Damon Amendolara opened his CBS Sports Radio show on Thursday morning by acknowledging that his days at the network are numbered. SiriusXM announced yesterday that he will be taking over the morning show on Mad Dog Sports Radio beginning October 2.
“Instead of a cold open here, I just thought I would talk and reflect and use today and tomorrow to do the same thing,” he said to start the 6 o’clock hour.
He thanked by CBS Sports Radio and the audience for being integral to the show’s success. He noted that finding a dedicated audience is what helped the show grow in overnights and move to more prominent day parts of the course of the last eleven years.
“These eleven years have been a pure joy to work here at CBS Sports Radio,” Amendolara said. “I’ve said this often. The coolest thing about this place for the last 11 years is they gave me total freedom to do what I wanted to do. My mind was the only limit in what we could do creatively. Man, and for those that are creative, maybe you’re a painter, you’re a musician, maybe you’re an artist, a sculptor, maybe you just look at landscaping and see a bunch of weeds and go, ‘I can create something out of that,’ or maybe you see a car that needs to be renovated and go, ‘I can create something out of that.’ Those things, to me, are my oxygen. I love that part of this job. And they let me do it. I mean, look at how weird this show is sometimes! They let me do it, and for that I am forever grateful.”
He said that the show felt complete once it made the move from nights to middays. That is when Andrew Bogusch and Pete “The Body” Bellotti joined the show.
“I have worked with some amazing, amazing people. Bellotti and Bogusch and me and Mraz (former producer Shawn Morash). I just couldn’t have asked for anything more. These guys are next-level talented, next-level committed, and it was just such a synergy immediately. It was like, ‘Wow, this is special. And that started in 2017. So I can say without a shadow of a doubt, the last six plus years of working with these guys, these shows mid-morning, then we were promoted to mornings going into 2020. These six years with Bogusch and Bellotti have just been the greatest radio I’ve ever done.”
He concluded by saying that in the end, the offer that SiriusXM made him checked all the boxes of what he would need in order to feel good about leaving CBS Sports Radio.
Amendolara admitted that he wanted to take the entire crew with him. It just was not going to work out.
“It’s hard to leave these guys and it’s hard to leave what we’ve built here. But it wasn’t an option. Because of the inner workings of radio, that wasn’t an option. They are too valuable here, and they’re going to be wonderful and supportive and talented for Maggie & Perloff, who are taking over the morning show starting on Monday.”
