OK, so maybe it wasn’t always for the best reasons, but Mike Francesa and Chris Russo still had a good run – a great run, even – and for nearly 20 years.
Hell, for better and worse, they made radio history. Like Burns and Allen, Klavin and Finch and Bob and Ray, Francesa and Russo – no longer together after WFAN let Russo go Thursday – together changed the course of radio. They were the first nationally known team in the history of sports talk radio. It’s a forever fact.
MORE: ‘Mad Dog’ Runs Away From Mike
So what if they got along like Martin and Lewis? And so what if they benefited from a media market – the world’s largest – that could never provide genuine competition?
Though WFAN in large part was saved by “Imus in the Morning,” it relied upon Mike and the Mad Dog for everything else. And now both shows, 16 months apart, are gone.
Twenty years ago, Russo was buying weekend air-time on WMCA, sending tapes to sports media critics, eager for ink, hungry to make something happen. And for all his knee-jerking and brainless defamations and butchered pronunciations and ability to get lost in an elevator, he made it happen.
And we’re told Sirius, bless its brainless bankroll, will pay Russo $3 million to rant about things he has, in almost 20 years, proven he knows little about. Good work, if you can get it.
If Howard Stern hasn’t yet crushed AM or FM radio, neither will Russo.
That Russo long felt that he was treated with less intellectual and financial regard by WFAN than Francesa became a self-fulfilling reality. His deferments to Francesa’s most specious opinions and flip-flops, his steady indulgence of Francesa’s delusions of grandeur, became standardized.
Russo became Ed Norton to Francesa’s Ralph Kramden. And now Norton’s on his own.
A new gig for a half of a history-making team may guarantee a lucrative future but not a successful one. As a Sirius host or working from a telephone booth, Russo lacks the capacity to be much more than another forced sports radio act, another holler guy.
Warts and all, Francesa, still aided and comforted by a paucity of legitimate competition, will remain a habit-formed listen here for however long he remains.
But together, and for nearly 20 years, Francesa and Russo made history. They made a whole lot something out of what previously existed as nothing.