Sequel to 2008's award-winning
"The Hard Lie"
By Richie Whitt
DFWSportatorium
PART 1: DEAD MEN TALKING
PART II: THE BLOODY KNEE
PART III: HIGH ROAD TO HELL
PART IV: SH*T HITS THE FAN
PART V: DIFFERENT DIRECTION
Where's Greggo?
He's in Spittle's corner office with me on Feb. 27, offering not once, not twice, but three times to resign from 105.3 The Fan.
"I'm no good at this kind of radio," Williams says moments after admitting to his boss that he's recently lied about missing work. "I know I'm just a drain on my show. On everybody. I'm dragging everybody down. I should just quit. I should resign. I need to quit."
For reasons I'm not sure I'll ever fully understand, Spittle is having none of it.
"Whoa, Whoa! WHOA!!" the program director says, lurching from behind his desk. "That's a conversation for another day and another time. Right now I just want to concentrate on how we're going to move forward productively as a show."
RAGE was fired 47 days later.
In our final days when Williams went on the air with another chapter about his disease of addiction or precise number regarding his consecutive days of supposed sobriety,
RAGE collectively hung its head in shame. We knew he drank beer at the Nikki Sixx concert in Dallas in early June 2011 and, when he thought I wasn't looking, picked up my Captain Morgan & Coke off the table and took a giant swig before our "Fanniversary" party last December in Irving.
I'd actually experienced increasingly mortal thoughts about our partnership as early as October 2012, and had casually mentioned my fears to Bruce.
(continued from page 1)
But after the November surprise, I developed a tangibly queasy feeling about the long-term health of
RAGE. Williams' heart obviously was no longer in the show, and more and more his body was AWOL as well. In my first attempt at an S.O.S. to CBS, on Dec. 5 I asked Bruce to dinner to voice my concerns over beer and seafood at Dodie's in Allen. The boss agreed that Williams' erratic behavior was ultimately going to sink the show, even to the point of drawing up termination papers for Greggo and mapping out a plan - including a list of my potential new partners - for not if, but rather when my co-host crashed, or at least lied himself into a corner from which he couldn't escape.
On vacation in Mexico over
RAGE's Christmas break Bruce and I sipped Modelo on a Mayan Riviera beach, attempting to conjure a name for his planned new pairing: Richie Whitt and Mike Fisher, Noon-4.
With the way Williams calmly, coldly and consistently lied to
RAGE, to CBS executives and to listeners, I told Bruce I thought the station was committing a grave disservice if my partner ever uttered another word on the air.
"As far as I'm concerned," Bruce echoed, clinking bottles in a toast, "
RAGE has done its last show."
But a pothole appeared on the way to Bruce's appealing fork in my radio road. As 2013 dawned he was suddenly and aggressively pursued as the senior vice president of sports operations by Clear Channel Media and Entertainment. He took the job.
So long, Plan B. Hello, Plan Spittle.
Much as I was gutted to see Bruce and his revamped road map unexpectedly depart, I was convinced Spittle was anything but a terminal audible. He was the one, after all, that took note of my 22 years writing for the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram and
Dallas Observer and hired me into radio when 105.3 FM flipped formats from Live to The Fan in December 2008.
"Can you be as polarizing of an asshole on the radio as you are in the newspaper?" he asked during my interview. "I think you can. And I think you can be a star in this business."
Though far from a star, I had gained significant traction at The Fan in the four years since Spittle departed via a demotion to a CBS AM station in Houston. I escalated from a part-time weekend gig with the likes of Mike Ogulnick and Pete Stein to a full-time position alongside Newy Scruggs middays and then into afternoon drive with Williams when Bruce arrived in 2010. I had consolidated enough relationships with advertisers that I advanced my income robustly into six figures, was allowed a strong influence in the hiring of employees such as Williams, Mark Elfenbein, Chris Arnold and Fisher, and had risen into one of the faces of The Fan. I was an ambassador, asked to both put out fires (via calls or visits to upset clients) or light a spark (via numerous marquee emcee duties and Cowboys pre-game shows). Oh and, for what it's worth, I was the guy management approached to pay for a tank of gas on our RV trip to the Super Bowl last January.
When Spittle returned we'd pick up where we left off and ...
(continued from page 2)
Nope. It was painfully clear from the jump things had changed, for the worse. Much, much worse.
When Spittle arrived Feb. 4 The Fan wasn't a sinking ship that needing rescuing. Ratings were slowly up-ticking and consistent revenue made us a profitable enterprise. To the staff, at least, it wasn't the new program director's job to ride in and fix all that was broken, but more so to maintain the steady improvement nurtured by Bruce.
