by Craig Carton
The problem was that I was now running a company that was starting to make money and draw interest from offshore casinos that wanted to advertise to gamblers. In theory, I could do both. I agreed to fly out to Denver and at least keep the door to radio open. I flew out to Denver on a Friday and met with Rick and Tim at a restaurant near the station. The plan was to chat on Friday, host a show on Saturday, have dinner Saturday night, and fly back to Florida on Sunday.
I walked into the restaurant and right away spotted Rick, an engaging guy, about six foot four. He gave me the man-hug with the two pats on the back and introduced me to Tim. I noticed that Tim had the largest human head I had ever seen. It was like a huge block with crazy big ears, sitting atop a freakishly small neck. I was so transfixed by his head that I had to tell myself to stop staring. I also noticed that he had no personality whatsoever—just like his radio station, apparently.
The first question from Tim: “If the Lindros situation happened here, how would you handle it with us?”
And away we go. The rest of the lunch was similarly awkward, and Rick acted as the liaison and conversation starter. After about two hours, we left. I was to do a three-hour show that night. Tim warned me that the station didn’t get many calls, so I should be prepared to delve into lots of topics and do a lot of talking. How could Denver’s only sports talk station not get phone calls all day and night? I didn’t understand. I spent the rest of the day listening to The Fan to get a sense of what the other hosts sounded like, and what calls, if any, they did take.
What I heard was the worst sports station in America. No pizzazz, no energy, no focus; just boring rambling from a variety of different hosts who should still be studying at the Connecticut School of Broadcasting.
I went on the air at ten, about the same time that night’s Rockies game ended. “Good evening. Craig Carton here on The Fan.” Wow, it sounded great. Truth be told, ever since I was a kid and WFAN Radio started, I had always wanted to say that phrase. No way would I ever get to do it in New York. This was good enough for me—at least the first few times I said it. I did a three-hour show and had calls every minute of every hour. The volume of calls shocked not only Tim Spence—who later remarked, “I don’t know how you did that, but I’m glad you did”—but also the show’s producer, who had to answer the phone lines. Because I lived by the Bigby rule of limiting caller time, the poor guy was in over his head.
I went back to Florida the next day. I figured that if they called to hire me, I’d consider it. If not, no worries. I was building an Internet company and it was starting to do well. We had more than a thousand members, people who paid a monthly fee to get our picks at a discounted rate and to get special picks every day for them at no extra charge. We were growing at about 10 percent a week. We had effectively tapped into the degenerate world of gambling.
Over the next few weeks, I checked in with Rick Scott to see what if anything was happening with Denver. I wasn’t overly concerned. I was working eighteen-hour days on the site. I didn’t have time to worry about the radio opportunity.
Almost a full month later, Tim finally called.
“Craig, we would love to bring you in to do afternoons on our radio station and are prepared to make you an offer,” he said.
His first proposal was such a joke, I told him no without even considering it. He wanted to sign me to a seven-month contract and pay me on a prorated basis. Mickey Mouse organization time. No thanks. If I decided to come, it would have to be for a full year with bonus incentives and option years based on success. Tim said that he needed to think about it and promised to get back to me.
I wish I’d said “Fuck off” right then and there, but I didn’t. It took Tim three days to call me back, which was another sign I should have considered when deciding whether to take the job. Ultimately they offered me $67,500 and bonuses for being one of the top-five-rated shows in my time slot that could have added another $25,000 to my base. I told him I would consider it and get back to him by the next day.
I called Marc Lawrence to let him know I had the offer, and that if I took it, I would move our company to Denver and run it from there when I wasn’t on the air. We had hired two employees to deal with customer service, and I figured that if there were any other pressing issues, I could handle them before and after the show. I also wasn’t done with radio in my heart. I was pissed at how SportsLine came to an end, and I didn’t want that to be the final story of my career. I wanted to go out on top and prove to all the naysayers that I was successful.
