Three-Dot Friday 11.15
Conicidences are where you find them, which means they're everywhere
Klay Thompson’s return to the Bay was as emotional and intense as anybody could have figured it to be, but the Golden State Warriors won the game thanks to Stephen Curry (of course) scoring 12 straight points in the final minutes of the 4th quarter…
The entire arena wore their captains’ hats and saluted Klay, who will remain a legend for- among other things- boating across the Bay to practice during his days with the Warriors. I don’t know where the boat is now, but it was a custom build for Klay, and he specifically requested that it be 37 feet long for the number of points he scored in a quarter in 2015, still an all-time NBA record…
Do you know how many total points Stephen Curry had in Klay’s return on Tuesday, a number that somehow no one has really realized how significant it is?
You guessed it… 37…
The San Francisco Giants hired former player Randy Winn to be the Vice President of Player Development, a title that could both mean something and nothing at the same time. It’s great that new President of Baseball Operations Buster Posey has finally selected someone for a position who didn’t work directly with Farhan Zaidi, but he still hasn’t hired anybody for any key position from outside the organization! As I will keep saying, if the goal is for the team and front office to be different from what it has been the past six years, can they please at some point hire somebody who isn’t currently associated with the team?
Bay Area radio legend Tom Tolbert had his last show on KNBR, “The Sports Leader,” on Thursday. The parent company of the station, Cumulus Broadcasting, is like all traditional media and just hemorrhaging money so the high salaries have to go, and Tolbert was the last of the old guard, having been on the air nearly 30 years. Tolbert was fun to listen to even though quite often it was obvious he had done no research on any sport other than basketball, which is how he got to the Bay in the first place. He was drafted by the Warriors and just stayed. It did really help him out about ten years ago when one of his old teammates and closest friends at the University of Arizona became the Warriors head coach, a fellow by the name of Steve Kerr…
People bemoan the fading away of radio like they do of being able to find certain things in stores, and my answer to them is the same: it’s all online…
Just a heads up though, people have been saying “radio is dead” for about 75 years now, and it keeps finding a way to reinvent itself. Nearly everything you see on teevee or Netflix or whatever streaming service you use to see shows and events was developed by early radio broadcasters…
For instance, radio put on audio versions of serialized dramas, which were already a common form of entertainment in magazines. When they discovered that people at home listened to the radios in the daytime, mostly women as they were doing something like washing, they developed daytime dramas that aired every weekday at the same time specifically for these audiences at home. When the soap companies discovered the audience was primarily people washing things, they at once became the primary sponsors of these shows…
And that’s why, even today, those shows are called “soap operas…”
Before teevee, people listened to the radio the way people watch shows at night. To encourage listeners, the shows had giveaways. Before ratings systems were developed, giveaways were an easy way to figure out how big of an audience a particular show had. The more people that wrote in for the giveaway, the bigger the audience…
Since it’s that time of year and the movie “A Christmas Story” is going to be around a lot, you ‘ll see an example of this in action. Ralphie’s whole saga about the “Little Orphan Annie” decoder ring is something that happened to every kid in every house that had a radio…
And when teevee took over broadcasting shows in the 50’s, radio re-invented as the music and talk and breaking news format that dominated for decades until the internet. Though really, Sirius XM is just that on a national basis, which is proof that “traditional” radio can thrive as long as there’s money attached to it…
And radio airing “the game” (whatever sport that is) will always be a thing. The question is what will get people to listen to terrestrial, e.g. “regular” radio more than tuning in (another radio word that’s been adapted by the internet) to something else. Regular Radio has re-invented itself before and will again…
Bill Self became the all-time winningest men’s basketball coach in University of Kansas history this week when he won his 591st game, passing the great Phog Allen, who they named a certain arena after. I immediately became suspicious when Allen’s record was broken, and those suspicions were both confirmed and disproven at the same time…
