While celebrating ‘610 Day’ today during the 30th anniversary of SportsRadio 610 in Houston, several former hosts joined the station to share memories and hit on current events. Today’s version of In the Loop was hosted by John Lopez, as per usual, but his guest co-host was his partner from over a decade ago, Marc Vandermeer, who is currently the voice of the Hoston Texans. The two of them welcomed back some other former 610 hosts including Josh Innes, who is now hosting afternoons on rock station KSHE-95 in St. Louis as well as Nick Wright of FS1’s First Things First.
Wright had a lot of praise for his former co-host on what was then known as In the Loop with Nick and Lopez. He talked about how kind of a person Lopez is and said he felt like Lopez prepared him well for fatherhood. Wright said he was 27 when he arrived in Houston from Kansas City, before eventually heading to FOX Sports in 2016.
Wright shared stories about his time in Houston and mentioned when we thought he was going to have to go to jail over protecting his source on a story about child abuse involving NFL player Adrian Peterson.
Lopez and Vandermeer asked Wright about being at the first game of the NBA Finals, his thoughts on his Kansas City Chiefs and his take on the Texans and quarterback CJ Stroud. He was then asked about the state of the media and sports talk business and whether or not he is worried about all of the changes and what could happen next.
“I am not certain what the delivery mechanisms will be, but I am certain what we do will always have a strong place in the market,” he said. “People like to argue about sports and people like to talk about their teams.
“I feel like the delivery might change, but the folks who can do what we do, well, will always be in demand in some capacity. Maybe it will be more YouTube than terrestrial radio, maybe it will be more shorter clips. I don’t know exactly and it’s not my job to figure it out. [There is] one thing that I do think local radio has going for it that no one has been able to replace, and I don’t think it’s going to be replaced anytime soon. The moment the game ends I want people reacting to that game and no matter how much you like a podcast, it doesn’t give you that instant gratification. Now, some of these shows that will hop on YouTube as soon as a game ends, now that works, it is a similar type of thing. But you can’t have that when you’re driving home from a game, you can’t have that passively the way you can the radio.”
Wright then talked about sports being the one thing that brings people together with all of the other negative things that go on and what people talk about on social media.
“I think right now, sports are almost the only thing that unites people,” he said. “Sports, in general, is the one thing where we can all come together and I think it’s one of the reasons why, that while ratings in television for everything are down, sports are up. Everything else is divisive and sports, people enjoy. So, I am bullish on sports media, even if the form is going to change somewhat.”
