November 25-December 1, 2004

cover story

Wireless Mike

Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Mike Missanelli says he doesn't care if you hate him. (Or if he gets back on the air.)

by Doron Taussig

Anthony "the Cuz" Gargano points a dripping cheese fry at Mike Missanelli. "This guy," he tells the patrons of the Philadium, a South Philadelphia bar, "should be on the air."

The two men, who once hosted a sports-talk radio show together on Philly's famed 610-WIP, are sharing pitchers of beer and watching the Eagles get trounced by the Steelers. Missanelli, 49, is dressed tidily in a turtleneck and slacks. He might have come from a country club. Gargano has a thick earring in each ear, and he wears a tight T-shirt that reveals both muscular, tattooed arms and a gut like a Hefty bag half-full of leaves. He might have come from the gym. Or from Geno's.

Missanelli does not respond directly to Gargano's declaration. But when Eagles wide receiver Terrell Owens appears to be shouting at Donovan McNabb, his eyes light up.

Photo By: Michael T. Regan

"He throws one wormball! That's all it took!" The bar laughs. Missanelli turns to a man he doesn't know.

"What did you think of that?" he asks.

The man, momentarily speechless, responds with a shrug. "That's T.O., Mike."

Throughout the game, Missanelli and Gargano do what they do best: be fun guys. Conversations in the bar begin to run through them the way the Sixers offense runs through Allen Iverson. When one of the other patrons makes an observation about the game, he will often turn and glance at the sports talkers' table, like a rookie in a clubhouse checking to see if the veterans are laughing at his jokes. Missanelli and Gargano are laughing—at those jokes, at their own jokes, and at old stories.

Toward the end of the game, a large man in an Eagles' cap and sweatshirt turns toward their table.

"Don't bury the Birds on Monday morning, OK guys?" he says.

"Don't look at me," Missanelli replies loudly. "I don't have a job!"

There is a quiet moment. The big man nods a little, laughs unsurely, and then turns his attention back to the television.

WIP is a radio dynasty in its prime. By providing chummy sports talk featuring local personalities, the station made itself a dominant force in the Philadelphia sports world. It is the catalyst and the conductor of all the sports debates carried on in bars and dens throughout the region. And the personalities—dubbed "the starting lineup" by the station's Web site—have become stars on par with the athletes they shout about: Howard Eskin, the afternoon-drive host, endorses Zinman furs; Angelo Cataldi, the morning show host, has his own television show; and Gargano, who works the midday, has branched out with T-shirts bearing his nickname and writing for Philadelphia magazine.

Missanelli was once a part of this list.

He was one of the original WIP personalities and worked as a host there for 11 years. He even branched off successfully, working as a sports anchor at WB17 on the side for three years. But last year, he voluntarily left WIP to host the morning show at WMMR, a rock station, to lead a three-man team called "The Philly Guys." After just 13 months there, he was dismissed.

Now Missanelli, who is divorced, spends his days driving his 13-year-old daughter to and from school, running errands and playing golf.

"It's tough to fill all that time," he admits, adding quickly, "it's good for your head, though " to observe life."

He does not listen to WIP very often.

He does, however, make occasional appearances on pre-game shows and spot substitutions for the regular hosts. Last month, he worked a two-week stint as one of several substitutes for Eskin—a diminished role Missanelli accepted despite he and Eskin, a former partner, sharing a mutual antipathy that is a matter of public record.

The WIP studios have relocated since Missanelli left, from Center City to Bala Cynwyd. Mixed in with the memorabilia now are seats from the Vet, and an intern wears a Duce Staley jersey in Steelers' yellow. But once Missanelli sits down and pulls his headphones on, he is transported back to his days on the first string.

When Missanelli hosted with Gargano, who exudes Philly pride and bleeds Eagle green—"he's the People's Champ," as Missanelli says—Gargano praised Philadelphia heroes and yakked it up with the callers. Missanelli, on the other hand, seemed always in pursuit of a fight. Together they recall one Monday morning after Missanelli had picked the Eagles to lose to the 49ers in a game the Eagles won.

As Gargano remembers it, "People kept calling in to say, "Anthony you're the greatest, and Mike, you're a piece of shit.'"