Marc didn’t love the idea, nor should he have. We were building a company that had his name attached to it. But I had delivered on my guarantees and promises, and he and I had an open and long-standing relationship. He wished me well and told me he trusted me to always do the right thing.
I called Tim Spence and accepted the job. One week after I started, I wished I never had. Not because I didn’t love doing radio. I love radio—even though at times I was bored and not challenged by it unlike now. But I regretted agreeing to work for Tim. In my radio career I had only worked for one truly incompetent PD, and that was Charlie Barker in Florida. Tim was the second. Tim was big on meeting right before and right after every single show. He loved to stifle any and all organic entertainment.
I knew I had to make my mark in Denver as soon as possible, and I knew that I would stand out from the other hosts in town. I had never done nor wanted to do straight X’s-and-O’s sports talk. At WIP I had learned how to do a good show. Now I just had to learn which sports Denver fans cared most about and add the guy mix. I figured I was all set.
The first thing I did, even before my initial air shift, was to go to the top two strip clubs in Denver and introduce myself to the managers. I told them that I wanted to highlight their clubs by bringing one of the girls in each week to play a sports game with me. Strip club managers never say no to a free promotion. The ulterior motive, of course, was that I would get to meet all the top strippers in town. Even better, I would meet them as the guy on the radio, not as some schmuck begging for a lap dance.
My plan worked right away. I had been on the air for a month when the station had a pregame appearance at an Avalanche game. I was the new afternoon guy and figured nobody knew me. The other hosts had all been there for at least a full year, if not more. I showed up a few minutes after them and made my way to the station tent. Within a few minutes, guys mobbed me, asking if I was the new guy on the radio with all the hot chicks. Nobody knew what I had said about the local teams. They just knew that I was the guy with the sexy girls who played games. The president of distribution of a beer company, whose corporate office was in Denver, invited me to sit with him in his box for the game. He, too, only wanted to hear about all the hot women.
One month, and that’s all it took. I was killing it in Denver. Through the strip clubs I met a photographer doing a “Girls of Denver” shoot for Playboy. He was going to shuttle some of the girls my way to promote the magazine and hook me up. The most memorable of all these women was named Susan. She was maybe twenty-two. Her voice was like candy, and she sounded like the most erotic stripper you’d ever met. I later had her come to the studio. She had platinum blond hair, big fake boobs, and a forty-five-year-old husband who looked like a stoner.
I eventually became friends with Susan and her husband, Bob, and started to socialize with them. Now, I admit, I’m not the best at keeping in touch with people, and I suck at intimacy, but as a surface-type friend to party with, I am your man. That’s what we did, until things went south.
Susan and Bob liked to party from time to time. When they did, he became jealous of guys hitting on Susan, which of course always happened. And then she would become enraged at him for not trusting her. One night they were partying and in the middle of a huge fight, and driving home on the highway, according to both of them, Susan decided to punch him in the face, almost causing him to drive off the road. He retaliated by calling her a skanky whore and demanded to know how many dic
ks she was sucking behind his back. She then called him “a limp-dicked, big-bellied old man.” He kicked her out of the car and told her to walk the rest of the way. When she got home, she called the police, and things escalated. I was unaware of all this until my phone rang that night. It was Bob. The police had been over, Susan had walked out, and he was alone and wanted to die.
Halfheartedly I asked him what he meant about wanting to die, and he said he was going to kill himself and needed me to come over to talk him down. Life lesson number one for Bob: He called the wrong guy. I knew him socially but didn’t know him that well. There had to be someone else he could have called to tell that he was going to kill himself. I engaged him for about a half hour and made it clear that a) I wasn’t coming over, and b) killing himself would be stupid. I suggested that he go to bed and call me in the morning. If he was still depressed, I would come over. What a great friend I was.