It took exactly one
RAGE meeting for Spittle to slap us into bleak reality.
"Look, we got a problem. You guys aren't big enough names to be talking about your personal lives as segments," he said to Williams and me. "Richie, we gotta work on your teases. Greggo, your list - whatever it's supposed to be - is gone. And I feel like there's too much estrogen on this station. You're gonna pull back on Sybil's involvement. Armen's going to talk only when one of you guys directly address him. And you guys play too much music. I want two guys passionately talking in a bar, making me want to jump in and join the conversation."
After the unadulterated undressing of everything we'd built in 2+ years, I asked Spittle if there was
anything he actually liked about our show.
"Sure," he said, gazing at his shoes, perhaps a piece of lint on the floor, or mostly anything but us. "You guys are both interesting characters with deep local roots. You have sports credibility from being in this market so long. I think listeners respect you and want to hear what you have to say on the big sports stories."
Cue the confusion.
But the real chasm in my eroding relationship with Spittle - and ultimately with CBS - was the handling of Williams. Or non-handling. By way of neglect, if not complete avoidance.
Because before Papa G's, there was Bennigan's.
(continued from page 3)
On Feb. 6 Williams arrives at our remote broadcast at the reincarnated restaurant in Fort Worth with the tell-tale signs of another oh, crap, here we go again. Dry mouth. Darting eyes. Gravel voice. Rambling, rapid speech. And inconsistent actions like, for example, missing our first three returns from commercials because he's ambling about the place chatting up strangers. Because at this point Spittle is only on his third day on the job, I text Tim:
2:31:
We gotta talk about Greggo. He's high as a kite today on that "cough syrup." Won't shut up. Talking in circles. My patience is about gone. Seriously.
At 3:17 I get a response from the assistant program director, who had been listening to the show in Spittle's office :
Gavin is aware, we just had a long discussion.
Williams finishes the show. But appears in the same uneven state the following day. As I had done before and would do again, I casually ask my partner "You okay?" The ensuing frivolous dance was one of me labeling him an irresponsibly bad teammate, and him countering by defiantly, arrogantly disagreeing while reminding me he apparently invented radio at The Ticket and then ... politely back to our corners for a future waltz to be determined.
I continue the conversation with Tim from the day before with another text on Feb. 7, this time magnifying my concern about a problem that - despite apparently being noticed - is going wholly ignored.
...
Honestly worried he's gonna OD one day.
At this point I'm genuinely worried about my friend. And sincerely pissed about what he's doing to our show.
But, wait, before Bennigan's there was Super Bowl 47.
(continued from page 4)
En route to eventually missing 17 of our first 37 work days following Christmas vacation, Williams blames his remarkable 54-percent attendance mark on everything from pneumonia, to a fall on a treadmill, to his mother having a stroke and needing to again change addresses, to fainting five times in one day but somehow deeming the episodes unworthy of a trip to the hospital. After one four-day sabbatical in mid-January - sandwiched around a weekend - Rosenbaum produced what she said was a "doctor's note," only with the physician's name manually scratched out, replaced with a different signature and featuring a customized treatment of "Do not work for four days."
In the wake of that bizarre no-show and beginning to feel
RAGE's credibility slipping under the brunt of my partner's sporadic actions, I ask for and am granted, on Jan. 25, a 10-minute audience with Brian.
With his office occupied, we retreat to an empty space on the 10th floor of the CBS building to address my partner's excessive absenteeism.
"Everyone realizes what's going on here," Brian comforts me. "And there's going to be a change made in his place. What or who or how I can't tell you, because Gavin isn't here yet. But I've spoken at length with Bruce and now with Gavin and we all realize there needs to be a change there."
And then, as reliable as a broken clock, comes another day of Williams missing work with, oh I forget,
somethingorother.
(continued from page 5)
The next week in New Orleans before the San Francisco 49ers-Baltimore Ravens' Super Bowl, Williams' peculiar behavior persists. The morning after declining his co-workers' polite-yet-passionate pleas for him to accompany us for food and fellowship at the annual Super Bowl Media Party, he sends Roseunbaum a panicky Twitter Direct Message on Jan. 30:
6:11 a.m.:
Hey..I'm in full panic mode ... I ended up taking Fridays meds ... just took the extra ambien from extra pouch ... I enough em begin for we'd, thur, and friday ... call everyone ... as your mom and her dr ... I also need some of the painkilling juice ...
