Her given name, long since swallowed up in the fiery nimbus of a self-created personality, is Nanci Donnellan. But never call her that, on or off the air.
AT ESPN cable and radio sports headquarters, where satellite dishes sprout above surrounding farm fields like huge steel mushrooms, she hits the air at full bellow:
“Ohhhh, myyyy gooooodness-snuggle up to that telephone, boys and girls, because the Fabulous Sports Babe is on the air!”
The Babe, as she will be known here and probably in the hereafter, begs for metaphors. She is Hurricane Babe; she is 9.6 on the Richter scale. She is a runaway Mack truck, a set of brass knuckles and a punch in the solar plexus. She also is just about the hottest thing ever to hit the world of sports-talk radio.
The Fabulous Sports Babe is, by her own count, the only woman in the business, and since joining ESPN Radio eight months ago from KJS in Seattle, she has spurred an affiliate growth that is nothing short of phenomenal. Her show now is heard on 111 stations-up from 34 at her July 4 launch.
Locally, she is carried on WMVP, where she has yet to make as big an impact as her rivals in the same time slot, WSCR’s Dan Jiggetts and Mike North. Jiggetts and North had a 1.7 rating, according to the fall Arbitron numbers, while the Babe had an 0.8, ranking 30th out of 38 stations.
WMVP is counting on those figures to rise, based on the Babe’s history. In Seattle, where the Babe raised the station’s market rating from an audience share of .07 to 7.0, Michael O’Shea, president of New Center Media, which owns the station, says he knows her secret.
“She’s a firecracker when it comes to entertainment,” he says. “She knows her stuff and she’s fun to listen to. She’s outrageous and bodacious. She’ll aggravate you at one moment, and the next moment she’ll have you laughing.”
Ironically, the Babe became the Babe because of a back injury that left her doing her talk show in Tampa, where she held forth before going to Seattle, from her sick bed. In typical bawdy fashion, she urged listeners to “spend a day in bed with a fabulous sports babe.” They did, in droves, and her career and her new name were launched.
Asked if she considers herself a role model, the Babe wryly accepts “a responsibility not to appear on the evening news in handcuffs with my shirt pulled over my head.” But she admits she is helping pave a still-rough road for women who happen to love sports.
“I was the first woman to do this in a major market; I was the first to do it in drive time, and I was the first woman to put an all-sports station on the air, in Tampa,” she says. “That’s why this (ESPN) is important. This, to me, is the last gender barrier in my business and it’s important to me to get it done. It’s up to me to lead the way.
“I do more for women every time I open a mike than most people do in their lifetime. I consider that a responsibility; I refuse to consider it a burden.”
At the moment, the Babe has burdens to spare. She is sitting in a broadcast studio almost too tiny to contain the energy she emanates, while her director, Len Weiner, screens incoming calls, putting those who sound interesting on hold and dumping the obscene and the tedious.
The Babe, who seems to carry a sports encyclopedia inside her head, reads seven newspapers a day before hitting the air; she’s on from 10 a.m to 1 p.m in Chicago. Just now, she is watching monitors carrying five cable channels, a screen with calls on hold and a computer display with Associated Press and sports wires, even as she bandies words with callers.
Throughout the entire operation, one hand hangs over a console controlling sound effects with which she punctuates the show: a hearty “HOO-wah” for first-time callers (“virgins” in Babespeak); a “Gillooly,” the sound of a knee-capping; and to “blow up” dull or obnoxious callers-the roar of about one ton of plate glass, crashing.
Babe: We’ve got a poor boy in a phone booth in Madison, Wis. Talk to me, Bubba.
Caller: I just want to say, I used to love Barbra Streisand, but no more. Now I have the Babe in my heart…”
Babe: Stop sucking up; I hate that. Why did you call?
When the caller makes what she considers a fatuous remark about an NBA trade prospect, she blows him up and moves on.
“Some people may not like that, but I don’t care,” the Babe says. “This is not a democracy; this is my show. If you’re boring me, you’re boring everybody and I’m moving on.”
The NBA, on player-trade deadline, dominates calls today, and not everyone gets blown up. A caller from Chicago with a good articulate argument as to why Bulls star Scottie Pippin should be traded (he wasn’t) gets well over a minute. But trifle with the Babe at your peril.
Caller: I just want to say that Kathie Lee Gifford makes me want to throw up every time she gets some sports figure on that show…
Babe: Kathie Lee Gifford!? Why are you calling me to talk about Kathie Lee Gifford? If you don’t like her, why do you watch her?
Caller: Well, my wife wants me to…
Babe: “Let me give you a bit of Babe advice, Bubba: Get a job; get a life; get a haircut!” Crash.
“My job is not to get people to like me,” the Babe says at a commercial break. “My job is to get people to listen to the radio station, and most importantly, to generate revenue for my affiliates and for this company. This job is about making money; it isn’t about anything else. Anyway, if everybody liked me, this show would be terrible.”
That even those who find her annoying do not find the show “terrible” is evidenced by their collective input. The Babe averages 85,000 calls a month, about 5,000 of which actually get into the control room, and about 200 a day of which actually make the air. In addition she receives about 300 faxes a day and she’s adding on-line service so she can rake them off e-mail as well.
But the Babe is no one-woman band. She puts top sports figures on the air and regularly calls on ESPN-contracted experts ranging from hockey analyst Darren Pang to ESPN SportsCenter television anchor Linda Cohn-an old friend from Seattle days.
“Why not utilize the resources we have here?” the Babe says. “I can talk hoops with anybody, but why should I when I have the Gym Rat?”
The Babe’s “Gym Rat” is Associated Press basketball writer Jimmy O’Connell, a Wednesday regular on her show.
“He comes on and I just back off because there is nothing this man doesn’t know about basketball,” she says. “He’ll talk about Eastern Carolina. Who the hell knows anything about Eastern Carolina? The Rat does. Why should I go `I don’t know’ when I’ve got the Rat?”
Another commercial break ends and the Babe plunges back into the maelstrom with, “Honnnney, I’m hooooooooooome.” It is “Geek-of-the-Week” day, “an exercise in Babe-ocracy” that gives the Babe and her callers an extra opportunity to trash the vain and pretentious of the sports world.
“Geek” nominees today range from striking baseball players and their owners through the Teamsters union for “thinking the baseball players actually have a union” to James Buster Douglas, the heavyweight fighter who has, as one sports columnist recently observed, “grown so huge he could apply for statehood.”
It’s four hours a day of fun and games, and the Babe has to love it because it’s also exhausting.
“When I get off the air, I’m mentally, emotionally and physically drained,” she says. “I don’t want to talk to anybody about anything for about three hours.
“I have a motto: If I’m not having fun, I won’t be back tomorrow.”