"I wasn't afraid to be the bad guy. That's what made us so good together," Missanelli explains.

"He hates everybody," Gargano says.

Some people returned the favor.

Missanelli's voice is not an obvious choice for the radio. It is tonally flat, almost deep and otherwise unremarkable. His speech pattern is a steady diet of blunt statements—most of the things he says, he states as though they are obvious, spiced with a hint of mischief. To be a Philadelphia sports fan and listen to him was at times a masochistic behavior.

Different hosts have adopted different tactics for hooking listeners. Some, like Eskin, thrive on spectacle and controversy; Gargano is a caricature of a South Philly everyman. Missanelli believes that his signature move as a sports talk host was to "make people think." A less charitable way of putting this would be to say that Missanelli was obstinate.

"The worst thing you could be is a flat line," he recalls. With his classic male face encircled by a thin layer of pudge, and his shape only now beginning to slip into a middle-aged man's mold, Missanelli does not look like a man who should be "recalling" anything about his career. Unless he had been an athlete or a rock star, he should be entering his prime. His famed arrogance is suspiciously absent in person, replaced with an unpolished caution. He is polite, even considerate. It is unclear whether this is Missanelli's off-air persona or his unemployed persona.

"Whether it was by antagonizing" or "playing the devil's advocate," he says, "my goal is just to make you think of the other side."

For example, Missanelli appeared on Lou Tilley's Sports Connection the night after the Eagles lost to the Steelers, having their weaknesses exposed for the first time. Tilley asked his panelists whether the loss was cause for concern. Each panelist said it was not, the team just had one bad game--except Missanelli, who chose instead to fan the smoldering fears of Eagles fans by telling them to forget the Super Bowl, because "you don't win an NFC Championship game if you can't stop the run." The Eagles have famously lost the NFC championship game three years in a row, and Missanelli delivered this line as if he were amazed that Philadelphia wasn't shitting its pants. Then, he smiled.

"If you want to define this guy in one word," Gargano says, "it's ball-hyphen-breaker."

Combative radio hosts are often accused of having the argumentative equivalent of whiskey muscles, drunk on the power to shout down or hang up on anyone. With Missanelli, it was not so much the intoxication of power as the Machiavellian manufacture of contradiction. He cops to taking positions he did not believe about 5 percent of the time (he would not speculate on the practices of other hosts, with the exception of Eskin, who he says is always giving his honest opinion). The rest of the time, he says, he was just "tweaking the other side"—suggesting a position without necessarily expressing an opinion.

When four current and former WIP employees were asked to describe Missanelli's style, the first word out of each of their mouths was either "bright" or "clever" (shortly thereafter, they all also mentioned "controversial"). They think he is good at sports radio. Missanelli grins as he discusses his career—he clearly agrees. The one thing he'll say he misses about the profession is working with Gargano.

"We had a good show together," he says.

Sports talk does not require much preparation for Missanelli. He says he used to come in with one theme for the day. On a Friday afternoon during his substitution for Eskin, Missanelli arrives two minutes prior to airtime, with a golf club slung over his shoulder. He and his partner, Glenn Macnow, have one question ready—would you rather see: a) the Eagles win the Super Bowl, or b) your preferred presidential candidate win election. Macnow floats the question, and men from all over the Philadelphia region begin calling in to share their answers. Most are conflicted, and try to construct compromises:

"I'll take the presidency this year and the Eagles next year."

"No, gotta take one."

"Well … ."

Intermingled with these intellectual writhings are general calls about the Eagles, Sixers and sports movies.

During commercial breaks, Missanelli gets up to swing a golf club along the carpet. While broadcasting, he reads the papers and glances at a television showing an old Penn State game on ESPN Classic. Dressed in khaki shorts, sneakers and a golf shirt, he could easily be mistaken for a man in the Bahamas on his boss's expense account. He smiles constantly. He is on vacation.

Like a starting point guard being made a backup for the guy he plays against in practice every day, Misannelli expertly navigates the show. With the exception of one caller asking when Eskin is due to return, the show flows easy.

Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Eskin sneered at his substitute hosts upon his return. "They needed an army to replace me."

