Dollars and sense: What I didn't include in a 14,000-word oral history of the 'Mac, Jurko and Harry'

Dollars and sense is a weekly sports business and media column. Ill never forget where I was the first time I heard the Mac, Jurko and Harry show. I was stuck in traffic on the highway.

“Dollars and sense” is a weekly sports business and media column.

I’ll never forget where I was the first time I heard the “Mac, Jurko and Harry” show. I was stuck in traffic on the highway.

How many long commutes did Dan McNeil, Harry Teinowitz and John Jurkovic make slightly less miserable from early May 2001 through the first two weeks of 2009? How many people stayed in their cars when they finally got home to listen to “Who Do You Love?”

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Forget the ratings, think about the memories. Think about the joy they brought you as you inched down the Kennedy or Dan Ryan.

I believe I saw an ESPN 1000 billboard and turned to the station and was transfixed by these Chicago voices. I wasn’t yet a Chicago resident when I first heard this trio and I think it took me a year to figure out who was talking. (Edward McClelland, the author of the book “Speaking Midwestern” would have a field day with those accents.)

At the time, I was sleeping on a friend’s couch and driving from Lincoln Park to freaking Elgin to cover a boys volleyball game for the Daily Herald. It was a Thursday, April 24, 2003.

While it was an inauspicious start to my Chicago journalism career, I found a show that I listened to regularly for the next five-plus years, whether I was driving to the suburbs to cover games, coming back north from grad school in Hyde Park or during an absolutely miserable weekday commute from Northbrook in 2007 through 2009.

While we all remember the fights and the blow-ups, as I recounted in this oral history, one thing that probably isn’t talked about enough with that show was the wit of the three hosts. They weren’t yelling about heroes and goats every day or boring you with statistics. They were legitimately funny. They were smart. They were acerbic. They had their unique predilections, and that made them even more relatable. While everyone (including them) loves to talk about the confrontations of Mac and Harry, I always thought the show was at its best when they were laughing and singing together.


This classic photo of Dan McNeil (left), John Jurkovic (center) and Harry Teinowitz (right) was taken for an advertising campaign to brand the trio as the “Afternoon Saloon.” It was shot in the basement of the Chicago Chop House. (Courtesy of ESPN 1000)

“There’s too much seriousness and I think there’s absence of fraternity in sports radio today,” McNeil said to me back in 2017. “Everybody is out there to be smarter than the next guy, it seems. People want to hear people having fun. There’s not a lot of that anymore.”

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That is true and at the same time, I learned as much from them about Chicago sports than anywhere else. It’s the delivery that made learning enjoyable.

When McNeil got canned in January 2009, I was crestfallen for the city’s loss. But of course, I didn’t know the whole story. A few months later, I actually started writing at the brand-new ESPN Chicago, the ESPN Local experiment that lasted until 2015.

As I wrote at the end of the oral history, I started this story way back in January 2017. I interviewed Teinowitz, McNeil, Ben Finfer and Adam Delevitt. And then, I got busy. Every couple weeks, I would think about starting my transcription, but those three hours of recordings (with hours left to tape) were daunting. And I let it go.

I thought about restarting every week, only for life to get in the way. Then a couple weeks ago, I decided to pick it up. In that time, I did more interviews and transcribed about 32,000 words. Give or take. A lot of those words made the cut, as you know if you made your way through the oral history. But plenty did not. So here are some out takes and other thoughts about the Afternoon Saloon.

First up, former Afternoon Saloon producer Scot Bertram had plenty of thoughts about the story and the show on Twitter. After reading them, I was disappointed that I never reached out to him. It just shows you, take your time when doing a story like this.

Click through and read this entire thread from Bertram, who worked on the show in three different stints during its run.

This is such a fun piece by @jon_greenberg for @TheAthleticCHI on MJH. I need to add just a few thoughts. https://t.co/SAEc0hNofR

— Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) May 31, 2018

This picture absolutely should have been in the story.

In the end, this is how I choose to remember the show. pic.twitter.com/8Aiq7iFd9H

— Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) May 31, 2018

About those three heavyweights…

IT’S JUST LUNCH

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As anyone who has seen them can attest, Mac, Jurko and Harry have each lost a significant amount of weight since their no-salad-please days.

“One of the reasons I lost so much weight is I’m not sitting there eating restaurant comped food,” Teinowitz told me over a Dutch Baby at Walker Bros. in 2017. “I used to sit there on the computer and talk and here’s lasagna, here’s Italian beef here’s this, here’s that.”

Now, Teinowitz works out daily and eats salads for lunch.

As listeners remember, those three ate like emperors every day. Either restaurants sent food in for promotional purposes or the trio bought lunches for the staff. And they weren’t buying McDonald’s.

