Other Sports KC Sorts Talk Radio: What's Wrong with Nick Wright? - Page 5

**KcMizzou** · 03-22-2011, 07:15 PM

Loooong, but maybe interesting to some.

Quote:

What's Wrong with Nick Wright?

The reason I’m so sure of myself is because it’s horrifying and terrifying not to be. Because this is the only thing I’ve ever known. My career — and this is going to sound awful, but it’s honest — my career is my religion. It’s what I know.

{ ink } dugan arnett

The other day, Nick Wright, the gangly 26-year-old host of 610 Sports Radio’s “What’s Wright With Nick Wright,” was lounging on the sofa of his Overland Park apartment, talking about how talented he is.

This was a Thursday night, sometime around 9 p.m., and as he spoke, he was nursing a wine cooler and splitting his attention between a visitor and a nearby television, which was broadcasting a steady stream of college basketball highlights. He had just finished providing a detailed and unsolicited account of how intelligent he happens to be (“I crushed the SATs”), how regularly he is recognized around town (“a lot”) and how, had he not decided to pursue a career in radio, he would have almost certainly become a very successful doctor or lawyer (“I could have gone to Harvard, probably”), and now he was leaning forward in his seat and explaining that, when you really break it down, there isn’t a sane individual on this planet who could listen to his radio show and not conclude that it is, without question, the best sports-talk program in Kansas City.

“You can take the Pepsi-goddamn-Challenge with my show,” Wright was saying, turning away from the television to make sure his remarks were being met with the appropriate level of fervor. “You listen to my show for a week, my show will either entertain you more or make you think more or make you angrier. One of the three.

“But there’s nobody that can listen to my show for a week and not acknowledge that it’s superior,” he added. “That, I know.”

That he is able to make such a proclamation — not only make it but, based on the tenacity with which it’s delivered, actually believe it — is an impressive feat to behold, given the lack of empirical evidence to support it.

As he was saying this, for instance, his show sat in a distant eighth place in the market in its demographic,* trailing, among others, a classic rock show (Skid Roadie on 101 the Fox), an irreverent drive-time show (“The Church of Lazlo” on 96.5 the Buzz) and a conservative political show (“Shanin & Parks” on 980 KMBZ). It ranked seven spots behind Sports Radio 810’s “Between the Lines” with Kevin Kietzman, the city’s oldest and most listened to sports-radio program.

Wright is unquestionably bright and unquestionably talented. He graduated from Syracuse University’s prestigious S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and has done so much so quickly that, when reached by phone recently, the man in charge of radio recruiting for ESPN knows precisely who you’re talking about when you mention the name Nick Wright. But the fact remains that, on any given day, roughly twice as many people tune in to Kietzman’s show than Wright’s.

And yet, here he sits, sipping his drink and watching his basketball and insisting that no one in this town has a bigger impact on the sports discussion than he does. No one works harder. No one cares more. No one, in the end, will achieve as much. He will be the most listened-to radio host — sports or otherwise — in Kansas City, he assures you, “and it’s not a Carl Peterson five-year plan.”

And it is at about this time that it occurs to you that one of the following two things is true:

Either Wright is, as nearly all signs seem to indicate, delusional.

Or, perhaps, he isn’t.

Nick Wright is delusional. Of course he is, because how else could someone so overestimate his potential reach?

Not long ago, analysts at Scarborough Research released a report detailing the makeup of the country’s sports-talk radio listeners. What they found is this: They are, in large part, between the ages of 35 and 54. They are homeowners, and they are active online shoppers, and they are willing to spend significant sums of money on things like home improvement projects.

Which is to say, when it gets right down to it, the kind of people listening to sports-talk radio are not a whole lot like Nick Wright.

Look at him now, lounging in the 610 studio before a recent show, outfitted in sweatpants, oversized T-shirt and gold chain, fiddling with his Android phone and recounting the particulars of a drunken escapade in which Jared Carter, the show’s 24-year-old board operator, nearly got himself cold-cocked at a Twins-Royals game by an individual who may or may not have been in high school.

On-air, Wright is boisterous and confrontational and a little mean-ish, his words tumbling out in aggressive bursts — pausing occasionally for emphasis, each syllable like a finger jabbed into your chest. In person, however, he cuts a rather unimposing figure. He is tall, probably a shade over 6 feet, and notably thin — with bony arms, a trim goatee and a nose that keeps on going — and it is difficult to look at him and not wonder why a middle-aged suburbanite would be especially interested in anything he has to say.

He is a connoisseur of baggy sweatshirts and baggier jeans, of track jackets and elaborate sneakers. Danielle Byrd, Wright’s 30-year-old girlfriend and a manger at a local men’s clothing store, was so put off by his wardrobe that it took months before she agreed to a date with him.