Despite the jibing, when WIP calls his name, Missanelli jumps up off the bench. He says he does because "there's no reason not to." It's hard to fight the impression that he does so to publicly put on a brave face.

It is very possible that Missanelli, a confident and optimistic man by nature, remains confident and optimistic in the face of his predicament. But it could also be that he is determined not to appear hurt—he is, after all, a man with enemies.

As Missanelli fills in for Eskin, a few people call in to say, "It's good to hear you on the air again, Mike." Others call in to fight. These callers seem conflicted: are they happy about Missanelli's misfortune? Or are they happy for the opportunity to go another round with a man who crawled under their skin two years ago? This was the same fundamental dilemma Missanelli presented listeners when he was on the air. They couldn't stand him. But could they turn him off?

Some couldn't, but some couldn't control themselves, either: "I've been in several confrontations," Missanelli says. "You never think that a sports conversation will lead to a physical confrontation. Sometimes people take it too seriously."

"I got into a scrap in the tailgate area with one drunken kid who wouldn't shut up," he remembers, and "another time I hit a guy with an oyster cracker."

People who know Missanelli off the air seem to like him. One former WIP employee, who wished to remain anonymous, says that Missanelli does not share the ego of the other WIP hosts: "Mike's cool. If there were two guys who were jackasses, it was Angelo and Howard."

This may have actually compounded the frustration with Missanelli. Although Eskin was always the most outrageous voice on WIP, Missanelli sparked a unique brand of resentment—a fury over a sense of manipulation. Eskin is genuinely outrageous; the fact that Missanelli toyed with people created genuine outrage.

Missanelli claims not to mind his detractors.

"I don't care about that," he says with a quick wave of the hand. "If they like you, that's good, and if they dislike you, that's good, too." He says that this hasn't changed now that those who dislike him might see his current situation as poetic justice for, say, a 1999 bit where he made fun of callers who made less money than he did.

One of the reasons Missanelli thought his talents would translate to FM radio was that he didn't do "sports talk," he says. He did "guy talk."

Missanelli offers a rather innocent example: there was a shed in his yard that he needed to move, but didn't know how. He mentioned this on the air. For the rest of the afternoon, listeners called in with suggestions, and for the next week, people approached Missanelli on the street to ask if he got his shed moved. "That kind of stuff sticks more in their head than any sports topic, because they're living the same thing," Missanelli explains.

There's more to guy talk than yard work, however. Two days prior to the shed incident, the talk of the sports world was Tiger Woods' marriage to a gorgeous Swedish nanny. Missanelli predicted that Woods's marriage would prevent him from winning any more majors, due to the fact that he was obviously whipped. A few minutes later, a man called in to disagree: "What do you mean? Mike, if I were married to that nanny, I'd be working on my stroke all day," the caller said. "The real question now is whether he's playing with a driver or a putter."

In just a few days of substitution this fall, Missanelli discussed testicles as they related to topics ranging from pet Mastiffs to Joe Paterno. Scatological humor is used frequently. All this guy talk enabled Missanelli to incorporate what might be called the "bar factor" into his broadcasts: listeners and callers felt like they were doing what they would probably rather have been doing: sitting in a bar with friends, talking about sports, women and movies, and making jokes to pass the time.

But guy talk is not a Missanelli specialty—it's a WIP formula. In Philadelphia, guy talk is a necessary approach. New York's sports-talk station, WFAN, can get away with nuts-and-bolts sports analysis. But "this is a very provincial town," Missanelli says. "We care about the Eagles, and—the Eagles." And there's only so much Eagles material to cover. You need to give listeners another reason to stay tuned.

So WIP hosts stay on the air past their time slot, chatting with the hosts of the next show, just hanging out. The result is a listener base that feels like a community. "Look at the Wing Bowl," Missanelli says of WIP's annual gorging contest. "They feel like they're a part of the station. You've got 20,000 people showing up at 6 in the morning to see fat guys eat wings." It is a very fraternal community, with the hosts serving as the alpha males, the extroverts, and in Missanelli's case, the hazer (think: Vince Vaughn in Old School).

When Missanelli left for WMMR, he may have expected more of the members of this community to go with him. If he did, his mistake may have been thinking that his radio personality was the key to his success, when in actuality WIP's formula was the key to his radio personality.

