If you’re in St. Louis or Boston right now, chances are you are talking a lot about the Stanley Cup Finals. If you are literally anywhere else, your show is probably largely devoted to the NBA Finals, the various NFL preseason storylines, and anything else of local interest.
There’s nothing wrong with that. It is a good programming decision. “Play the hits,” as they say. Sometimes though, it is worth digging a little deeper in the sports world to find those stories that our listeners can connect with or relate to on a very human level.
When you think about what those stories are, it is very natural for your mind to jump straight to what is going on with the home teams. After all, in most cases your listeners have connections they formed with those players, logos, and uniforms long ago. Irrational emotional investments in things and people that are incapable of loving you back is about as human a phenomenon as there is.
You know what else is very human? Being able to see your story or the story of someone you love in something on television. Dig a little deeper into the sports world than just the headlines on ESPN.com and you’ll see that we’ve had two of those moments in the past five days.
Most of us were watching Pascal Siakim welcome the Warriors and the NBA Finals to Canada with a nearly perfect shooting performance on Thursday night. Meanwhile, over on ESPN the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee made history. We’ve had co-champions in the past, but the 2019 Spelling Bee ended with 8 kids claiming a share of the trophy. The event went on so long and ran through so many sudden death rounds that organizers ran out of words.
There are going to be very few people in your audience that don’t have an emotional reaction to something like that. Maybe it sets off bells and whistles to rail against participation trophy culture. Maybe the alarms go off for people in their 30s sick of hearing their parents’ generation shouting about participation trophies as if that generation isn’t the one that came up with the idea in the first place. How about anyone that has ever been to a kids’ sporting event that was poorly organized?
An event like that is ripe for Twitter and text message interaction. You could turn to the phones too, but honestly why would you? This was the morning after the first game of the NBA Finals. Some parts of the country are wild about college baseball, and Friday was the first day of regional play.
The Scripps National Spelling Bee would be low on the priority list. That doesn’t mean you don’t devote a little bit of air time to it. There are so many angles to the way that event ended that your listeners are bound to an opinion on it. Reasons to react to your show are another chance for listeners to form a connection with you. More connections build deeper loyalty.
Saturday night we saw another one of these moments play out. Anthony Joshua, the undefeated heavyweight boxer who stands 6’6, has the body of an Adonis, and holds all four heavyweight championship belts, lost to Andy Ruiz Jr via TKO in the seventh round of their fight at Madison Square Garden.
Ruiz is no slouch. Now that he has the belts, he is certainly a deserving champion. He came into that fight at 32-1 with 21 knockouts, but he also came into that fight as an absolute afterthought.
Just look at that picture of the fighters next to each other. Joshua has the body of an Avenger. Ruiz looks like the dude in an Avengers movie that drops his sandwich and stares in amazement at Bruce Banner transforming into the Hulk.
Which one do you think looks more like the majority of guys listening to your show?
There are so many ways to talk about this fight beyond the Xs and Os of boxing. Combat sports in general bring with them an element of tribalism, and this was an undefeated foreigner built like a Rocky villain getting beaten by a dumpy American. Combat sports bring an element of gambling with them. Joshua was a 9-1 favorite in this fight. Who lost money on what was supposed to be a sure thing?
Perhaps the craziest element to this fight is how Ruiz got there in the first place. Darren Rovell of The Action Network Tweeted that it took a lot of hustle on Ruiz’s part once Joshua’s original opponent dropped out.
There are so many twists and turns to this underdog story and each one is better than the last. Your listeners can see themselves in Andy Ruiz Jr. and besting a guy like Anthony Joshua is the stuff of fantasy. Just like the Spelling Bee, it isn’t something you need to devote an entire segment to, but it is worth bringing up on Monday and diving into the very human side of this story.
This business is all about making connections with the audience. Listeners are expecting you to offer opinions on the biggest stories of the day. That is literally the bare minimum for being in this business. The shows that stand out from the pack are the ones that fill the spaces between the A topics in the most interesting ways, and nothing interests people more than themselves and their own opinions.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