“My wife would get so mad,” Teinowitz said. “‘You spent $25 on Smith and Wollensky for lunch?’ She’s like, ‘That’s great. I had leftover salad.’ But Mac was making a shitload of money and Jurko had a shitload of money and I liked to eat. So we’d order in lunch from all these restaurants. And restaurants would always send stuff in.”

Current ESPN 1000 producers/hosts Adam Abdalla and Chris Bleck remember those days fondly.

My first internship in 2005. Learned a lot and gained 15 lbs https://t.co/lvE50BmLxD

— Adam Abdalla (@AdamAAbdalla) May 31, 2018

nothing like running $400 lunch orders, the good old days!

— Chris Bleck (@chrisbleck) May 31, 2018

“Well, I thought it was important to be magnanimous,” McNeil said. “Everyone knew, because it was well-publicized, that I was making a stupid amount of money. … So I would buy lunch. The last few years of that show, twice a week. Jurko would get it once a week. Harry would get it once a week and on Fridays we were in an establishment and we’d usually eat there. Yeah, we lived like kings. It was like Goodfellas. For us, there was no other way to live.”

SING US A SONG, YOU’RE THE PARODY MEN

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The parody songs on the Afternoon Saloon were often laugh-out-loud funny, but also serious business, which means they caused consternation among Mac and Harry. They were a big part of the spirit of the show.

“Those guys loved their parody songs,” Ben Finfer said. “Harry and Mac loved their parody songs. That was a big spot of contention for those two as well. Harry’s big thing was let’s write a song and have a professional singer come in and perform them. Mac’s philosophy was it should be our voices. So it would piss Harry off because he’s a terrible singer. His songs would suck and Mac would never want to play them. Harry was like, ‘That’s why I want to get a real singer in here!’ and Mac was like. ‘No, we’re not doing that.’ So they were fun. A lot of times, they were really shitty. Sometimes they were really funny. A lot of fun was them making fun of each other for how bad they were. Jurko tried a few and they were terrible. They made fun of him for those. Harry would come in at least once a week with a new parody song that Mac did not want to do. ‘No, we’re not doing that.’”

During my conversation with Teinowitz, McNeil texted him, because he heard a song that Harry once did a parody song to on the radio. It was something they still do, Teinowitz told me.

“The parody songs were great,” he said. “I never wanted to sing. If it was Bob Dylan, I would sing. The Cubs had three games in a row where the bullpen blew the game in the ninth inning. So to ‘Blowing in the Wind,’ I did ‘Blowing all the Wins.’ Mac wanted to sing every parody we ever did and you know he’s a better singer than I am. I’m the worst singer in the world. I can’t sing. We would write parodies and some of them were really good. Intricate. But we’ll text each other about ‘I heard this song, I heard that song.’”

The “Waddle & Silvy” show still carrys on that tradition, as did McNeil with his old partner Matt Spiegel, who is an actual singer. Last fall, Spiegel created a pretty ingenious project called “The Mitch Album.”

PURE JURKO

I think I just plain forgot to use this Harry anecdote about Jurko, but it’s basically the perfect snapshot of the Good Kid’s attitude about life.

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“Mitch [Rosen] one time said, ‘Jurko it’s 10 minutes before the show, I want you fired up, I want you revved up,’ I want you to be like it’s 10 minutes before a kickoff,’” Teinowitz said. “Jurko’s sitting there, he’s reading a sports section, he’s got a cup of coffee and he goes, ‘Mitch, 10 minutes before a kickoff, I’m reading the sports section with a cup of coffee.’”

Another side of Jurko, though, could come through. The day Denis Savard, a favorite of the show, was fired as Blackhawks coach in 2008, executive producer Danny Zederman told the guys they could talk about Savard, but admonished them — as he still likes to do with his hosts — not to talk too much hockey.

“Jurko stood up, grabbed the phone off his desk, ripped it out of the wall and threw it across the room,” Zederman said. “It sailed over my head and hit the wall. We still have a hole in the wall. I don’t know if tensions were high with the show or if he was in a mood or was upset about Savy.”

But as usual with Jurko, it took like 10 minutes for everything to get smoothed over.

‘I ACTUALLY WAS VERY WRONG ABOUT SEAN SALISBURY’

Nowadays, it’s hard to believe that Mac, Jurko and Harry were basically carrying the station (aside from the games they carried) from a local angle until Marc Silverman and Tom Waddle moved into the mid-day slot in 2007. Yes, “Mike & Mike” was a ratings powerhouse, but it was over at, what, 9 a.m.? Dan Patrick’s show was pretty good, but a better lead-in would have probably been nice.

“I can rip Mac a little bit for this,” original producer and current Bears reporter and national radio host Jeff Dickerson told me. “He would complain about these horrible lead-ins, but he had Tony Kornheiser and Dan Patrick, some of the biggest names in the business. Those are real lead-ins. No, they weren’t the Monsters talking Chicago sports all the time. Mac had a feud with Tony that didn’t end well, but he was friendly with Dan Patrick, that was better.”