There is a prototypical biography for the American sports nut: inherited allegiances, memorized statistics, autographed baseballs and catcher's mitts under the pillow. Not Missanelli. He grew up in Bristol, the son of an RCA employee and a sometimes-secretary/sometimes-homemaker. The older Missanelli was a sports fan, but "not rabid." His son was not, either. Missanelli didn't even have professional sports heroes. He mostly just played sports—three sports in high school and baseball at Penn State (he was a letter-winner in the 1976 school year, a fact reflected to this day on his resume), whose sports programs he often discussed on the air. Though he did briefly expect to be a professional baseball player, he did not otherwise plan to make a career of sports. He wanted to be a writer. The job he found out of college was as a sportswriter for Montgomery Newspapers in Fort Washington, and he took it.

Even then, Missanelli did not commit to sports—sports persisted after him.

After several years making beans in Montgomery County, Missanelli applied to Widener University School of Law in Delaware, and right after he got accepted, was offered a job at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Not wanting to choose between these two opportunities, he did both ("I didn't have a social life for four years").

When he finished law school, he planned to leave the Inquirer, but was offered the college basketball beat job—with his first assignment covering the Maui Invitational Tournament. Missanelli took the job, at which point, he says, "my fan-dom went out the window." He backtracks, saying he prefers to see Philadelphia teams win (perhaps imagining the angry voices of callers during further substitution gigs), but he hasn't really cared since he started covering sports. Plus, he adds with a smirk, "it's better for sports talk radio when they're losers."

Though he had covered sports occasionally, Missanelli had been solely on the sports desk at the Inquirer for six years when WIP came calling. WIP became the second all-sports radio station in the country in 1987. In its early years, the station often had the Inquirer sports reporters on as guests.

"When they realized we had a little personality," Missanelli says, the station started hiring them as hosts. Cataldi was the first to make the leap, and at the time, Missanelli says, "it was a shock to all of us" that someone would leave a "cherished institution" for a fledgling industry. But Cataldi opened the door. When Tom Bigby, then WIP's general manager, offered Missanelli a gig, he still didn't consider himself a sports guy: "I just wanted to try as many things as I could before I became that serious about my life, became this serious corporate attorney or whatever." (Bigby declined to comment for this story.)

But perhaps the strongest evidence that Missanelli is not a sports guy is that, after a decade at WIP—an experience he describes as "a blast"—he left the station for WMMR, a rock station—an experience he describes as "a lot of fun."

If Missanelli does not go back into sports radio—and he still may—he will not have a terrible time giving up the sports end of it. It may even enable him to regain his fandom. But can he give up the celebrity?

This is another area where Missanelli excecutes careful PR. He says he enjoyed having fans walk up to him and pick up a conversation he left on the radio. "People say what a nuisance [celebrity] is," he says. "Maybe for Michael Jordan it is. It gives me a kick, frankly. If somebody asked for my autograph, I'd feel like I ought to pay them."

Missanelli says that being recognized confirms the value of his work. "You make a difference in people's lives, you bring them a little joy," he explains. "When you do it, you don't really know you're doing it. You don't know who's listening out there. You just feel you're in this little box, and you're just doing a show and having fun. It's amazing. I'm amazed how many women listen. Women come up to me all the time, "Hey, are you upset about this, blah blah blah blah?'"

Photo By: Michael T. Regan

His explanation of why he doesn't accept the argument that college athletes should be paid illustrates how valuable he thinks celebrity is. "You have a chance to be a big man on campus or a non-entity, what would you rather choose?"

But he tries hard to emphasize that he "never got carried away" with being a star. "I was more amazed by it."

Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky has described Missanelli's ego as "a bicycle built for two." "Mike doesn't suffer from low self-esteem. He's kind of full of himself," Bykofsky says, adding sarcastically, "or he used to be when he was a success." This is an image that conjures up a self-absorption in stark contrast with the humble appreciation Missanelli claims. But if you drain each man's comment of its spin, you find that Bykofsky and Missanelli agree on one central point: Missanelli appreciates public appreciation. He looked happy while subbing for Eskin because it was, above all, a vacation from anonymity.