Before that day's show via text I alert Tim - who at this point was the interim program director after Bruce and before Gavin - that Williams is uncharacteristically quiet and somber on the way to the NOLA Convention Center Media Center. Afterward, my partner instructs engineer/chauffeur Ted Nichols-Payne to drive him to the CVS Pharmacy on Prytania Street. Unloading our luggage from our SUV shortly thereafter, we clearly see the contents in the bag: A dark brown bottle of Hydrocodone-infused cough syrup, prescribed by a Dr. Wilcox.
Back in Dallas after a week of Williams being so incoherent that Fisher was subtly added as our show's daily fifth voice, Tim sends me a text:
I apologize for yet more drama. Not supposed to be this way ...
Unfortunately, we were just getting started.
(continued from page 6)
During our show the following week, on Feb. 8, Williams swears on the air that he no longer takes Ambien to help him sleep nor any pain-killing drugs, prescribed or otherwise. He also proudly stakes his "sobriety number" at 1,760 consecutive days ... exactly three weeks after he publicly promised the number was 1,491. I'm not real good at math, but something doesn't add up.
To call him out on the air would be to voluntarily impale our show. To allow him to perpetrate such a charade on listeners who hang on his every word and hail him as the common man's hero feels criminal. Either way, our chemistry - our show - is about to unravel.
On the air and off, Williams begins angrily questioning why I've started angrily questioning him.
"Why would you challenge me like that?" he'd ask when I'd doubt his facts or ask him to provide a smidge of validation on a particularly bombastic statement. On Feb. 13 I openly defy his latest fairy tale - that a 5-star general he'd never met suddenly opened up to him privately and spilled national military and political secrets during Kyle's funeral outside of Austin.
"Why would you question me like that?" he shouts during a break just before our show concludes.
"Why do you feel the need to make up such ridiculous lies?" I violently volleyed back.
That night a handful of Fan hosts attend a pre-game party at my friend's condo in The Cirque across from American Airlines Center and then over to watch Dallas Mavericks-Sacramento Kings. Armen receives a text from Williams in the first quarter and dutifully alerts me to the looming storm:
I won't be attending tonight...I'm sure you know why..a decision must be made..me or richie..I'm done with him..I will never ever work with him.
The next morning - Valentine's Day - I awake to a love letter.
(continued from page 7)
Williams emails demanding that I begin respecting him on the air. He also sends management a bizarre separate email (one that he never expected me to be see) stating that he would win, by landslide, an in-station popularity contest against me - I'll take that bet and give him odds - and that CBS needs to find him a new partner. Immediately.
Knowing what I know - his text to Armen, his email to management, his on-going lies and his shaky future according to Brian - I'm not really in a flirtatious mood. So I respond to his demonstrative missive in a language he must've needed Rosetta Stone to interpret for him: Honesty.
I write that while I didn't trust or believe or respect him, I would attempt to work with him because, well, my contract mandates so. As I drive to the station prepared for a bitter show not befitting the romantic date, I get a call from Tim. Williams has - shocker - conveniently called in sick. Though given zero details, I'm warned not to address my partner's absence - not even alluding to the fact that he's not on the show.
I had no idea he wouldn't be back until Feb. 25.
In Spittle's office the following day, Feb. 15, he informs me that Williams "can't be trusted at this point" and is being yanked from
RAGE's imminent trip to the Daytona 500. "Who would you like to work with? Today, tomorrow and in Daytona?" My answer is easy: "Fish."
Says Spittle, "You want to call him or do I need to?"
"Done," I say, picking up my phone.
(continued from page 8)
In the ensuing days we are besieged by texts, emails and phone calls from flabbergasted listeners inquiring as to Greggo's whereabouts. "Where's Greggo?!" becomes a tiresome, relentless theme of our listener feedback, prompting me to once again seek Brian's counsel. This time I send - during our show, no less - an all-out distress email. With any mention of you-know-who strictly taboo, I tell Brian that our show's reputation, credibility and listenership are suffering possible irreparable damage. I ask for another face-to-face to address the increasingly dire situation.
Before I can meet with Brian, Fisher and I head to Daytona the next day. CBS' cost of eating Williams' ticket and buying my fill-in partner a last-minute seat? $1,400.
Now
there's your unvarnished truth.
While in Daytona there are social media rumors of a Williams return. But while he is - who knows where? - there are also, in Tweets and Direct Messages to listeners, a pile of gibberish faux communication that would lead one to believe the author has gone complete Mad Cow, is heavily medicated, or void of anything more than a remedial English foundation.
Feb. 21, 11:26 a.m., Lindsay Kimbrell (@LindsayK85) ...
where the heck have you been?! Hope all is well, ready to hear ya again on radio!
