Mariotti: "Chicago a better place without North"

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: Chicago a better place without North : End of controversial Score host's reign a victory for decency : : We only can hope that the end of Mike North is the beginning of decency, professionalism and couth in Chicago sports radio. Oh, some desperate shop might hire him, hoping to capitalize on name recognition at the expense of dignity and wobbling ratings, but so what. This is a day of civic celebration, a chance for sanity and lucidity to reign again in a racket filled with smut. : The guy lost me when he used to host "Hug A Black Day," followed by "Hug A Jew Day," followed by "Hug A Hispanic Day." He proceeded to lose me more when he made a clown of himself at press conferences and engaged a police officer in crude trash talk in New Orleans, an incident I observed in the French Quarter with fellow Sun-Timesman Mike Mulligan at a Super Bowl. Absurdly, his antics won him a $1.5-million-a-year deal at WSCR-AM, which placed him ahead of Ben Wallace and Cedric Benson as the most overpaid performer in local sports history. : At last, his bosses came to their senses and sought to slash his salary in half, realizing his quarterly numbers didn't begin to justify his wage and his public-relations messes. He rejected the offer last Friday. It was the best favor North ever has done for his hometown, prompting CBS Radio to yank the contract and leave him without work. : This is what happens when visionary radio executives pull a schmo out of a hot-dog stand and turn him into a talk-show host. They dumb-down the city's intelligence quotient, narrow its vocabulary to a ninth-grade level and allow insensitivity to reign. Remember the day when he mimicked brain-damaged Terri Schiavo in her final hours? It was typical of North's imbecilic attempts to survive in the morning-drive market, a colossal mistake by Score executives who thought he could talk politics and hard news. Hell, he had enough time earning credibility on sports through the years. Eventually, his product-of-the-streets act was exposed as demeaning to the city, and the listeners tuned him out, opting for a national alternative in America's most parochial sports town. : Mike North, voice of Chicago? : Only if we're the dopiest city in the land, which we're not. : On his Web site Tuesday night, North hailed his long career at the Score as a triumph. "I didn't get a chance to say goodbye so here goes," he wrote to his listeners. "I wanted to say my 16 1/2 years with the Score were awesome. When I was on the air, it was unreal. To be able to entertain, have fun and sometimes get serious ... well you never knew what would happen on a daily basis. I want to thank all the listeners and callers who not only laughed at me but with me." : Problem was, no one laughed at the end. We just cringed, especially the day when he and Ozzie Guillen -- the only guy in town with a bigger mouth -- locked horns during North's show on the White Sox' flagship station. When the Blizzard called in and showered North with expletives, angry that the host was supporting A.J. Pierzynski on a day when backup Toby Hall was in the lineup, North fired back and told Guillen to watch his language. This would be the sports equivalent of George Carlin duct-taping Chris Rock's mouth. "Hey, Ozzie, clean up your mouth. Clean up your damn mouth when you're talking on the radio and talking to me," North shouted. "Have a little respect, all right? Don't go talking to me like you're talking down to somebody. Don't you ever talk down to me. Don't ever talk to me like I'm some ... Yeah, you'd better hang up the damn phone." : It happened last summer. And it will be remembered as the day North lost his leverage. Before then, he was enabled by Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, who appreciated how a street kid like himself -- North from Senn High, Jerry from the same Brooklyn high school as Al Davis (hmmm) -- battled some of Reinsdorf's media enemies. But when North went after the Blizzard, Jerry's beloved manager, he seemed to lose footing at a station where the program director's basic job is to shine Reinsdorf's shoes and serve his every whim. It also didn't help North that he was slurring ethnic groups at a time whenReinsdorf was working as co-chairman of Major League Baseball's Equal Opportunity Committee. When the Sox were serving diversity by employing an African-American general manager and a Latin manager, North was on the team flagship angering the Asian community. : The HBO crew interviewed me as part of an HBO special on the sports media. When the producers came to town and taped North, he thought he would be featured positively among the nation's leading talk hosts, as he told the Sun-Times' Bob Feder. Little did he know they were coming to depict him as a national embarrassment. The HBO crew came to interview me about the ills of local sports radio, and every time one of my comments was run during the show, it was accompanied by North's ill behavior. If he didn't know it was over then, he should have. : What's sad is that North, deep down, has a heart somewhere. He devotes countless hours to charity. He loves dogs. His wife is a sweetheart. So why turn into such a cold-blooded lout on the air? It's one thing to criticize the local sports teams, which he did when it was convenient to his bank account and political agenda. But he was cruel and ignorant when it came to race, like a caveman from the last century who never evolved with the times. Michael Holley, a prominent African-American writer and sports-talk host in Boston, spent a brief time in Chicago as a Tribune sports columnist. To this day, he is stunned by North's racial viewpoints and says he couldn't survive in many other towns. : So why did Chicago tolerate him for 16 1/2 years? And why would another station possibly hire him? Because radio executives generally are idiots who abandon common sense and good taste in their hunger for ratings. Why do you think Don Imus landed another gig after his "nappy-headed hos" furor? A desperate station, WABC-AM in New York, shamelessly wanted to attract a few listeners to an Imus comeback. That backfired Monday, when Imus went down the crooked racial path again -- after all those weepy and sensitive apologies to the Rutgers women's basketball team -- with a regretful commentary about Pacman Jones' run-ins with the law. : "What color is he?" Imus asked. : "African-American," he was told by sportscaster Warner Wolf. : "There you go. Now we know," Imus said. : He claims he was trying to defend Jones, via sarcasm, as a victim. : "What people should be outraged about is that they arrest blacks for no reason," he said Tuesday. "I mean, there's no reason to arrest this kid six times. Maybe he did something once, but everyone does something once." : Please. If Imus didn't have a lengthy record of racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism and anti-humanity, he might have some credibility. Truth is, he should be nowhere near a microphone. : Nor should Mike North, for that matter. I'd like to think the market has learned from its 16 1/2-year mistake. I'd like to think no radio programmer will repeat the mistake. For now, I will listen to replacements Mulligan and Brian Hanley talk about sports -- sports! -- and cling to hope. : (Sun-Times)

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