller. "Gambling is what makes the NFL fun," he tells another. When a spate of silly calls comes in, he groans. "Is this the way we're going to end the show today?" he asks. "With the moron segment?"

The real Goldberg is far more nuanced. On this afternoon, Dennis Sutton, maitre d' at Joe's Stone Crab on Miami Beach and Goldberg's good friend, has just died. "The only beef I had with him, when we were golfing, he'd blow cigar smoke in my face," Goldberg says off the air. "But you know what?" His eyes start to well with tears. "I'd give anything to have him do it again."

Four television screens in the studio impart the latest information. But Goldberg's orientation is relentlessly local. With his guest, former Miami Heat assistant Tony Fiorentino, he tries to make the case that the current edition of the Dolphins is the least palatable team in the history of South Florida sports. Along the way, Goldberg, Fiorentino and the callers drop all kinds of names, usually without identification. Goldberg mentions someone named Eddie Kaplan, and Fiorentino counters with a long anecdote about someone named Neil Goodman. These aren't players or coaches but insiders, [ital]machers[end], regulars somewhere or other. Many of Goldberg's listeners are from the same milieu. If they aren't, they like to pretend they are.

The afternoon has focused on the pathos of the Dolphins, the prospects of the Heat, and some national college football. But it also has been a gathering of a select clan, a not-so-secret society that has seen the same games, drinks at the same bars, and knows many of the same people. In short, the show has been as much about Eddie Kaplan and Neil Goodman as any famous coach or athlete. Much of that is natural, but Goldberg fully understands the ambience he is creating, and how important it is for listeners to feel that they are a part of something genuine. As he heads out the door, someone in the studio tells him he enjoyed the banter, but couldn't place Goodman's name. Goldberg shrugs. "I don't know who Neil Goodman is, either," he says.

* * *

"Governor mixes it up on the radio" is how the six-column headline atop the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's sports page reads. WCNN's John Kincade couldn't be happier about it.

Kincade, 41, is a Philadelphia transplant who brings that city's aggressive attitude toward sports to the gentler Atlanta market. When Georgia governor – and UGa alum – Sonny Perdue was upset by a Journal-Constitution headline following the Bulldogs' 51-33 loss to Tennessee last football season, he wrote to the newspaper. That set off Kincade, one of the brightest members of an emerging generation of local sports talk-show hosts.

The resulting on-air conversation between Kincade and Perdue gave the story legs. "I think you've got better things to worry about, and it's not the governor's job to tell the AJC what headline should be in the sports section," Kincade said.

"I exercised my free speech," said Perdue, who ultimately asked Kincade's co-host Buck Belue to "Turn [Kincade's] mike off."

Now it's the day after, and Kincade is crowing. But the looks he gets as he walks into the station for his show – dressed in a shirt and a patterned tie, with moussed-up hair like an East Coast basketball coach – don't seem entirely positive. "I'm the biggest story in town today," he says in a quiet moment. "I'm on the political page, I'm in the sports section. If it was Philly, Boston, New York, they'd be saying 'Great job,' 'Awesome,' 'You can't buy that publicity.' But in Atlanta, it makes people uncomfortable. Welcome to the softest media market in the country."

Somehow, the clash between Kincade's passion and Atlanta's politesse results in compelling radio. "I'm opinionated, I've got energy, and I'm not afraid to be wrong," he says. "I want to get to the issue that will tug at Atlanta's heart-strings."

Kincade is so intense about his job, lives it so thoroughly, you'd think he'd been pointed toward it all his life. In truth, he only has been working full-time in sports radio since 1999, following two battles with cancer. The second, a testicular cancer that struck him in 1997, made him identify his priorities. He realized that his lucrative job as a health care consultant didn't make the list. "It took the cancer to make me wake up and say, 'If you survive, this is what your life is going to be about,'" he says.

At 41, he's young enough to have grown up listening to sports-talk radio. In his case, the personality who made the deepest impression was WIP's Howard Eskin, one of the wittiest – and, at times, cruelest – men in the profession. As a teenager in Broomall, Pa.., he wrote asking Eskin to appear at his school. Eskin did. "I went on the air with him," Kincade says. In college at Temple, Kincade worked for the NHL's Philadelphia Flyers, helping coach Mike Keenan on game nights. At 20, he was on the air as a Flyers reporter for his college station. But after graduation, he chased money.