They got back together, as she had nowhere to live and he wasn’t going to land another hot twenty-two-year-old. The crisis was averted. When my future wife flew to visit me, I told her that my best friend in Denver would pick her up at the airport and spend the day with her since I had to work. That was Susan, and what a great introduction to the town for my wife. Hi, I’m a stripper with big boobs who knows your soon-to-be husband. Let’s hang out for the day. Oh, and by the way, I swear I never fucked him.
My show soon became the number-one show on the radio station and the highest-rated in the station’s history—and I hated it. I had started to refuse to go to pre-show meetings, and only took post-show meetings when Spence cornered me. Besides the distraction of his big head, he liked to talk in parables and metaphors. After one of my stripper shows resulted in the girl being naked and doing jumping jacks for Broncos tickets, he said to me, “Craig, you are building a house and it’s a nice house, but today you burned down the deck. Why did you burn the deck down?” I had no fucking idea what he was talking about, but I knew I needed to leave.
They moved my time slot a few times in the first nine months to try to have my audience cover both middays and some afternoon real estate to help the ratings for the entire station. Then they thought I should do mornings—something I didn’t want to do. Having established myself in the early afternoon, I knew how hard it would be to then build an audience in a different time slot. I had established something great and didn’t want to mess with it. I couldn’t guarantee that the quick success I’d had would transfer to mornings. KKFN was a lousy station, and I was happy doing my thing right where I was for the time being.
Once a week, my afternoon show was live from a bar in Larimer Square in downtown Denver. The show attracted crowds of nearly a thousand people. It became a must-attend event. I decided to make it a circus-like show and brought in local celebrities, athletes, and girls. I gave the crowd an awesome four hours of entertainment. To this day, the events are some of the best pure entertainment shows I ever did. What I did not know was that the huge crowds also brought an important visitor to the bar every week. He came alone the first three weeks, and he came with his boss the last week. I was being watched, but I didn’t know it.
Just before Bob Richards came and changed my life in Denver, something far more serious did. For a few months, I had a strange sensation in my arm, making it feel extremely tight. My fingers tingled, and at times my arm looked bloated and purple. I did nothing about it until I complained about it during one of the live shows, and medics came to check me out. They couldn’t figure it out, either, but suggested I have it MRI’d. I did, and again, nothing. I wasn’t too concerned, but it was in the back of my mind.
One day I went to the gym to work out, and I couldn’t even lift the bar with no weight on it. After work that day, instead of going home, I checked my voice mail. There was a message from Dr. Michael Cooper’s office. He was a top thoracic specialist and worked out of Swedish Memorial Hospital. The message was that he could see me that day at 4 p.m. if I wanted. Otherwise, it was going to be a month until he had an opening.
I called Kim, who’d moved to Denver three days earlier, and told her I was going to go, then I’d swing by the house and pick her up for dinner. I walked into his office and he asked me to take my shirt off and raise my hands as if I were under arrest. I did, and within ten seconds, he said, “You’re going to the hospital and right to the ICU. You have a blood clot, and it needs attention immediately.” Stunned and bewildered, I signed a bunch of papers, got directions, and left. I called Kim and told her to be ready, but not for dinner. We were going to the hospital.
I had thoracic outlet syndrome, and had a blood clot the size of small cigar a few inches from my heart. TOS is when the clavicle and a rib push against the muscles, arteries, and veins and cut off the blood supply to the arm and fingers. The doctor would have to remove my first rib, take out the clot and the bad vein, and take a healthy vein from my ankle to repair the bad one. I was also going to be on aggressive blood thinners—and oh, by the way, I could die.
I went to the hospital, filled out more paperwork, was admitted to the ICU, and within an hour I was hooked up to a shitload of machines and wires. They were going to do a venogram to locate the clot and then prepare for surgery the next morning.
A young nurse tried seventeen times to get a blood line going before the doctor showed up and stopped her. A few hours before the surgery, a priest came to my room to talk. I told him I was not a big God guy, and I was Jewish. He counseled me that I should talk to someone, and that he would send a rabbi in. Even though they were coming because the surgery could go wrong and I could die, I never considered dying. A few minutes later, the rabbi showed up, and I dismissed him as well, but I thanked him for coming in. I was on my own. God would not be in the room this time.
