If there is any justice left in sports radio, on March 24, Dan McNeil, Harry Teinowitz and John Jurkovic will check in with poor Ben Finfer at the Cubs Convention.
After all, that’s how the “Afternoon Saloon,” the wildly successful afternoon sports talk show, unexpectedly ended its run on Friday, Jan. 16, 2009, on ESPN 1000. What if Finfer is still downtown cobbling together interviews with Micah Hoffpauir, Bobby Scales and Tom Gorzelanny?
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“We went to Ben at Cubs Convention and at like 5:45 p.m., we talked to him and he joked around and made fun of all the different things at the convention,” said Danny Zederman, who was a producer on the show at the time.
And that was the final segment for “Mac, Jurko and Harry,” a ratings juggernaut for the upstart station competing with the established brand, 670 The Score. The trio hasn’t been on the air together since. That will (hopefully) change on March 24 when ESPN 1000 hosts a 25th-anniversary show for the station at the House of Blues. Cue up “Thunderstruck” and “Who Do You Love?”
“When you think about 25 years at ESPN 1000 you couldn’t celebrate anything without celebrating Mac, Jurko and Harry because they’re the foundation this great radio station was built upon,” said Zederman, who is now the director of content for the station, which is no longer owned and operated by ESPN. It’s now a Good Karma Brands station.
A grizzled sports radio host, a comedian and an ex-football player. Three outsized personalities, trying to survive in one radio booth.
“Who saw it coming?” McNeil said to me years ago. “It was an odd mix.”
But it did work. Until it was canceled.
After that 2009 final show ended at 6 p.m., McNeil was brought into station GM Jim Pastor’s office to meet with him and Justin Craig, the program director. With a few months left on a high-paying contract, McNeil was told his services were no longer needed at the station he helped build.
“As they call me in, I’m checking, ‘OK, what did I say?’” McNeil told me in my 2018 oral history of the show. “And Jim said you’ve done a lot of great things both on the air and what your show’s success has meant to our sales department. It just can’t ever be overrestimated based on where we were at billing-wise when you guys started compared to where we are now. We’ll always be grateful for that, but we’re going to let you go. I paused before I said anything. I wanted to get my composure. All I asked was who made the decision and when.”
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McNeil thought, and still thinks, the decision was about money. The economy was in the toilet and the days of huge rating bonuses were ending. Pastor told me that was part of it, but not all of the reason. The combustible nature of the show, particularly with the hard-driving McNeil as the lead host, is what made it popular, but it was grating to those involved.
“I think it reached a point where it was no longer long-term,” Pastor told me for that oral history. “It wasn’t going to serve or be as successful as it once had. The tensions, like that, were going to be too strong.”
Regardless, after so much time, what remains are memories of how much fun the show was and how it changed Chicago sports radio. When I wrote about MJH in 2018, my oral history spiraled out of control into a 14,000-word opus that somehow required a cutting-room floor notebook as well.
The fans loved the nostalgia. Zederman said he assigned the story to new staff at the station to familiarize them with the show.
In 2009, McNeil went back to The Score for the second time. He left and came back again and was fired during his third stint with the station in 2020 and has been hosting a Friday show on WJOB in Hammond, Ind., along with podcasting and video duties for Rivers Casino for his old producer Adam Delevitt. He is working on a book about his career for Eckhartz Press.
Teinowitz lasted at ESPN 1000 until 2013. He most recently co-wrote a play about his time in rehab. Teinowitz has been dealing with multiple serious health issues. He just had surgery to replace heart valves and is waiting on a liver transplant. He is trying to make the reunion show.
Jurkovic, the ex-football player who was a couple years out of football when he started the show, has never left the station and hosts a mid-day show with Carmen DeFalco, who replaced McNeil as the show’s driver in 2009.
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While this show should be the highlight of the day, Zederman has been busy inviting old hosts, famous guests and other employees from the station’s 25-year history to join the all-day festivities. Finfer will be one of them, hopefully with some news on the 2009 Cubs.
(Photo of Dan McNeil, Harry Teinowitz and John Jurkovic: Provided by ESPN 1000)
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