By 1998, he was ready to channel his profligate energies into radio. His tapes landed him a job doing pre- and post-game shows for the NHL's Atlanta Thrashers. Early in 2000, WCNN became "680 The Fan," and Kincade found a home. He has teamed with Belue, a former Georgia quarterback, since the beginning. "We take fewer phone calls than any show in the market," Kincade boasts. "The listener doesn't want to hear what Joe in Atlanta is saying. He wants to know, "What's Buck saying? What's Kincade saying?'"

What Kincade's saying, you can be sure, is what he's thinking. And though his detractors call him a carpetbagging Yankee who lacks respect, those thoughts resonate around the market. "The power of this job is amazing," he says. "The ability to influence people and have your opinion matter. A lot of guys in the business say it's like you're bellying up to the bar, but I don't see it that way. I see it like I'm almost a preacher, giving my daily sermon."

Kincade plots his show with the exactitude of a Bill Walsh pass play. "It's my job to lay the bread crumbs and let people follow," he says. "It's not about where the callers take the show. The callers are there to be entertained by me. It'd be real easy to come here and say, 'LCS tonight, who do you like?' Instead, I try to make a show like a Seinfeld episode. All the threads come together at the end."

He starts with a local angle on Mets-Cardinals. Tom Glavine, the longtime Atlanta pitcher, is starting Game 1 for the Mets. As Atlantans, Kincade wants to know, are we rooting for him? Later, Kincade interviews Jay Feely, the former Falcons kicker, who now kicks for the Giants. Atlanta losing players to New York is a leitmotif of the afternoon.

But about 5 p.m., the television mounted in the studio reports that Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle has died piloting a private plane. There's little to do except repeat second-hand news, but Kincade finds a way in. "How much does your employer have the right to tell you what you can do in your free time?" he asks. "Should piloting a plane be off limits?"

The lines light up. Kincade looks like a quarterback whose audible has resulted in a draw play for a touchdown. He shakes his fist in celebration, then looks abashed when people notice. "It's an intoxicating feeling," he says. "An aphrodesiac."

* * *

Less than an hour before his show one day this winter, Tom Tolbert, 41, is sitting at a sushi bar in Alameda. He wears camouflage shorts and a striped t-shirt, and a stocking cap with an Arizona 'A.' Unlike Kincade, Tolbert has no prepared topics for the afternoon. He has no clue which way the discussion will go. "My hope every day," he says, "is that the show takes on a life of its own."

Tolbert's nightly preparation consists of watching SportsCenter, and maybe a local or national game. It also means going through life gathering opinions on a range of topics, such as how hard it is to type out a text message. "We've always said that our show wouldn't work back East," Tolbert says. "People there enjoy talking about the Red Sox or whomever 90 percent of the time. It's not like that here."

Given the fragmentation of California's sports loyalties, a caller is just as likely to be a UCLA fan as Stanford or Cal (and more likely to root for the Lakers than the Warriors.) Tolbert freely admits many callers will probably know more about their topic than he does. But after playing for Lute Olson at Arizona and seven years in the NBA, he's brings a different kind of credibility to the discussion – and a different kind a celebrity. Leaving the sushi bar, he's spotted by four teenagers. "Hey, duuuude," one calls out. They're dressed like younger versions of Tolbert, except for the ski cap.

"Shouldn't you be in school?" Tolbert asks. It develops that they're in the midst of exams. "Shouldn't you be studying?" The response, in unison: "No!" It's hard to imagine the teenagers giving such a brazen answer to any other sports broadcaster in town, which may help explain why Tolbert's ratings are so high. "I'm always fascinated by teenagers that call in," he says once they've moved on. "Like, why aren't they listening to music?'"

Inside KNBR's plush, modern studio, the oddly dressed Tolbert looks just as he did all morning. He sounds the same, too. A wide-ranging conversation over lunch could have been transposed with the first 20 minutes of the show, and nobody would have been the wiser. "We'll be talking about a conversation we had," says his co-host, Ralph Barbieri, "and I'll forget if it happened on or off the air."

If other sports-talk hosts program their shows to appeal to the listeners' passions or interests, much as Top 40 radio does, "The Razor and Mr. T" is more like free-form album rock. "We talk less sports than anyone," Tolbert says. "Probably no more than 80 percent of the time. I've always felt that people break things down way too much. It's mind-numbing." Instead of affiliations with local teams driving the show, it's Tolbert's ebullient personality (and the restrained, more cerebral Barbieri, who acts as a foil.) "A lot of guys prepare so much because they're petrified of dead air," Tolbert says. "I've never had any problem with that. I'll always have something to say."

