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Andy Musser was an unlikely sports-talk host

I don't listen to talk radio for the same reasons I don't eat broccoli. It's got no taste and it gives me indigestion.

I don't listen to talk radio for the same reasons I don't eat broccoli. It's got no taste and it gives me indigestion.

My grandmother could stomach it. In her last days, amid the spirit-numbing lethargy of a nursing home, she found comfort in radio talk shows, the political ones. They occupied her time and her mind. But they also darkened her heart.

It wasn't entirely her fault. On many of those shows, callous hosts pandered to an old woman's fears, stoked her prejudices, turned legitimate doubts into rock-hard certainties.

Information and entertainment weren't enough. To really engage an audience, radio executives came to understand, it was necessary to infuriate, titillate, castigate.

The political-talk format proved commercially successful, so successful that it soon was adapted for sports.

What began as an outlet for hot-stove talk degenerated rapidly. Sports-talk too became a forum for topics and takes aimed at creating more controversy, more outrage, more listeners.

"If you're not getting in trouble once in a while," Traug Keller, who runs ESPN Radio, said in 2015, "you're not pushing things enough,"

Given its current iteration, it's interesting to recall that sports-talk radio's origins were rather mild.

When the genre debuted in 1964 with Bill Mazer's nightly sports call-in show on New York's WNBC-AM, the talk terrain was familiar and tame. Trades were proposed and statistics dissected. Both hosts and callers shared in the hero worship that then pervaded sports and sports journalism.

At that time in Philadelphia, 50,000-watt WCAU-AM's programming consisted of talk shows and sporting events, but no dedicated combination of the two.

The talk was mostly innocent. Hosts like Ed Harvey, Bob Menefee, and Jack McKinney occasionally ventured into sports or politics, but more often the discussions focused on life's minutia. Menefee, for example, once spent days bemoaning an uncomfortable pair of wing tips.

Since radio formatting is extremely imitative, WCAU was soon drawn to the sports-talk trend, creating a nightly show hosted by Andy Musser, their lead Eagles broadcaster.

"It's safe to say that Andy's show was one of the very first . . . in the nation," said Gerry Wilkinson, CEO of the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia.

A low-key announcer from Central Pennsylvania, Musser was a 27-year-old Syracuse graduate when 'CAU hired him in 1965.

For the next 3½ decades, he would be a broadcaster for the Eagles, Chicago Bears, 76ers, Chicago Bulls, New York Knicks, Villanova basketball and, most notably, the Phillies.

Musser was as square as the big-collared, loud-plaid, polyester clothes he favored. He was polite and polished and there wasn't a mean bone in an unusually bony physique.

He was, in other words, a most unlikely sports-talk radio host, which might be why so few Philadelphians today remember his pioneering show.

"His show wasn't confrontational," recalled Chris Wheeler, the former Phillies announcer who was an intern on Musser's show. "Andy didn't go on there each day with three topics meant to stir the [conversational pot]. It was affable. He was very versed in basketball. He'd done the Eagles. He loved baseball. He could talk those sports."

I listened regularly then and as civil as it might have been, it wasn't always compelling radio. Musser was a simple straight-shooter who, if the subject wasn't hot enough, could slip into a bland routine. If he had a guest, it was usually the same curmudgeonly, 70-something ex-baseball player.

Jimmy Dykes, whose big-league career as a player and manager had stretched from 1918 to 1961, was an honors graduate of baseball's old school.

He was feisty, crusty, and full of stories. The Delaware County native hid that first quality on the air, but relied heavily on the second and third.

"Jimmy had so many stories," said Wheeler. "I used to ride with Andy and him from the radio station to Connie Mack Stadium. He'd have this big cigar in his mouth and he'd be telling all these Babe Ruth stories."

When Musser became a regular part of the Phillies broadcast team in 1976, 'CAU brought in sports-talk hosts like Don Henderson and Steve Fredericks.

The genre's explosion came a decade later, in the late-1980s, when radio stations such as New York's WFAN and Philly's WIP made the switch to 24 hours of sports-talk.

Now, in virtually every metropolitan area in America, there are competing sports-talk stations. As their numbers and the resulting competition have increased, their subject matter has broadened and coarsened.

There are smart, gifted people in sports-talk. The best and most successful of them learn to create personas that inspire love and loathing in equal quantities.

Andy Musser was just plain old Andy Musser. He wasn't always captivating. His ratings never went through the roof. But he was earnest and kind and that counted for something.

He died in 2012. By then, cable TV, sadly, had learned to emulate talk-radio.

Turn on any of ESPN's multiple channels any time of day and you're as likely to see a debate - too often a blatantly contrived debate - as a sporting event.

Locally, CSN Philly has taken the plunge too. In recent months, the Comcast-owned sports network has eliminated one newscast and trimmed another to make room for more "analysis and discussion among hosts."

For those unfamiliar with TV jargon, that translates to "staged arguments."

The electronic media continue to expand and commodify the American street corner on which kids used to argue sports.

It's a strategy that's made fortunes for them and their celebrity hosts. But it's helped to impoverish us, the ordinary citizens of what was once a civil nation.

ffitzpatrick@phillynews.com

@philafitz