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Before “Waddle & Silvy” moved to the first of their two ridiculously popular daytime shifts, the station tried out a tandem of Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Rosenbloom and ESPN football yelling guy Sean Salisbury for their post-“Mike & Mike” show in 2006. It did not go well.

“‘Salisbury and Rosenbloom’ is probably the worst sports talk radio show of all time,” Finfer said.

For one thing, Salisbury did most of his shows from either his Dallas home or in Bristol. For another, who thought it was a good idea to have Salisbury talking about, say, the Bulls?

“I like Steve Rosenbloom a lot,” Teinowitz said. “I think he’s very funny. I don’t think people realize how hard it is to do what he does every day. He called me up one day. He said, ‘What the hell do I do? This guy said he’s going to be here all the time and he’s never here.’ [Salisbury] was losing money. It was in his contract that if he wasn’t there so many days a month they wouldn’t have to pay him that much and he didn’t care. He would be on the phone during segments.”

But when Salisbury was in town, people at the station liked him. He wasn’t a good Chicago radio host, but at least he liked to hang out.

“I remember one night Salisbury said, ‘Let’s go out,’ just the two of us and we went to some club,” Teinowitz said. “I wanted to go to a bar. We went to some club and Mark Malone meets us out when he was doing sports on Channel 2. He said, ‘I didn’t have time to get ready’ and he reaches out into his coat pocket and brings out a fancy pen case and he opens it up and it’s his earring. He’s putting in his earring. What is that?”

OK, that’s more of a Mark Malone story. But mention that show to anyone in the sports radio industry, and you’ll get a chuckle.

“I actually was very wrong on Sean Salisbury,” McNeil said. “I thought he was going to be great. I had no idea he was as cuckoo as he is.”


Jurko, Harry and Mac surround former Bears receiver Tom Waddle at Radio Row at the Super Bowl. Waddle was preparing to join the station, where he has incredible success with Marc Silverman in the Afternoon Saloon’s old spot. (Courtesy of ESPN 1000)

The Saloon actually did have a decent lead-in for most of 2004, when Bob Snyder, the station’s GM at the time, hired Jay Mariotti, the bombastic Sun-Times columnist and Around The Horn talking head. Mariotti was hired in February and fired in late December. The Fall 2004 Arbitron book showed him beating The Score, so he wasn’t let go for ratings. Mariotti insinuated in a Dec. 29, 2004 Tribune article (and like 5,000 more times in his own columns, tweets and podcasts) that Bulls and White Sox controlling owner Jerry Reinsdorf leaned on ESPN to get his biggest critic off the air. After all, ESPN 1000 was the home for both teams at the time. At the time, ESPN wouldn’t comment on it. But…

“I think that’s probably what ended up getting me fired,” Snyder told me. “I stuck to my guns on Mariotti. Jerry complained, as is his right. When Jerry complains, he talks to Bob Iger or Michael Eisner. Someone probably called my boss and said, ‘Who’s this guy Snyder pissing off Reinsdorf?’

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“[Reinsdorf] may have been the reason I got fired in 2004, but the first very call I got was from him,” Snyder said. “The next day we had lunch at the Standard Club. I’ll forever remember that graciousness. It stayed with me.”

In any event, that marriage probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer given the egos involved. McNeil tried to make peace with Mariotti by offering to co-host his show one day, but Mariotti canceled at the last second, as McNeil remembered.

THE SERIOUS STUFF

It’s pretty well known now that both McNeil and Teinowitz had addiction problems during the show’s run, but their personal troubles got more serious after the show ended.

McNeil took numerous leaves of absence — which frustrated his partner and producers — when he hosted the “McNeil And Spiegel Show” on The Score from 2009-14. He later shared that he suffered from depression and an addiction to pain medication, for which he got help. When we talked in 2017, McNeil said he was doing better. When I talked to him recently, he sounded better.

“It was smart to take time off,” he said. “I wasn’t healthy. I told Matt when we started that I thought it would be odd if I wanted to do more than five years. Five years was as long of a shelf live as I thought a radio show should go. That’s what we worked together, five years.”

How was he doing with his recovery? I asked.

“Well ‘it works if you work it,’ like the cliche says,” he said in 2017. “Everybody sees it as some point in their life. And it can be real ugly. The thing about it for me was I had it a lot easier than a lot of other people, because my low wasn’t as low as other people get. My low was extreme withdrawal. Some people go broke, some people crash cars, some people destroy relationships that are the most meaningful. I sit in the basement and not want to be around anybody. I’m an extreme isolationist when I’m abusing. That was the worst of it, have to talk on the radio and you don’t want to be around anybody. It required an enormous amount of digging from the toes to try to get it up for the show. I didn’t want to be there mentally.”