As an ex-jock, Tolbert doesn't have to prove his knowledge of the games. He's also not interested in the local zeitgeist, in tapping into a culture like Goldberg or plucking at heart strings like Kincade. Instead, he pretends he's doing the show for his friends, "10 or 12 guys I hang out with. My philosophy has always been, if you're having fun, people will feel like they're in on it."

Fortunately, Tolbert loves sports. During the course of this show, he'll express interesting – and at least semi-informed – opinions on the NBA, college basketball, the NFL, tennis, hockey. First, though, he and Barbieri have a discussion about Wallabies, the soft-sided shoes popular several decades ago. By the time they segue into timelier topics, the caller board is full of listeners waiting for their turn. What do they want to talk about? Wallabies, of course.

To make fun of overly biased announcers, Barbieri and Tolbert play a tape of a Texas high school game that they've played before. Then they ask their engineer for another tape in their archive, this one of an interception return by ex-Bengals linebacker Takeo Spikes. The local announcer moans "Oh, yeah, oh, yeah," as Spikes crosses the goal line. "Something sickly sexual about that call," Tolbert says.

A caller references a team that has had an "us-against-the-world" mentality all season, and Tolbert takes umbrage at something he's heard too often. "Obviously, the 'world' is for nobody, because every team is 'us against the world,'" he says. On television, the Bulls have a 26-9 lead over the Mavericks. "It'll be tied," Tolbert pronounces. "It's the NBA. It's good as gold. One team takes a 17-point lead in the first quarter, at some point the game will be tied." The show is like a boat sailing in open water on a gusty day. Wherever the wind takes them, within reason, they're content to go.

After four hours, they've had three guests on the phone line: Warrior coach Don Nelson, whom Tolbert played for; former Bay Area sportswriter Mark Gonzales, now in Chicago; and Jason Cole, a Stanford grad and national sportswriter who is working on a Reggie Bush story. All three seem to come out of nowhere, and once their segments have ended, their topics vanish without a trace. Tolbert admits that the show wouldn't have been substantially different had all three cancelled. "We would have kept talking, like we always do," he says.

It seems haphazard, yet there's something endearing about the show. San Francisco listeners must think so: it has been the most popular sports show in the region since it debuted a decade ago. In his own way, and without particularly trying to, Tolbert – the only one of these hosts who has actually worn a jersey with the name of a place written across it – has captured the sensibility of his market. He riffs about his cell phone, about the complexity of modern slot machines ("Did I get the axe, the guitar pick and the kumquat? I win!"), and admits that when he watches Serena Williams, he can't take his eyes off her breasts. Then he and Ralph speculate about Williams's actual weight. Wherever they take the show, callers follow.

Not everyone loves the free-wheeling approach. On the day that popular Warrior Mike Dunleavy is traded to Indiana, Tolbert and Barbieri never get around to more than a cursory mention. They're too busy talking about all sorts of other minutae. "One guy e-mailed in, 'One of the biggest trades in Warrior history, and you're talking about a tuna melt,'" Tolbert says. "He was indignant."

Barbieri considers. "Ten years on the air, we'd never talked about tuna melt," he says. "It was about time."

* * *

Boston fans wouldn't e-mail a protest about a tuna-melt discussion. They'd just change the station.

Competing in the ultra-competitive world of Boston sports media, Ordway's Big Show stays focused on the passionate fan. "It's not like a newspaper, where I can still participate, read about my team, and skip what I don't want to read," he says. "As a listener, if they're talking about something I don't care about, I'm no longer on WEEI. My idea is, in radio you don't play your own CD collection. You play what people want to hear."

If you tune in to the show at random, Ordway says, there's a 70 percent chance you'll hear talk about the Red Sox. The Patriots occupy another 20 percent of the airtime, the Celtics another five. That leaves five percent – total – for the Bruins, local schools, national sports, tuna melts, and everything else. "I go into a show thinking I'm going to have four or five topics I'll have to think about," he says. "If I never get to No. 2, it's a great show."

Because the market is so fervent, Ordway can serve as a sort of traffic cop of the airwaves, directing the flow of content from guests to callers, from news breaks to audio features. "Keeping it going, pulling out the expertise of the guys who are in the trenches each day," he says. It isn't like working in play-by-play, his profession for nearly two decades. "In that job, you had to know a lot about a little. This job, you have to know a little about a lot."

