Before it was cool, Rob Thompson was doing it. Before it was a multi-billion dollar industry and something you can control with your fingertips, he was playing fantasy football the old-school way.
But what was once just a hobby turned into one of the best opportunities of his life. In 1992, Thompson was playing fantasy football with different people from all over the country. He was looking for a specific stat to calculate scores from the weekend, but there was confusion with the numbers.
“One of the guys had a Chicago paper and I had a San Antonio paper and our numbers were different,” Thompson said. “So I called the local paper and asked for the official NFL stat line. The guy I called asked why. I told him I was playing this weird game called fantasy football. We had lunch and he had heard about it and he asked me if I could write a column. So I started writing a Saturday column about fantasy football.”
A local radio guy named Charlie Parker started reading the column. Soon after, he asked Thompson and his brother to come on his show. They started showing up on Fridays and then eventually on Mondays. Looking back at it now, Thompson thinks it was because they were being used as a segment filler. But before they knew it, they were regular guests on the show.
“Then on a random Friday he called in sick,” said Thompson. “The program director walked out and said, well, I guess it’s y’all. So we jumped on air and he ended up hiring us. He brought us on for a Saturday show, his name is Andrew Ashwood.
“I kind of fell backwards into it and then one thing led to another and I had a Saturday show in San Antonio with my brother. Because we are in San Antonio and on the iHeart station a couple of the vice presidents of the company started listening to us and liked us. And then they syndicated us. I got nationally syndicated before I had a local show. This was in 2000 working with WOAI, a legacy station here doing Saturdays and that turned into weekdays.”
Getting into sports radio was a stroke of luck, but he’s carved out an amazing career in San Antonio. Today, he’s the co-host of R&R in the Morning on ESPN San Antonio’s Sports Star. He’s also the PD of the station, which means his normal weekday begins before most people even think about getting out of bed.
“I’ve been an afternoon guy my entire radio career, other than the Saturday shows,” Thompson said. “I moved to the mornings last year back in July. About a year ago during the Covid crisis, my station decided to invest in sports talk and felt like we had a pretty good product here and it allowed me to expand our lineup.
“We went from one three-hour show to now I’m running right at eight hours daily. I get in around 3:30 am. I do a lot of my grunt work for traffic and everything before anyone gets here in the morning and then I do my show that ends at 10:00. I’ll hang around for my mid-day guy and then see my PM drive but I’m out of the building around 2:00.”
If Thompson didn’t already have enough on his plate, his station is undergoing a rebranding that began last year. The station is still an ESPN affiliate, but changed its name to San Antonio Sports Star, a play on the Dallas Cowboys and the amount of coverage the station commits to the team.
“We’re a pretty big Dallas Cowboys affiliate,” Thompson said. “We get Jerry Jones on pretty regularly. Mike McCarthy on weekly. We even go to their training camp. We’ve adopted the star logo while still hanging on to the ESPN letters. We rebranded last year, but I carry those ESPN letters pretty proudly because it gets me in a lot of doors.”
But sometimes a rebrand doesn’t come without challenges. A name change can cause confusion with some listeners. Yet overall, it’s something Thompson and The Sports Star knew they needed to make happen.
“I wouldn’t call it smooth,” Thompson said. “In the San Antonio market, there’s two competitors. For the most part, because we’ve cross pollinated so much… my co-host came from across the street and I worked across the street.
“It wasn’t a matter of confusion about ESPN. I’m trying to separate from that and become our own entity. I love the letters and I really love them for sales purposes, because it gets us in the door with so many advertisers. But quite frankly, most of our listeners, they get us confused. They always have, because I was across the street for 15 years and my co-host was there basically for the same amount of time.”
San Antonio is a one-sport town and the one team in the city has enjoyed an incredible run since the late 90s. Granted, the franchise isn’t having the same success as when Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker were on the floor, but it’s still a Spurs town at its core. However, Thompson and his staff are committed to Cowboys talk. Seeing as the Spurs have fallen off a bit, will they commit an entire show during the NBA season to the local team?
“Not an entire show,” Thompson said. “We’re not their flagship or an affiliate. They’re such a closed franchise and hardly anything comes out of there. There’s some benefit and there’s some negative to it. For us it allows us to open the canvas to paint whatever picture we want.
“We can talk about the Spurs daily, because they’re not going to give us anything, we can just project what we want. So it’s always been an easy fill. We still talk about them every day. I’ve always called it the holy trinity that we hit every single day: the Dallas Cowboys, either Texas or Texas A&M football, and the Spurs.”
Outsiders come into Houston all the time to do sports radio. It can even happen in Dallas, as well as other markets in the state of Texas. But San Antonio has a little bit of a different feel to it. It’s not easy for an outsider to come into the city and be beloved by the listeners.
“That’s a good question, because I don’t know of anyone that’s come from the outside and been successful other than one guy across the street,” Thompson said. “He took my seat when I left back in 2008 and he’s done a great job.
“We’re a very insular community. The local CBS affiliate has been on the air since around 1959. They’ve had two sports broadcasters in their history. One has been on for the past 25 years and he’s retiring, so I brought him on to be a co-host on my PM drive show. There was never any consideration to look outside the market. They just don’t test well here. People need to know what high school you went to.”
Thompson’s co-host, who goes by Rudy Jay, is one of the locals doing sports radio that has endeared himself to the listeners. He and Thompson have developed an incredible rapport and take San Antonians to work every morning.
“He’s a great guy and a man of the city,” Thompson said. “There’s very few people that, no matter what they say and how they say it, you walk away not being upset with them. He’s just a genuine and honest man, who has great opinions but never really inflicts them on you. He’s a well-versed and interesting guy that loves to talk about sports. I couldn’t be happier.”
Tyler McComas is a columnist for BSM and a sports radio talk show host in Norman, OK where he hosts afternoon drive for SportsTalk 1400. You can find him on Twitter @Tyler_McComas or you can email him at TylerMcComas08@yahoo.com.
