San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
SPORTS SHOW
son.”
“We talked about sports on the phone so much that Calvin would call and my mom would say, ‘It’s your girlfriend,’ ” said Johnson, who holds his own on air but allows Casey to take the lead during an interview in the iHeart radio studio, interjecting here and there to elaborate on a point.
(A third member of the crew, who goes by the nickname Salami, is white and has been absent from the show since the beginning of the pandemic. According to Johnson, it’s unclear when or if he’ll return. Salami declined to be interviewed for this article.)
The lack of minorities in sports talk radio has been an issue the industry has wrestled with for years.
“There’s no other explanation for the lack of Black voices on sports talk other than racism and lack of opportunity,” said Rob Parker, who co-hosts “The Odd Couple” on Fox Sports Radio with Chris Broussard and has written extensively on the topic.
Parker said “The Odd Couple” is the only national sports talk radio show with two Black hosts.
“I think it’s getting better,” he said. “It’s got to because it makes no sense to hear only the opinions of 50-year-old white guys, especially when so many athletes are either Black or another minority.”
Casey and Johnson said they faced racism from their first day on air.
“Right away the phones started ringing, ‘Get those monkeys off the air,’ ” Johnson recalled. “That eventually stopped as people became used to hearing us, but it can be a gift and a curse to be Black on the radio.”
When something like the killing of George Floyd happens, he added, half their audience will tune in to hear the two Black guys’ take while the other half just wants a respite from it all.
“The reason I think people are OK with us is we don’t abuse the race card,” Johnson said. “If we don’t agree with what the majority of Black America is saying, we’re gonna tell you. And so if we do go to the race card, you’ll know it’s something we feel strongly about it.”
Early on, for example, Casey said he thought that Colin Kaepernick’s protest of police brutality and racial inequality was mere grandstanding. He eventually came around to understanding why Kaepernick chose to kneel during the national anthem, but he took grief for his stance in the beginning.
The show also focuses its attention
beyond the parochial view that the only teams that matter to San Antonio are the Spurs and the Cowboys.
“San Antonio has always been a big military base town, so you’ve got people coming in who are not Spurs or Cowboy fans,” Casey said. “So that gave us the motivation to talk all different kinds of sports.”
Neither took the usual path into sports radio. They’re not former pro athletes, nor do they have degrees in broadcasting. In fact, they didn’t even start listening to sports talk until the turn of the century, when Casey discovered national host Jim Rome and, later, local voices Don Harris and Walter Pasacrita.
“Rudy and I talked about sports all the time, so one day in late 2002 or early ’03 when I was between sales jobs and I didn’t know any better, I started thinking, what if we got into the sports talk radio business?” Casey said. “But I had no idea how to do that. I was coming in completely green.”
Undeterred, he pitched the idea to Johnson.
“I thought he was crazy,” said Johnson, who at the time had a young child and a job in data entry and claims for an insurance company.
A salesman at heart, Casey did what came naturally: He started cold-calling local radio stations asking for an on-air job. The response was underwhelming: “I didn’t even get a call back.”
Eventually a friend let them make a demo tape of their proposed show in the backyard shed he’d converted into a recording studio (“He used a mattress for
soundproofing,” Johnson said.) By luck or chutzpah, they wrangled interviews with then-TNT analyst David Aldridge and local sports host Andy Everett.
“It was super cool of them to do that because they didn’t know Calvin from a can of paint,” Johnson said.
Demo in hand, the pair began shopping their idea for a sports show with a Black sensibility to stations local and national, even those that were not sports-talk format.
After dozens of rejections, they finally got a call from San Antonio’s KLUP 930. The station played oldies, although they also carried Astros baseball, so sports wasn’t totally foreign.
When the general manager offered them a slot from 6 to 8:30 p.m. Mondays, it was as if their prayers had been answered. Dollar signs floated before their eyes. Then the general manager told him it would cost them only $12,000 for six months of airtime.
“I was like, ‘How does that work?’ ” Casey said.
The GM was offering what’s known in the industry as paid programming or pay-to-play: The station sells a slot of time to the show host, who makes money by selling advertising time. It wasn’t what they’d had in mind, but it was an offer Casey said he couldn’t refuse.
“I knew if we could get the show on air, then I could sell it to advertisers,” he said.
It was a leap of faith, but “The Sports Grind” — the names derives from how difficult the pair knew it would be to get the show on air — was a success, running on KLUP for 2½ years, even after
the station switched to a conservative talk radio format.
It also served as a real-life broadcasting education.
“There were shows when we wouldn’t get a single phone call,” Casey said. “So we had to learn how to carry on a conversation without phone calls. I always told Rudy that was a blessing in disguise.”
With only one show a week and little opportunity to expand, they realized that to grow, they’d need to move to one of the allsports talk radio stations in town.
Eventually, in 2007, the Ticket gave them a Saturday slot, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. That expanded several times until by early 2020 they were on the air 6 to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday, the last hour of drive time.
The pair credit their success to the many long-term relationships they have with their sponsors. Jason Thompson, owner of the Thompson Law Firm, has been an advertiser almost from the beginning.
“Rudy and Calvin are authentic and interesting, which is rare,” Thompson said. “Over the years I’ve realized that if you’re someone who likes the show, then I’m going to like you if you become my client. So advertising on ‘The Sports Grind’ has been a good business decision for me.”
Over time, the business arrangement with the station has changed. While they still make money by selling advertising, they no longer pay for air time. Now, the station makes money by selling advertising around their show.
While they’ve had opportunities to become employees of the company, they’ve turned them down.
“At times we make more this way than we would if we worked for the company,” Johnson said. “There’s no ceiling, but when it’s cold out there, when the economy is struggling, it’s difficult. The first thing business owners do is cut the advertising.”
In other words, the grind to keep “The Sports Grind” a success continues.