He curses profusely and egregiously (“****ing worthless ****ing stooge” is how he identifies one radio contemporary), and though he was raised comfortably in Kansas City, a graduate of the private Barstow School and the son of two Harvard alums, his show features a markedly urban feel. Hip-hop music welcomes listeners into the program and back from commercial break, and Wright’s slang-infused dialect — callers are “Bro,” the idea of the Kansas City Chiefs acquiring Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald is “sweet” — has prompted some to accuse him of playing up certain things to cultivate an exaggerated sense of street cred.

Based solely on the way he speaks, local sports media blogger Greg Hall recently mused, it’s not difficult to imagine him retiring each night to one of the city’s rougher precincts.

And this is to say nothing of the show’s risqué subject matter — a steady stream of anecdotal tidbits pulled from the annals of his personal life. If traditional sports-talk is like chatting about yesterday’s game over the backyard fence, “What’s Wright” is like sitting in a frat house basement, reliving the night before. On-air discussion has centered on, at one time or another, Wright’s accidental presence at a furry swingers party and his 2003 arrest for marijuana possession, while one of the show’s running jokes is the fact that Carter, the board operator, was once caught in bed with another man’s wife, with whom he now has a child.

“He’s not relatable to a dad with two kids in Johnson County who doesn’t understand why he says ‘cuz’ every other word,” says Chris Hamblin, who along with Cory Anderson held the 610 afternoon-drive spot that Wright took over in April 2010. “He wants to be himself, and good for him, but you have to know that the 40-year-old guy dropping his kids off at soccer practice and going to Starbucks, some of the things Nick’s getting into will make him change the station.”

So despite his insistence to the contrary, Wright can’t possible be bound for talk-radio immortality. If he were, wouldn’t it have occurred to him by now to tone down some of the antics? Wouldn’t he at least attempt to cater to the 40-plus crowd?

And, if he were a real threat, wouldn’t Kansas City’s current king of sports-talk be concerned?

“I’m not an expert on what he does,” shrugs Kietzman, 46. “But it sounds more like a niche than a mainstream approach. That’s just me. With the specific jargon and lingo and things that he does, it’s like Jim Rome. I think he kind of sounds like a Rome-clone or something.”

Of course, if Jim Rome — arguably America’s most prominent sports-talk host and a man whose show is broadcast on roughly 200 stations across the United States and Canada — can be considered niche, then maybe niche isn’t so bad.

And if Rome is niche, couldn’t the same be said for the rest of the country’s most high-profile radio personalities? Rome fights his guests, and Howard Stern interviews porn stars, and Rush Limbaugh rages against the liberal media, and each carries out his specific shtick with enough gusto that he is nationally renowned because of it.

No, Wright might not look like his competitors or sound like his competitors or think like his competitors, but as a result, he is in a position to offer a perspective that — love it or hate it — is unlike anything else you’ll find in local radio.

What other sports-talk host will argue, in the span of one show, that Auburn defensive lineman Nick Fairley’s dirty play should be celebrated and that University of Kansas forward Mario Little, arrested following a domestic-related incident, had no choice but to hit the guy he found at home with his girlfriend in January? Or that he’d love the chance to interview NFL spokesman Greg Aiello in person so that he could “punch him in his smug face”?

Who else invites listeners, during a weekly Friday segment, to call in and offer their unfettered critiques of his work from the past week? And is more than happy to keep jawing with his audience long after his show has ended (an avid user of social media, he has roughly 6,400 Twitter followers — more than four times as many as Kietzman — and was recently forced to create a second Facebook profile because his first had reached the 5,000 friend limit)?

And who else, perhaps most notably, is willing to look upon the longstanding mores that govern traditional sports-talk radio — keep a distance from the players you cover … don’t mention the competition … don’t stray too far from sports — not so much as set-in-stone rules as open-to-interpretation guidelines?

He is friends with a handful of Kansas City’s professional athletes and friendly with a couple dozen more — in some cases, he has been to their homes, ridden in their cars — because when you get to know the men you spend four hours a day discussing in a way that no one else in the city does, you can speak with a level of authority that no one else in the city can. “Clancy Pendergast held back — held back — this team’s defense in 2009,” Wright says of the former Chiefs defensive coordinator. “You know how I know it? Because a half-dozen guys on the defense told me he did.”

It took him less than two weeks on-air at 610 to offer his opinion of the city’s other sports-talk hosts, and because it is his belief that you can’t win — at least the way Wright defines winning — by talking only sports, he doesn’t shy away from using his personal life as fodder for his show. He’ll talk about his high school job selling steaks door-to-door and his failures as a gambler because these are the things that will make him relatable. To younger listeners, sure, but also to the middle-aged guys grinding through blue-collar jobs who know exactly what it’s like to go bust on a four-team parlay.