First of all, the actual numbers. Self has 591 wins in his 23 years on the bench in Lawrence, while Allen had 590 in 39 years. Yep, nearly twice the number of seasons. Even a casual glance at Phog’s record shows that for most of his career, the Jayhawks rarely played more than 20 games a season, whereas Self has averaged right around 28 wins a year…
So, at first glance it looks like Self’s record was a bit goosed by playing more games a year. But the other side to that coin is that Self broke the mark in fewer games. Phog went 590-219 at Kansas, while Self is now 591-143…
Self’s also ahead of Allen in total basketball wins (because they both also coached elsewhere), but Allen has more wins than Self as football coach and baseball coach. Yes, the great basketball mind Phog Allen was simultaneously the football and basketball coach at what was then Warrensburg Teachers College- now Central Missouri State- for six seasons, and when Allen came back to Kansas he spent one year as KU’s football coach in 1920 and started 5-0 before resigning to focus on basketball full time. But the former varsity baseball player spent two more multi-coaching years in 1941 and ‘42 during World War Two when coaches and players were both in short supply…
The simplest way to sum up Phog’s baseball coaching career is that he was a great basketball coach…
And 1920 just happened to be the season before Memorial Stadium was built, so Phog Allen coached the last KU football team to not play any home games at Memorial Stadium until this year, because the place is being completely rebuilt…
Speaking of rebuilding, the current official Tampa Bay Rays stadium, Tropicana Field aka the world’s largest bingo parlor, won’t be ready for play again until 2026 because the roof got torn off in Hurricane Milton this fall. Of course, people started thinking “They could play in Oakland” as if MLB would even allow such a thing to happen. As it turned out, they will stay in Tampa but play at the Yankees spring training facility…
So that means two teams in 2025 will officially play in stadiums that have a capacity of fewer than 18,000 fans per game… this says something about the state of MLB that they are not even bothering with in-person attendance any more, and that’s not a good outlook to have…
The Cal Bears host the Syracuse Orange this weekend in an ACC Conference game, which seems like a very weird thing to happen but was nearly a thing in 1960. When the original Pacific Coast Conference dissolved in the late 50’s because of pay-for-play scandals, the University of Pittsburgh’s Athletic Director floated the idea of five major PCC schools (Cal, Stanford, UCLA, USC and Washington) joining together with seven or more prominent eastern independents, including all three service academies, for a conference that would span the country from east to west…
As opposed to what people are thinking now, this was considered a good idea! It never came to fruition because the PCC schools got back together, and the Pentagon didn’t like the idea of Air Force, Army, and Navy joining a conference…
Those four other major eastern independents that were going to join? Well, Pitt, obviously. The other three were Penn State, Notre Dame, and Syracuse. It would have changed the balance of power and made the “Airplane Conference” the dominant conference in the land…
And with the collapse of the Pac-12, who are Cal and Stanford playing on a regular basis nowadays? Why, Notre Dame, Pitt, and Syracuse- two of the three were on this year’s schedule for each school. It might be a new conference game to us, but it really almost was a thing in 1960…
It’s weird, it’s coincidence, but it is a fact. Just like Steph scoring 37 in Klay’s return…
Brilliant tie the knot article!
The proposed merger of the Pacific Coast Conference and the Atlantic Coat Conference is a fascinating bit of history. We think we are inventing the wheel...
Radio will adapt, always has, always will...that will change, though, if new cars no longer include AM/FM radio as standard equipment. Then, the wheel will slowly turn as cars age out of the vehicle inventory in the next couple of decades. Radio's infrastructure is still present to offer an opportunity for the next generation of content to develop.
Internet is the future of radio. Here in Bend, Oregon, we have Pirate Butte Radio (piratebutteradio.com), with deejays broadcasting live from their homes (with studio names like "The Bunker" and "The Old Union Hall" and an unnamed home studio deep in Idaho) and listeners around the world. We have no staff, no office, no BOD, no pledge drives, no FCC censorship, and welcome more deejays to join in the fun. Wanna do a show on the Beatles? Sports? Oldies? Newies? We're here for ya.