Named the program director of WEEI in 1995, he flew to Philadelphia and spent two days holed up in an airport hotel, listening to how WIP, one of America's most successful sports-talk stations, connected to its fans. He returned to Boston and "blew the whole thing up," he says. "Moved people around. Fired people. And what you see now is pretty much what we created."

The show he has created may be more insider-oriented, more of a closed circle, than any other radio show in the country. If you've just emerged from the Ted Williams Tunnel for the first time, you're likely to have little idea what Ordway and his rotating roundtable of guests are talking about. Today's controversy centers around what local sportswriter Bob Ryan said on a conference call with Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein the previous day. Ryan had audibly expressed an opinion – out of bounds for a working journalist, in Ordway's opinion – on the sagacity of signing oft-injured outfielder J.D. Drew to a huge contract. Curt Schilling, the loquacious Red Sox pitcher, then called WEEI's morning show to express his opinion on Ryan's actions.

If it all seems as incestuous as the royal families of Europe, that's how WEEI listeners like it. After the first 10 minutes, Ordway and sportswriters Tom Curran and Tony Massorati don't even bother to reset the entanglement, figuring that anyone listening knows the story to date. Which they probably do.

The show starts with 25 minutes of pure, high-energy sports talk. No commercials, no callers. It's Celtics, then Drew, then Schilling. Ordway doesn't have the best radio voice, nor is he as funny as Curran or as plugged-in as Massorati. But something about the way he asserts himself on the air – not rudely, and not without charm, but with utter confidence – establishes him as the authority. He chooses callers from a coterie of determined, knowledgeable, and intensely interested listeners. One after another, they weigh in on how Drew will respond to the pressure of playing in Boston, on whether signing him means a trade of Manny Ramirez is imminent, and other pressing issues. Never mind that Opening Day remains months away.

"We couldn't do what we do on the FAN in New York," says Ordway during a break, "and they couldn't do what they do here. We're extremely parochial in this market. It becomes extremely personal. So many people who live in New York didn't grow up in New York – and with a potential of 13-and-a-half million listeners, they can talk about so many things and get away with it. But if we spend 25 minutes talking about Boston College basketball the same way they talk about St. John's, my audience would be gone."

At 4:45, nearly three hours into the show, football – currently in season – is mentioned for the first time. Then it's back to Drew, and the impending signing by the Sox of Japanese pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka. The last 15 minutes are reserved for the Whine Line, taped takes by callers on topics of their choice. The panel listens as the best and worst of the calls – assiduously collected and edited by the production staff – are played. The final caller does a riff that imitates Ryan's voice – including a pregnant pause – during the conference call with Epstein. It is so insider, so self-reverential, yet so funny if you've been following the whole affair all day, that it brings down the house.

That night, Ordway makes an appearance on behalf of WEEI at a jewelry store in nearby Framingham. Ordway is half the draw; the other half is Peter Gammons, the former Boston Globe sportswriter who now appears on television and the Internet for ESPN. Ordway and Gammons arrived in the world of Boston media almost simultaneously more than a generation ago. In another time, it was Gammons – the prototypical newspaper reporter – who was exalted as Boston's sports oracle. Today, by dint of his local exposure alone, it's Ordway.

The two of them are friendly, and they greet each other. Then each retreats to a different area of the store to greet fans. Gammons is peppered with direct questions about Red Sox minutiae. What does management think of young relievers Hansen and Delcarmen? What are the specifics of Drew's contract? It is like an on-line chat room come to life.

In front of an earring display, a fan approaches Ordway. "I'm of the opinion that you're the greatest basketball play-by-play announcer today," he says. "I know you have this terrific lifestyle now, but don't you miss it a little?" Ordway admits that he misses the 1986 team, Bird and Parish and McHale. But they'd be gone now, anyway. It would have been hard, he realized in 1995, to maintain the necessary enthusiasm with a loser.

The fan isn't satisfied. "But you come into that studio every day and you're a ball of fire of enthusiasm," he says. "Yeah, I love what I do," Ordway says.

Across the room but within earshot, Gammons is giving his inside opinion on the Matsuzaka negotiations. One fan in front of him is actually taking notes. Ordway smiles, well aware of who he is – and who he isn't. "I love what I do," he repeats. "I love what I do."

 
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