Williams' response on Feb. 23, 8:46 a.m.:
That sounds great ... though I'll,have to skip liquor...but..I'm a world champion iced tea drinker.
(continued from page 9)
Williams' seven-show absence is completely covert. Not he nor Rosenbaum say or write one syllable of an explanation to
RAGE. We are warned by Spittle not to take calls or return listeners' texts regarding the glaring void. Business as usual, though everyone realizes something is extremely unusual. It smells fishy. It feels wrong. It ... needs to end. One way or another.
But while Fisher takes his turn appealing to management's sensibilities via an email that details how his family is being harassed on Facebook and how he's being labeled a "backstabber" for merely warming Williams' empty seat, our return flight lands in Dallas on the morning of Feb. 25. You are now free to move about the cabin, and check your text from Spittle:
9 a.m.:
Greg is back in today so I told Mike we won't need him for today. Thanks
Wait, what? Just like that? Greggo's back? With zero explanation of why he left or where he went? And without an admission, much less a resolution, of his "I'll never work with Richie again" proclamation?
Instead of heading home I immediately text Spittle and detour from D/FW Airport toward CBS.
Just landed. Coming straight to office. We need to talk about this.
While waiting for a response I'd never receive from Spittle, I go around his back, over his head and into Brian's office. Suitcases in hand and blood pressure out of hand, I vent for 20 minutes. I tell him how unfair it is that we can't address on the air my partner's absence. I tell him how ridiculous it is that Williams - unlike me, and most other hard-working Americans I know - can miss 17 of 37 days and still have a job waiting for him at his leisure. I tell him I'm worried about trying to maintain, much less improve, our show's decent ratings while being plagued by daily uncertainty.
Ultimately, I am soothed by my boss' boss.
(continued from page 10)
"Everyone inside and even outside this building acknowledges and appreciates what you're dealing with and how you're dealing with it," Purdy tells me on the couch in his office. "You've been a real pro about all this, but it needs to continue. I know this isn't easy, but your play here is the high road."
At this point Brian stretches his left hand toward the ceiling and drops his right near the floor.
"Look, you're up here," he says with equal parts drama and clarity, "and your partner is down here. These things ... they tend to work themselves out in 60 days. Give me 60 days. Give me the high road. And this too will work itself out. You'll be up here, and this down here ... will go away."
Though comforted by assurances from the strongest, most authoritative voice in the building, I'm also pensive about being on the air with Williams for the first time since our blow-up almost two weeks ago.
"This will be your toughest day in radio," Brian forecasts. "Take the high road."
The calendar in my head now vividly counting down from 60 and the warning signs distinctly pointing me toward the seeming safety of the High Road, on the air promptly at 2 p.m. I ask Williams only a pinch of the questions we'd all like, and deserve, answers to. As to his hideout, he hints at everything and provides nothing, stumbling on about depression and surgery side-effects and the mysterious tests.
As for the total lack of communication with his show teammates during his absence, Williams mumbles "Yeah, I probably could've done a better job on that."
To at least one interested, experienced leader with a keen ear, Williams' latest round of excuses fails to impress, much less convince.
Don't believe a word he is saying, Bruce says to me in a text.
And I never will. He has ZERO credibility with me.
During Williams' re-entry show, I send Brian an email asking if my role sounded suitably "high-roadish." The next day he confirmed, "Well done yesterday. Thank you."
To this day I have no idea where Williams was or if anything was truly ailing him other than hurt feelings.
(continued from page 11)
After the show I stop in Spittle's office and Brian's blueprint is reinforced.
"I'm not saying it's going to be easy, Richie," he says. "I'm saying the high road is your best play. Your only play. Stick to that and this will work out for the best for you. Obviously this is not a perfect situation, but we're working on it. I can't tell you exactly what's going on behind the scenes, but I can tell you it'll get fixed."
Armed with a strategy and provided a finish line, I'm now more equipped and willing to absorb Williams' irrational antics. Like not knowing if he's going to show up for work. Or not knowing if he's going to show up sober. Or his constant crowing about being so cool and hip, despite his "last time to do something for the first time" being probably a good 10 years ago.
My inner monologue grew encouraged. Surely for 60 days I can mute my madness and survive. Help - albeit two long months down the High Road - is on the way.
Relatively invigorated, I even ask for a get-on-the-same-page meeting with Williams, Spittle, Tim and Brian, but am granted only an audience with Greggo and Spittle in the program director's office on Feb. 27. After this
confab in which Williams admits to our boss about lying to miss work and then tearfully tells me he has in fact still been abusing prescription drugs, I text Spittle to thank him for at least providing a cleansing venue.