The surgery went perfectly. My rib was taken out, I survived, and I recovered for two days in a private section of the hospital. The only drawback to the operation was that when I woke up, my groin hurt more than the area of the surgery. They neglected to tell me that I would be catheterized, and that they took a vein from my groin as opposed to my ankle. I had a tube going inside my penis. I was miserable. I needed it out.
The sweet, sympathetic nurse said to me, “Here’s the deal: if I take it out, you have thirty minutes to pee on your own. If you don’t, I’m putting it back in without anesthesia.” I kicked everybody out of the room and had the nurse turn the water on, but no luck. I called Kim back in and had her make a hissing noise like a snake in my ear. Again, no luck. I then had her bring warm water for me to dip my hands in. No luck. The clock was ticking. It was twenty-nine minutes in when I dripped a few drops of urine. Thank God, because the nurse had a weird smile as she prepared the catheter for my small, scared penis. I was home free, or so I thought.
Then celebrity hit again.
Norm Clarke, the popular gossip writer in Vegas who was a friend of mine, had written about my predicament. When I started to come to in my room after the surgery, I saw Kim and my folks, and there were two other people I didn’t recognize. Neither did anybody else, but no one had the wherewithal to ask them who they were. “I know I’m fucked-up on drugs, but who are you guys?” I asked. I was hoping they were friends, and I was so messed up on morphine, that I just forgot who they were. It turned out they were fans of the show, read Norm’s column, and showed up to bring me food and gifts. Awkward. I thanked them, and hospital staffers asked them to leave. Norm then got pissed at me because I never thanked him for writing about my health issues. Unreal!
I would miss one week of work for the first time in my career, but I was set to come back on April 20, 1999. I returned to the show with Dave Otto, and we broadcast live from a supermarket five miles outside Littleton, Colorado. Most of the show was about my return and some baseball nonsense, too. All was fine until two fucked-up kids decided to open fire on innocent students at Littleton’s Columbine High School. That was my first day back on the air. It is a day I will never forget. It is also a day I don’t want to remember.
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br /> It turned out that the guy who had come to my Larimer Square events was Bob Richards. He was the program director of a legendary rock station in Denver, 106.7: KBPI Rocks the Rockies. I knew Bob from Buffalo. He ran the rock station there when I was just getting started at WGR. We didn’t know each other well, but we had met. Bob waited until a full hour after the show, when most of the people other than those looking to party the rest of the day with me had cleared out.
As he approached, I recognized him. We shook hands, and he asked if he could buy me a drink. The answer to that question is always “yes.” We sat on the outside deck of the bar, and he told me that he was running KBPI, which I didn’t know. They were huge fans of mine and couldn’t believe the crowds or the ratings I was getting at the dump I was working at. He wanted to know my contract status, and if I wanted to do mornings for them.
My contract had only a few months left and I wanted out, so that would not be a problem, I thought. And yes, I would love to work there. It was a perfect place for what I was creating in Denver: a hard-core, young, male-skewing rock station. Most of their daytime shows did well, but they had a lousy morning show, and that was holding the station back from reaching its true potential. Assuming we could work out a deal, he wanted me to start the first Tuesday in October, so they could maximize my arrival for the fall ratings period.
I wanted out of my FAN contract. I had recently been moved to doing the morning drive, and while I didn’t mind getting up, they gave me a partner named Dave Otto. I liked Dave, but I went from being a number-one hot solo show to having a partner and needing to incorporate him into the show. Dave was a radio vet, and he understood what I did, so we got along from jump-street. But I was not doing the show I wanted to do anymore, and I was pissed. There was no raise in the move, and no assurance of anything in the future, plus with daily meetings and being there at 6 a.m., I was tired and miserable.
