It was a crazy Wednesday morning over on the Boomer & Gio Show on WFAN. With Jerry Recco filling in for Boomer Esiason, Chris Lopresti was scheduled to be in the morning update studio, but did not come in. For part of the morning, it was a mystery as to where LoPresti was.
LoPresti did end up calling the show during the second hour of the program and said he had no idea that he was on the schedule and that he had no idea that he missed it.
‘Jerry and I exchanged emails about February recently, but these were Boomer dates. I will go back and look, but I am almost certain I was never informed about this. I am not trying to make light of it. If I screwed up, it is on me. I will have to go review the tape as they like to say. I am sorry. I just don’t always go right to my phone with two young kids.”
Lopresti took to Twitter to thank the people who reached out for their support and explained what had happened.
With everything that was going on, the show had to find someone to do the updates. The producer, Al Dukes, did the update at 6:30 A.M. Then, for the 7:30 and 8:30 updates, they brought in Dave Ettinger, who Is the executive producer of After Hours hosted by Amy Lawrence on CBS Sports Radio.
Throughout the morning, the show also took auditions from callers to do the 9:30 update via phone. After a couple of bad auditions, Claudia from Rhode Island impressed them with her knowledge and personality and she ended up doing the update with Recco having the audio clips ready to cut to.
After the update was over, Gio asked her if she ever had experience working in radio and Claudia said that before she moved to Rhode Island, she was an engineer, but she never did any work behind the microphone. Now, she works at a bank, but she works as a musician and has a studio, so she volunteered her services for the show going forward.
Recco and Dukes added to the praise that Claudia deserved after she went off the air for doing great work considering the circumstances:
“If I would have time to actually write her a legit update and put more sound into it, she would have nailed it. You have to see what I sent her. She had it,” said Recco.
“I thought she was great considering she was on the phone, she was throwing to clips, having to know when the clips were ending. I think she did a great job. Even when she stumbled a little bit, she didn’t let it get caught up in her brain and she plowed right through it,” said Dukes.
Throughout the show, the listeners were kept updated as to what was going on behind the scenes as it went from busting LoPresti’s chops for not showing up to being genuinely concerned about what was going on. Luckily, he is okay. In the meantime, one woman got to do something that a lot of people wish they could be doing.