Feb. 28:
Thanks for the meeting yesterday. Good to hear him fess up to some stuff. Hopefully it won't repeat now.
Responded Spittle,
Hopefully.
(continued from page 12)
But as the days dragged slower than refrigerated honey, the gold-bricked High Road deteriorated into a perilous path of charred and cratered asphalt as skinny as it was scary.
On one occasion Williams dared to challenge
my "integrity" on the air, while simultaneously lying to
RAGE. During a commercial break he claimed he needed Armen to provide him an email file of an earlier segment, because a listener supposedly missed it and wanted to catch up. In reality, we all knew he was sending the file to a friend who was helping him put together a demo tape for prospective jobs he was secretly applying for. "I'm so outta here," Williams would routinely say to listeners via Direct Message or even our Fan Text. Deep breath ...
High Road. Even though it was no secret that Spittle was a huge fan of office assistant Jake Springer and webmaster Jeff Burkett
, Williams would lambast the two in meetings and in email, calling Burkett "totally clueless and not on our side" and once writing - in an email to Spittle - that Jake was in "way over his head."
Though I feared Spittle would ingest those criticisms as
RAGE-endorsed and, not what they really were, solely Williams-spewed ... deep breath ...
High Road. Williams also began multiple times a day hinting on the air that he would soon be fired. Deep breath ...
High Road. And more than one time he begged me to trust him, trying to convince me to adopt his lethal strategy of "I'd much rather get fired doing "OUR" show ... rather than getting fired doing "GAVIN's" show."
My cunning scheme was, of course, "How 'bout let's not get fired at all?"
(continued from page 13)
Navigating this treacherous high-wire was eroding my patience and resolve faster than another Tony Romo late-game meltdown. Propping up Williams and shepherding him away from FCC violations while trying to keep
RAGE from devolving into something disjointed and unlistenable was making me anxious, agitated and angry. I was like the visitor to the insane asylum, convinced everyone in the joint was crazy but more and more suspicious that they were lucid and I was the one who was loony.
Though bound to the professional path constructed by Brian and Spittle, it dawned on me after management's curious indifference to Williams' Papa G's episode that this High Road might, in the end, railroad me straight into a ditch and out of a job. Was I being set up? Was this bumpy route actually a High Road to Hell?
For five months I had been waving red warning flags and shooting up emergency flares. Through documentation - emails and texts and messages and meetings and phone calls - I had alerted my supervisors as to my partner's detrimental behavior, misconduct and unprofessionalism. Time and again I got the nod of confirmation or a pat on the back. But more and more I felt like a lawyer who kept winning trials, only to have punishment for the defendant postponed until ...
High Road. But when Fan morning show co-host and long-time CBS employee Jasmine Sadry was hastily fired on March 20, it became clear the entire station was under Spittle's acute and intense evaluation.
(continued from page 14)
In one last pro-active move to get my complaints notated by everyone above me on the food chain, I call CBS Human Resources Director Jana Schunck on March 29.
"I don't want anybody fired," I tell her during a 12-minute call. "I just love CBS and my job and I want to protect myself. I want my complaints officially registered in my personnel file. I'm being told at every turn to take the high road. But my fear is that, when the time comes, I will be equally lumped in with a partner I'm being mandated to rise and stay above. I know you guys know what's going on here. You see his Direct Messages. Honestly, I feel like my future is better than our future together. Am I making sense?"
Schunck tells me emphatically, "I understand. You will be evaluated fairly and independently. You have my word."
Later that Friday I meet with Spittle in his office, to apologize for coming across combative and to re-calibrate the GPS on my job. He too makes a promise he will soon break.
"I want you to be a big part of this station moving forward," Spittle says. "I really like you on the air, though I think you're miscast. I think you'd be best as a No. 2 voice. Would you be open to that role?"
"Of course," I respond, genuinely agreeing with his assessment. "But any slot, any role. I just want to help The Fan win." The meeting ends amicably, sealed with a handshake.
I drove home that night knowing I had done everything in my power to strengthen my previously tenuous grip on saving the remaining 20 months of my three-year contract at 105.3 The Fan. But also leery that it might not be enough.
Radio can be a fickle bitch entangled within a slimy industry. My precarious perch had nothing to do with my individual performance and everything to do with my partner. Though we were rarely held to the same standard during our three-year run, suddenly I was an equal, indeed joined at Williams' degenerative hip.
I never made it to 60 days.
I was the baby, thrown out with Greggo's dirty bath water.
Continue reading part 4:
Sh*t Hits The Fan