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McNeil returned to the airwaves in March and it turned out it was going to be at the expense of Spiegel, which obviously fractured their longtime friendship. McNeil, who was briefly selling cars, is now working with Spiegel’s old partner in Danny Parkins, an Afternoon Saloon intern himself.

“Had it not been for Jimmy deCastro being empowered at Entercom, I would probably still be shining a chair with my ass at Webb Ford, asking people if they wanted to go zero percent over 72 months,” McNeil said.

And then, just as he arrived, he lost his meal ticket: his voice. McNeil thought he had laryngitis for weeks, before a doctor properly diagnosed him with vocal cord paralysis. A series of painful collagen gel injections into his larynx got him back on his feet. But for a little bit, it looked bad.

“For the first time in my life, I wondered if it was going to be something like that, that contributed to writing the final chapter,” he said. “The whole reason I was excited about coming back was to write a better final chapter, so that’s what I’m in the process of trying to do right now.”

As for Teinowitz, his infamous DUI in Skokie in 2011 was very serious, but in true Harry fashion, it was also kind of funny and made for radio fodder on both his station and on McNeil’s show on The Score. According to a police report, Teinowitz blamed the lingering smell of marijuana in his car on a mysterious valet and then asked to speak to the mayor of Skokie, George Van Dusen. (He really knew him.)

Teinowitz entered treatment shortly after that incident, for which he apologized on the air, and it was for the best. Both Jurkovic and McNeil told me stories about Teinowitz’s drinking prowess — “You have to give him a spot in the Jewish Drinking Hall of Fame,” McNeil said. “It’s a small building.” —  and while it’s clear Harry excelled as the life of the party, he needed a change. While Teinowitz doesn’t have the regular radio show that he deserves, at least he’s still with us, waiting on the day the NFL adopts a Monday Night Football doubleheader schedule and closer quarterbacks.

“Jurko told him to stop drinking,” McNeil said. “He kept repeating it, ‘Stop drinking. Stop drinking.’ Ultimately he wound up stopping drinking. That arrest saved his life. He’s admitted that to me, I don’t know if he’s told you that. He’s admitted that to me.”

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AFTERNOON SALOON 2018?

Could this show work today? Thoughts on the subject are mixed.

During a breakfast with Jurkovic and his agent Bryan Harlan, the latter thought the show absolutely should be on the air. Then again, Harlan represents McNeil and Jurkovic.

“I wonder about that,” Finfer said. “I don’t think the show would work now. I think it’s probably just because that whole fraternity house mentality wouldn’t fly as much anymore in this day and age. I don’t think they would get away with as many things as they did back then.”

Particularly working for an ESPN station. How the heck did they get away with so much anyway?

“Bristol was much more tolerant of it than you realize,” ESPN 1000 vice president and general manager Jim Pastor told me. “And, in part, because they weren’t listening every day, right? Because if there was ever a line that was crossed or anything, I’m not sure they were always fully aware of it. But they knew the success it was having and the mark it was making in Chicago and for that, they were very proud, because the station really made a name for itself around the show.”

The show never focused on politics or “issues,” and really, at that time, how many sports talk shows did? McNeil said the focus on sports and fun was intentional, but admitted he would have waived that rule during the 2016 election and its aftermath. Mac and Jurko arguing about politics would have made for interesting radio.

And about politics…

“Here’s a quick version of this story,” Zederman told me in a phone conversation. “Every year we did around holiday time, Mac, Jurko and Harry would take the producers for a show meal, usually at the Chicago Chop House, Mac’s favorite place. I think it was December ’07 or January ’08 and Obama’s running for president. His campaign is rolling and we’re at the Chop House and Mac looks at me seriously and says, ‘You know Danny, I’d like you to get Obama on the show.’ Finfer is there and he says, ‘Mac, you know, he’s running for president.’ He said, ‘I know, but he’s from Chicago. I know he knows us. He probably listens to us. So I’d like to get him on the air.’ I didn’t know what to say. At this point my relationship with Mac was kind of rocky. He liked to ride me a lot. I knew we were not going to get this guy running for president on the air, but I’m not going to look at Mac and say, ‘No shot.’ As we were walking out, Ben just said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’”

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There’s still plenty I’ve left out, like the Bears’ Super Bowl season where the show really thrived, the story of Mac pissing in, and spilling, a coffee cup in the studio. (McNeil disputes he spilled it, while Teinowitz and a second source say he did.) There was a silly, raunchy on-air conversation that resulted in the entire show being suspended. That story is better told in person than in print and today they’d totally be fired in a heartbeat. And, of course, there was Harry’s 2009 horse accident that happened after Mac was fired.

If you see these three guys out and about, just ask them about anything. They love to talk. As Jurko said, it’s their gift.

(Top photo: Courtesy of ESPN 1000)

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