Soapbox: Radio
Station: AM 950 Denver
Title: Sports Hosts
Nickname: Mike & Sandy
Our Nickname: Whiny & Dopey
AM 950's Mike & Sandy Show is your standard local cornball rally -- two or three scripted talking points set afloat in a sea of screened calls, score updates and annoying ear candy that typifies modern sports radio production. The format is your basic Abbott & Costello morning show. Evans plays the bewildered doughboy to Clough's whiny know-it-all.
To their credit, the pair does a mildly entertaining job of fleshing out the Denver sports headlines of the day, just as long as those headlines are limited to Broncos, Nuggets or Rockies. Unfortunately, the minute the subject turns to hockey, the show devolves into a defensive, whiny muck of idiotic homerism and bald faced fact-warping designed to feed the most thoroughly deluded jockies aboard the Divemobile.
One of the pair's favorite parlor tricks is to take the tiniest, unverifiable editorial nugget and spin it into a great, sweeping non sequitor for all of Avsmonkey Nation to clutch like a blanket in times of crisis. Take, for instance, Clough's claim that he attended Wings games at Olympia many years ago in which many of the seats were empty (or something like that). Over and over, season after season, hazy variations of this anecdote are trotted out and spun as absolute proof that hockey fans in Detroit --indeed, throughout the entire state of Michigan-- can lay no claim whatsoever to any tradition in hockey. Never mind the 10 Stanley Cups. Never mind having an Original Six team and its slew of hockey legends. Never mind the number of NHL players the state has produced or the myriad of youth, high school, college and minor league hockey teams that were established and thriving throughout Michigan before anyone in Colorado even knew what color a hockey puck was.
Sandy Clough on
Divealanche.com |
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"I have seen it and the people contributing to the site are fools."
- from an email forwarded to us by one of our readers.
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Nope... none of that is relevant because Sandy Clough went to the old Olympia and there were empty seats. Amazingly, such a hysterical judgment was laid down in spite of the fact that Clough's own "Avalanche" was purchased for Denver like a carton of eggs after the Hockey Rockies failed to produce the requisite Cup Parade for Colorado's front-running sports homers. Had the Divealanche not hastily delivered a Cup to these glory-starved Broncos fans, Pierre's Traveling Circus Show would have been folded up and shuffled off to some other hockey purgatory, just as the Rockies were. But that's another 800-pound gorilla that gets conveniently ignored whenever 950's pundits preach the carefully-edited gospel of St. Pierre.
Like any yarn spinner, Clough knows that such bald-faced fibs need to be sweetened up nicely for public consumption, so he'll frost over any pesky logistical scuffs with phrases such as "any fool knows" or "it is common knowledge around the league" or "it is well-known among sports writers" and other such pap. The resulting myth is so slickly packaged that the Fib becomes Fact for every Avsmonkey on the Divemobile.
As for Mike Evans, there is no point in even bothering with a summary of his NHL insights... the words "clueless" and "homer" already appear on this site roughly 2,793 times. Other AM 950 personalities who don't quite grasp hockey are smart enough to stay close to shore when the water gets over their heads. Not Evans. No doubt inspired by the volcano of verbal diarrhea erupting beside him, Evans can't help but flap his own yawp if only to create a natural resting place for his own clown feet. Who can forget his famous 2001 knee-slapper that the Avs/Wings rivalry was officially over because the Wings were no longer as good as the Dives? One would think that the 7-0 drubbing of Forsberg & Co in the 2002 Western Finals might've warranted a retraction of that howler, or at least some acknowledgment that Evans was wrong. Fat chance. As any listener who ventures to The Fan knows, none of these people ever comes correct, not even after being exposed to the world outside their hermetically-sealed soapbox.
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