Steve Politziner, left, and Craig Karmazin: nimble and creative.
This is March, the heart of basketball season. But you wouldn’t know it by listening to sports talk radio, which remains consumed by the soap opera of the Green Bay Packers and their drama-obsessed quarterback. Hints dropped by Aaron Rodgers and team executives about the team’s future continue to provide daily fodder for radio shows across the state.
That’s certainly true on 100.5 FM, the home of ESPN Madison, where the 9 a.m.-noon show, Wilde and Tausch, is hosted by longtime Packers beat writer Jason Wilde and Mark Tauscher, who played offensive line for the Badgers and had an 11-year career in Green Bay. But when Tauscher joins the show on March 2, what he really wants to talk about is airplane etiquette.
“You should always put your bag on the opposite side of where you’re sitting, so you can grab and go,” Tauscher says. “You don’t need to turn and twirl.”
Like a practiced improviser, producer Jesse Nelson immediately slides into “yes, and” mode.
“I think the most uncomfortable thing, when you’re on the plane, is when you’re reaching up to get your bag…” Nelson offers, before Tauscher interrupts, laughing: “And they can see your midriff?”
It’s the kind of exchange that wouldn’t have been out of place on the station 20-plus years ago, when childhood friends Craig Karmazin and Steve Politziner moved to town from New Jersey to produce their own show while building Good Karma Broadcasting, the company they started with stations in Beaver Dam, Columbus and Madison. Quality of The Steve and Craig Show could be uneven, with guests canceling and equipment malfunctioning, but the “fake it ‘til you make it” style proved irresistible to listeners looking for authentic conversations.
“Our focus is on transparency, real names, real voices. If you try to mess with that, we just didn’t think it was going to be effective or relatable and our feeling is always to just be relatable,” Politziner says from West Palm Beach, Florida, where he moved to oversee a station Good Karma bought 20 years ago. “I do think it was in many ways like a microcosm of the company. You’re figuring a lot of things out on the fly and inviting people to be part of figuring it out.”
Karmazin and Politziner are CEO and president, respectively, of a company that now owns the ESPN Radio affiliates in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, among other markets, including Beaver Dam. And their programming in Madison, which includes several former Badgers athletes and Olympic curler Matt Hamilton, still allows hosts to stray from the typical sports talk formulas.
“In a digital content world, the idea of not being afraid to fail and not being afraid to try things is a really important thing for us because we’re still a tiny company in the media landscape,” Karmazin says. “If we’re not more nimble, if we’re not more creative, we’re not going to be able to be successful.”
In an interview with the pair 20 years ago in Isthmus, Karmazin stressed that their goal wasn’t to compete with the hot takes on other stations, but “to get people to laugh on their way home from work.” It’s refreshing to see that their success hasn’t pulled them away from the humor and fun that should accompany the sports business.
