Sports Radio Star Returns, But Some Colleagues Chafe

When Mike Francesa, the renowned sports talk radio host, wrapped up his 30-year radio career late last year, he left with the parting words, “Time to try something new.”

Next week he will begin his second career, in something rather familiar — talking about sports, once again for WFAN, the same station he left to much fanfare four months ago, after he had taken a 19-month retirement tour.

But unlike other big-name sports comebacks — like Michael Jordan’s 1995 return to the court after a brief hiatus to play baseball, Brett Favre’s return to the gridiron after a fleeting summer “retirement” in 2008, or the reinstatement of Mr. Met, the baseball-headed mascot of the New York Mets, in 1994 — news of Francesa’s return has been met with more jeers than cheers.

“It just looks pathetic,” Boomer Esiason, WFAN’s morning sports host, said Wednesday on the show he shares with Gregg Giannotti. Although news reports have said Francesa is poised to return as soon as next week, WFAN would not comment on when he might make his debut, again.

Esiason and others said they feared his return would substantially diminish the roles of the trio hired to replace him: Maggie Gray, Bart Scott and Chris Carlin, co-hosts of the show “The Afternoon Drive.”

“Radio can be a real sewer pit, and there’s a lot of back-stabbing and knife-throwing and all that other stuff that goes on,” Esiason added. “We try to stay above all that stuff, but unfortunately you can’t, and three people basically have gotten screwed.”

The decision to bring back Francesa, known for his ability to fill five hours of airtime with endless sports rants, about everything from horse racing to free throws, and his sometimes caustic exchanges with scores of daily callers, comes after slumping listener numbers from his replacements.

The station had high hopes for the Afternoon Drive crew, a younger trio with racial and gender diversity, which executives had hoped would attract younger fans, and more of them. But the group has received mixed reviews as listener numbers have plummeted — to the point that the closest competitor, ESPN radio’s “Michael Kay Show,” which had routinely finished behind Francesa’s show in the Nielsen rankings, had in recent months routinely eclipsed the show that replaced it.

News of Francesa’s return induced a schism at the station, with those in the new hosts’ corner, like Esiason and Giannotti, complaining that the new hires would be marginalized, and their show given short shrift and a smaller time slot, with Francesa back in the lineup. In a statement, WFAN said that no decisions had been made regarding time slots or programming, and that negotiations with Francesa were still in process.

“Every day they walk in here they’re going to feel like, ‘Wow, everybody looks at us like a failure,’ and that’s just the perception of what it’s going to be, and that’s not fair,” Giannotti said during Wednesday’s broadcast. And at one point in the show, he fretted for his own future. “Next thing you know I’ll be doing 4 a.m. to 6 a.m.,” he said.

In its statement, the station acknowledged it was in discussions with Francesa about his return, adding, “We also confirm that we are very proud of our current lineup at WFAN and that any potential future engagement with Mike will not result in any talent departures.”

Drama and vituperation seem as much a part of sports radio as peanuts and crackerjacks are to baseball. In 2008, Francesa split from his longtime co-host Chris Russo, known as Mad Dog, breaking up a 19-year partnership over contract issues and interpersonal strife that played out over the airwaves. A representative for Russo, who now hosts Mad Dog Sports Radio on Sirius XM, said he was unavailable to respond because he was on the air.

Francesa did not respond to messages left at his home phone requesting comment. Mike Levine, an agent with Creative Artists Agency, which is representing Francesa, declined to comment.

In an interview with the New York Post on April 24, Francesa seemed to suggest that the resistance to his return to the air is what spurred him to come back. “This is for those who started this campaign in recent days,” Francesa told the Post. “I didn’t decide to go back to WFAN until I was told I better not go back.”