At the Philadium, the carcass of the cheese fry basket has been abandoned, but the pitchers keep coming. Beers and conversations begin to flow in tandem: beer one and the Phillies, beer two and the Sixers (Gargano: former Sixer Theo Ratliff is "a pussy"), beer three and WIP, beer four and WMMR.

Missanelli says he left WIP because the station was taking its time offering him a new contract, while WMMR was wooing him. "I just didn't feel wanted anymore," he explains.

At the time, there was speculation that Missanelli was leaving because he didn't get along well with Bigby ("We all had fights with him," Missanelli says). Bykofsky suggests that Missanelli was rolling the dice on a big break: Missanelli had been moved to midday at WIP six months earlier, and he would have been taking the morning shift at WMMR. Missanelli saw it as "a time slot in which you can really make a big name for yourself and become a superstar," says Bykofsky.

WMMR's vision for "The Philly Guys" was to market Missanelli, fellow WIP alumnus Joe Conklin, and Vinnie "the Crumb," were marketed to the 25- to 54-year-old demographic (WIP's target is only males in that age group) as a comedic, masculine, local bunch. Missanelli believes that the vision was good and the show was "starting to gain momentum." But, he says, the station failed to follow through with its decision to phase music out of the morning program. "They got scared to lose their music," he says. "They wanted to do something different and they got scared to do something different." He claims that the last ratings book "The Philly Guys" got while Missanelli was there—which came in after he was fired—was among the highest WMMR has ever received.

The bad guys in Missanelli's WMMR story are consultants. "The thing I learned about rock radio is that it's mostly run by consultants, rather than the people who actually run the station," he says. First, consultants told WMMR to go in a different direction, Missanelli says, and then they told the station to go back.

"Consultants have to criticize to justify their job," he tells the Philadium crowd.

Conklin, who moved to WMMR with Missanelli (and still works there), says that nobody was ever clear on what "The Philly Guys" show was supposed to be: comedy, rock, or entertainment? As a result, he thinks, it was a mess.

At the bar, Gargano and others assure Missanelli that the WMMR morning program is much worse without him (the station has still not appointed a permanent replacement). Gargano predicts that the consultants will bring in some out-of-towner to replace Missanelli, and "that's not going to get people to listen." Missanelli agrees.

In spite of all this, Missanelli says he does not regret his decision to leave.

"I think when you're given an opportunity, you should take advantage of it," he says of his WMMR experience

His friends do not tack as carefully to his talking points. WIP personalities Rhea Hughes and Big Daddy Graham both speak of Missanelli's absence with melancholy. "I think he belongs back at WIP," says Hughes. "That's the best place for him." Graham recalls a time when he was out of work, and Missanelli, who was editing a magazine called The Fan, printed an article of Graham's and overpaid him for it. He objects to the notion that Missanelli was "fired." "Fired is for people caught stealing or caught with a 15-year-old intern in the closet," Graham says. "It's an industry thing. Mike was ... I don't know. Not fired."

Missanelli still occasionally slips up and refers to WIP in the first-person plural.

"Would I go back there?" he says, seeming slightly tired of the question. "If the right offer came to me, I would." For now, he is slated to teach a class in sports law at Saint Joseph's next semester and is trying to publish a book he co-wrote with Jeff Manto, a baseball journeyman, called A Minor's Tale.

"I could do a hundred things at this point. I haven't really gone after a lot of opportunities," he says. "Every one of my jobs along the way has kind of popped up, so I just kind of trust that part of it."

Maybe it's time to bow out of the spotlight and finally become that corporate attorney?

"Maybe," Missanelli says, but he sounds unconvinced. "Maybe this is the message."

The Eagles, meanwhile, are being demolished. Missanelli leaves the conversation about WMMR behind to tell a story about disguising his voice and calling other WIP hosts as "Lou from Langhorne," to see who could figure him out.

"I'd say, "Pedro Martinez is wily as a wolverine!'" he says in a hyper howl. The table cracks up.

"Wait," asks one surprised patron, "You do this now?"

"No," Missanelli says, back in his regular voice again. "I don't do that anymore. Just when I was working there."