Radio Daze

Due to a fairly long train commute each day, I listen to a lot of sports radio. So, I was a little surprised to hear former CBS sports broadcaster Mike Adamle pop up on 670 the Score as a fill in for Rick Telander last week. Sure enough, both the Trib and Sun-Times confirmed that Adamle was hired to be utility guy for the Score, filling in as various hosts go on vacation. For those of you who didn't watch Adamle on CBS (and judging from the ratings, that's, well everybody) Mike is the answer to the trivia question: who was the only player besides Walter Payton to start at running back for the Bears between 1975-1987? Adamle started one game in 1975, the only one that Payton ever missed. In addition, Mike was one of the most brutal sportscaster's to ever grace a major market news cast. I never watched him, but every day at 6pm, Steve Dahl would play any lowlights from Adamle's sportscast the night before. Adamle was so bad, that this was basically a daily feature on Dahl's show. Mike basically got the job for two reasons; he was an ex-Chicago jock, and two, he looked the part. Which makes me wonder why the Score would hire him. Adamle's greatest(and I use the term loosely) asset was that he looked the part of the sportscaster. Having him on radio nullifies that. And while he played for the Bears, he didn't have a memorable career, and he's no more plugged in than anybody else on the Score staff. Finally, the guy would stumble over the words that he'd written (well, I assume he wrote them) for his sports cast. I shudder to think what he'll do when he's got to improvise. Now, this isn't really a major position he was hired for, and that's part of the problem. The Score could have hired somebody new, or given one of it's younger guys a chance as the fill in, but instead, they decided the safest thing to do was hire another Chicago retread. And that's why they're still in 2nd place.