Growing up in Ohio, Nick Cellini seemed to always be talking about sports, especially at the kitchen table with his father and his brother Vince.
Years later, both Nick and Vince would start receiving paychecks for talking about sports.
“(My father) passed away in the late 90’s but he was like ‘I can’t believe you guys get paid to talk about stuff that we talked about around the kitchen table every day,’” said Nick Cellini, co-host of Cellini and Dimino on 680 The Fan in Atlanta.
Nick was inspired by his older brother’s journey and followed in his footsteps.
They grew up in a tough Italian neighborhood in the inner city of Cleveland, where not many people went to college. Vince decided to write his own story and earned a communications degree from the College of Wooster where he also played football. He went on to become a sports anchor at WJW TV in Cleveland while also hosting a sports talk show on WWWE Radio. He eventually made his way to CNN, becoming a sports anchor there.
If that path could work for his brother, Nick was determined to follow a similar road and that included a degree in communications from the University of Mount Union in 1989.
“He’s eight years older than me, so I watched what he did and I was like ‘ok well, he’s doing that then well I’m going to do it,” said Cellini. “I’m going to go play football in high school and play at a small school in college and be a communications major. So, yeah, he was a major inspiration to me and still is to this day.”
Today, the Cellini brothers are still close as they live in the same neighborhood in Atlanta. Vince certainly has to be proud of his younger brother as Nick has enjoyed a more than two-decades run in Atlanta sports radio, a run will go on for at least a few more years. He and his long-time co-host Chris Dimino signed a four-year contract extension with 680 The Fan last year.
“It’s been incredible,” said Nick Cellini. “As you get older, you have a newfound appreciation for things because you know how challenging this business can be. We’re working on, Chris and I, third generation of people who have been listening to us…it’s crazy.”
Atlanta is now the Ohio native’s forever home.
“It’s amazing that this town has adopted me as one of their own now,” he said. “I feel like this is my hometown now. I’ve raised my family here and it’s just been an incredible run.”
And through that run, Cellini has been there to talk Atlanta sports fans through the highs and lows of the local sports teams. Over the years, there was a lot of success for the Atlanta Braves including a pair of World Series championships as well as two trips to the Super Bowl for the Atlanta Falcons, including a loss to the New England Patriots when the Falcons blew a 28-3 lead.
“If you do something long enough, you deal with both sides of it,” said Cellini. “You’re kind of a conduit. You sit there and you let the people celebrate and you let them vent.”
And over the years, the topics of discussion have not only centered around the local teams. As more and more people from around the country have relocated to Atlanta, there has been the need to focus on other teams as well as national stories. As the population of the Atlanta metro area grew from around two million people to the more than six million that live there today, so too did the scope of the daily content on Atlanta sports radio.
“Especially when the local teams aren’t winning because that’s when it really gets challenging. You have to focus on the national stories. But it seems like more people now embrace the local teams because the Braves are winning and maybe it’s because the Falcons had some success. I think now, more-so than ever, we can take the local angle but for a while it was that way.”
Through many of his years in Atlanta sports radio, Cellini has been teamed with Dimino with their experience together dating back to working at 790 The Zone.
Over the years, they’ve developed a special chemistry and it’s made them very successful.
“I can honestly tell you that I look forward to coming to work every day,” said Cellini. “It’s more like a family relationship where we can say whatever we want to each other but no one from the outside can say it. We compliment each other because we don’t think the same and we don’t want the same. We’re past the point of any egos. We’re just doing our job. He calls it a stupid little show. If you get it, you get it. If you don’t, you don’t. We’re going to be what we’re going to be.”
It was during their time together at 790 The Zone when things unraveled a bit back in 2013.
Both of them, along with co-host Steak Shapiro, were fired by the radio station after they did a bit that mocked former New Orleans Saints player Steve Gleason who suffers from ALS. For Cellini, it’s something that he carries with him every day.
“You have to remind yourself that people are listening and you’re talking about people,” he said. “You can have fun but you can’t make it personal or try to be, for lack of a better term, a shock-jock.”
After he was fired, Cellini issued an apology to Gleason and vowed to donate his first month’s salary to the Gleason Foundation if he was to get another job in radio.
The Gleason family and the Gleason Foundation did reach out to Cellini and accepted his apology.
“I would never want anybody to do something so silly and so stupid but if anybody ever made a mistake like that, my best wish for them would be that they would get embraced and forgiven,” said Cellini. “What Steve and his family did, they didn’t have to do. It was just really incredible the way they reached out to us. I think there is always going to be a bond between us.”
His 28-month absence from Atlanta sports radio will always be part of Cellini’s DNA but not completely in a bad way.
“It’s something that I do think about every day and I think about it in a positive way because I know that this can all be taken away,” said Cellini.
From talking sports at the kitchen table with his father and brother to his successful career in Atlanta and even through a terrible on-air mistake, Nick Cellini has experienced a spectrum of emotions. It’s been quite the ride for Cellini and his family and that journey isn’t over quite yet.
Peter Schwartz writes weekly sports radio features for Barrett Media. He has been involved in New York sports media for over three decades, and has worked for notable brands such as WFAN, CBS Sports Radio, WCBS 880, ESPN New York, and FOX News Radio. Peter has also served as play by play announcer for the New Yok Riptide, New York Dragons, New York Hitmen, Varsity Media and the Long Island Sports Network. You can find him on Twitter @SchwartzSports or email him at DragonsRadio@aol.com.