“You gotta do things a little bit different,” says Lazlo of 96.5 the Buzz, one of Kansas City’s most outspoken — and successful — radio talents. “And to me, where Nick is trying to get listeners, nobody’s fishing right now. There’s a big empty pond of … people who watch sports and are into sports and see things differently than the old guard does.”

In the pursuit of listeners, Wright will shirk conventional wisdom, and he’ll rock the boat a bit — he recently challenged one local rival, on-air, to a boxing match — and in doing so, he’ll take the risks the city’s more established personalities won’t. Even Kietzman admits that, when you’re standing atop the sports-radio mountain, you approach things more conservatively than you would as an up-and-comer who’s trying to make a name.

“You don’t go for two-point conversions as often,” he says, “when you’re the Patriots.”

Wright will draw listeners because he has no problem going for two. Because the traditional sports-talk formula might be growing a bit stagnant. Because Kansas City, having spent much of the past 12 years listening to Kietzman and his 810 brethren, might be itching for something new — a fresh voice among the familiar drone of the town’s current on-air personalities.

Different might be exactly what it takes to make people notice.

But how do you reach talk-radio glory when you’re burning bridges faster than you can cross them?

There are times, Wright admits, when his unfiltered ruminations have created problems both socially and professionally, when pulling a punch or two would have made his life infinitely easier. He has made office meetings sticky by mocking co-workers on-air, and not long ago he strained — at least temporarily — his relationship with Byrd after describing her affinity for shopping, to thousands of listeners, as an “addiction.” On multiple occasions, he has been told by 610 program director Ryan Maguire to avoid certain topics on-air and gone ahead and discussed them anyway. Sometimes he gets spoken to afterward, sometimes he doesn’t. Doesn’t much matter; he’s not changing.

As Wright puts it, “I don’t think anybody else knows how to do ‘What’s Wright With Nick Wright’ better than I do.”

For that matter, he’s not sure that, when it comes to radio, anybody else knows how to do much of anything better than he does, an idea he is happy to expound upon during regular rants about how much more talented he is than the competition, how much better trained he is than the competition and how overwhelmingly, in the end, he will outshine the competition. His is a cocksuredness so profound that he has taken to qualifying it with a disclaimer of sorts. Before delving into one particularly self-aggrandizing thought last month, he warned, “Dude, put your arrogance helmet on …”

Of course, even with your arrogance helmet strapped firmly in place, there are times when it’s difficult not to be taken aback by his personal brand of bravado.

On the unique sound of his show: “I say this, and I mean it: You could not speak English, and be scanning the radio dial in Kansas City, and you would stop on my show.”

On the inevitability of his ascension to most listened-to radio personality in Kansas City: “If I do ‘What’s Wright With Nick Wright’ on 610 Sports Radio for 50 percent of the time — ****, 30 percent of the time — that Kevin Kietzman’s done ‘Between the Lines’ on 810, I’ll be blowing him out the water. And let me rephrase: I’ll be beating everyone.”

On the anticlimactic nature of his eventual disposal of Kietzman: “I feel like when I win, partly it’s going to be by default. I’m going to win because Kietzman has made (a lot of money) and become complacent, and people are going to be tired of him. … I wish that I could start over because it would have been, I think, a better challenge.”

Not surprisingly, there are those in the industry who have been put off by his incessant ramblings. Since starting at 610 almost four years ago, he has taken shots at, among a slew of others, Kietzman (lazy), former Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock (poor dresser) and fellow 610 host Bob Fescoe (homer). So critical was he of rival Soren Petro that the 810 midday host confronted him following a Chiefs news conference in October 2009, unleashing a profanity-laced tirade during which Wright says Petro stuck his finger in his chest and threatened his career in front of fellow media members.

Petro, who once worked alongside Wright when the latter interned at 810 in 2004, refuses to discuss the incident. “Never heard of the guy,” he says, asked about Wright following a recent show in Leawood.

Wright? He dedicated a show to the dust-up shortly after it happened and has continued to paint Petro as a talentless clown, describing his show, during one expletive-filled rant last month, as “an abortion.”

For the most part, Wright does not seem to be in any hurry to rectify his reputation as the market’s resident villain, and the possibility that, in his march toward radio greatness he might be leaving a trail of burnt bridges in his wake has either not occurred to him or is of little concern.

“Adam Carolla says before you do anything, you gotta ask yourself, ‘Is this going to make me money? Is this going to make me happy?’ And if you can’t say yes to either one of them, why are you doing it?

“The thing is,” he says, “sometimes telling someone to go **** themselves makes you happy.”