Espn Radio Plays Hardball Over Rose Bowl Spokane-Area Fans Denied Home-Grown WSU Broadcast

Washington State and Michigan are four weeks away from their Rose Bowl confrontation but a pretty good game has already heated up between broadcast rivals.

Radio rights to the Jan. 1 game belong to ESPN and its affiliate stations, which in Spokane is KGA.

That puts KXLY, the Cougar station in Spokane, on the sidelines except for pre-game and post-game programming.

So, if you happen to be driving through the most remote corners of the Canadian prairies on Jan. 1, chances are you’ll be able to pick up the Cougars in the Rose Bowl. Supertalk 1510-AM, KGA, the home of Spokane Chiefs hockey, is heard throughout Alberta, many parts of Saskatchewan and western Manitoba.

You’ll find the game locally, but you won’t find the play-by-play of Bob Robertson. Robertson, for three decades the voice of the Cougars, will be heard on the Crimson and Gray flagship station, KJR in Seattle, and on the campus radio station in Pullman, KWSU 1250-AM.

Otherwise, the Rose Bowl belongs to KGA and other ESPN affiliates.

“We signed up without knowing the Cougars would be in it, but hoping they would be,” said Dean Allen, KGA’s program director.

Look at it this way, Allen said. “You won’t have to listen to Paul Sorensen.”

Sorensen is the unabashedly pro-WSU analyst on the Cougar radio network.

Dave Iverson of Broadcast Inc. in Seattle, which owns the rights to Washington State football, fired back.

“Who’s doing the game for ESPN?” Iverson said.

Charlie Steiner will do play-by-play for ESPN radio, according to Allen. Todd Christensen is the analyst.

“Oh gawd,” Iverson said.

“The problem for most Cougar fans is that, as a national broadcast, they’ll be doing the game from the standpoint of Michigan playing for the national championship,” said Linda Keck of the WSU sports information office. “Who in Washington really cares about that?”

KGA has planned a locally produced pre-game show at 1 p.m., with Chuck DeBruin and Craig West, prior to ESPN’s pre-game programming at 1:30, Allen said.

A replay of Robertson’s call of the game has been discussed for Jan. 4 on KXLY, Iverson added.

“KXLY will have the Cougar Road Show and extensive locker-room coverage,” Iverson said. “They just won’t carry the game. I tried to get ESPN to understand that they’d get more listeners for their commercials if we put the game on in Spokane and ran their commercials for them.”

That request was turned down “by some guy in Dallas,” Iverson said.

Brian Paul, program director at KXLY, said, “For me, this raises the question of why KJR is the flagship station. This (not having the Rose Bowl) is the last thing we had on our minds. I don’t think it’s fair to Robertson or to Cougar fans here who finally hit paydirt after suffering for so many years.”

It’s not the first time that Robertson has been shut out of an important WSU football event.

“When the Cougars went to the Aloha, Copper and Alamo bowls, we were allowed to clear the whole state,” Iverson said. “But when the Cougars went to their first bowl in the modern era, the Holiday Bowl, Bob didn’t do that one.

“We’re not the first to run into this. This (a national broadcast pre-empting a local feed) created problems in Wisconsin a couple of years ago (when the Badgers went to their first Rose Bowl since 1962). And, hey, they’re not happy about this in Michigan, either.”

Not everybody is unhappy. Allen at KGA is ecstatic.

“Response was great,” he said. “It (advertising spots) sold out in one day. It’s a hot commodity.”

, DataTimes