WCMT AM (Martin, TN)

[Kent]

Sports fans can be hard to handle. When I was in Houston, we carried some college football games. One week the Houston Chronicle listed the start time at 11am instead of noon. Being the manager of the station at the time, after the jock got cussed up one side and down the other, they put them on to me. For a good 80%, they believed we had the game start time wrong, not the newspaper. I recall we all laughed about that a few times but while the calls were fast and furious, it wasn't much fun.

It's not just the sports fans who can be hard to handle. The people who listen to the programs that get preempted for sports can be fun sometimes, too. I once worked at a station that carried Cardinals baseball, and the newspaper had the start time listed later than it actually was. We put the network in cue when we exited the local programming to run Paul Harvey. We heard the countdown to the start of the pregame show, and it was at the five minute mark. At the time, if you aired Cardinals baseball, you had to air EVERY spot in the program. If you missed even one network spot, you weren’t allowed to carry any of that game. So, we dumped out of Paul Harvey as soon as it was time to run Buck at Bat, and the Telix strip lit up like a Christmas tree. The newsroom phones went berzerk, too! I even had a few old ladies call me names I couldn’t repeat!