* Mike and The Mad Dog: Goodbye and good luck

Mad Dog, left, and Mike: partners no more

Fans of sports talk radio in the New York area — and I am not one — are mourning the “loss” of their favorite team from WFAN.

Mike (Francesa) and the Mad Dog (Chris Russo) had been together since 1989, annoying the hell out of me on the rare occasion that I would listen to them ever since. Opinionated, arrogant (even more so when their prognostications or assertions were wrong), and aurally unpleasant, I never could figure out there popularity.

Bryan Curtis published this assessment of the team in “The Week in Review” section of today’s NY Times. Among the “highights”:

“Both thought their opinions were valuable enough that they should be broadcast without interference by the other guy.”
“Francesa, round and toad-like, was the more oracular of the pair, able to instantly summon obscure sports facts. (He had trained as a researcher at CBS.) Russo, who was skinny and vibrated like an old radiator, was no slouch: he was the product of a boarding school education and an eager student of the sports pages.” With a personality like his, no wonder his parents sent him to boarding school.
““Mike and the Mad Dog” resisted the peppy production values that have crept into popular radio shows like ESPN’s “Mike and Mike in the Morning” (no relation) and the “Jim Rome Show.” Most sports radio shows attempt to disguise the banality of the enterprise; Mike and the Mad Dog exulted in it.” Peppy production values? This is radio; how much production value can there be?
“Occasionally, the nonsports world would intrude. Though they rarely laid down a cultural reference more ambitious than Bruce Springsteen, long-time listeners note that Francesa and Russo, in their inimitably clumsy way, dealt with the Sept. 11 attacks, the Virginia Tech shootings, and the competing theories around the J.F.K. assassination (an obsession of Francesa’s). This June, it was up to Francesa to come on the air and announce that NBC’s Tim Russert had (as he phrased it) “dropped dead” in his Washington studio.” Yeah, that Francesa was always a classy guy.
“In a strange way, the end of “Mike and the Mad Dog” is not an altogether sad occasion.” Not at all, to me at least.