Angelo Cataldi: My years as one of the loudest voices in Philly sports

This essay is adapted from the book “LOUD: How a Shy Nerd Came to Philadelphia and Turned up the Volume in the Most Passionate Sports City in America” by Angelo Cataldi, which will be published Tuesday by Triumph Books.

“Booooooo! Booooooo! Booooooo!”

Until the moment when that groundswell of rage shook the foundation at Madison Square Garden at the 1999 NFL Draft, it hadn’t occurred to me that this whole idea was incredibly stupid.

I had gathered together 30 of the loudest, grungiest fans of the Philadelphia Eagles — a team known for its loud, grungy fans — to welcome Ricky Williams to Philadelphia when he was claimed with the second pick in the first round.

OK, genius. What happens if the Eagles choose someone else?

None of us at the draft had ever considered that possibility until Commissioner Paul Tagliabue announced, “With the second pick, the Philadelphia Eagles select ... Donovan McNabb, quarterback, Syracuse University.”

Oops. The response was organic, and perplexing. To this day, a quarter‐century later, it ranks among the loudest outbursts in draft history.

Of course, the person most perplexed was McNabb himself, who had labored most of his life for this moment. His brutal and unexpected introduction to the NFL that day in New York left a wound that has never fully healed.

At the time, I was able to rationalize those boos by handing most of the blame to the dynamic and sports‐obsessed mayor of Philadelphia, Ed Rendell. After all, he started the ball rolling (right over McNabb) when he called into my sports radio show on WIP a month before the draft and began the campaign for Williams, a gifted running back with a social anxiety disorder which he managed with frequent use of marijuana.

Rendell helped to get us the 30 tickets to the draft at a time when it was just beginning to grow into a TV event on ESPN. The mayor called our show every week or so to fan the flames of the populace as we carefully chose the 30 social outcasts who would represent our proud sports city.

Many years later, Rendell confided to me that he realized a day or two before the draft that the plan could go haywire if the Eagles chose someone else, but by then it was too late. There is no stopping Philadelphia sports fans once they get started. Ask the patrons who pelted J.D. Drew in center field with batteries after he shunned Philadelphia for St. Louis, or ask the wacko who shot a flare gun across the field and into the stands during a Monday Night Football game at Veterans Stadium, or, yes, ask the zealots who infamously pelted Santa Claus with snowballs.

In retrospect, the entire 1999 draft adventure was doomed before the bus rolled out from our studios at Fifth and Callowhill Streets for the 90‐mile mission on that cloudy day in late April. When we did the final count, we were missing our 30th day‐tripper. “Dirty 29″ just doesn’t have the same ring to it, so we recruited a grubby man who was experiencing homelessness on the corner a block from the station with the promise of free food and drink. He ate and drank like a king.

Meanwhile, the other 29 sports enthusiasts became increasingly, er, enthusiastic as we made our way up the New Jersey Turnpike. No alcohol was provided on the bus — by order of the WIP lawyers — but it’s a safe bet that many of the fans smuggled in their favorite beverages. As I recall, most appeared to be legally drunk before we even crossed the New York state line.

We arrived at the draft, waited two hours in line before the doors opened, and were placed in ideal seats to see all the action. ESPN must have had an inkling something might happen with these Philadelphia nitwits that would spike interest in the draft.

The ensuing boo has echoed through all these years — a staple for decades as the best advertisement on ESPN for the unpredictable nature of the event. It began another round of national debates about how uncivilized Philadelphia sports fans were, and we were depicted — accurately — as a collection of classless boobs.

As you probably know, even the goal of our mission was misguided. McNabb became the best quarterback in Eagles history, and Williams walked away in a cloud of pot smoke after a good, but not great, NFL career.

At the same time, we learned something about McNabb that predicted his failure to win a Super Bowl. His repeated refusal to come on my show over the years tells me he still holds a grudge about that draft day, which illustrates how unaccepting he would always be of adversity. He had magical feet, a powerful arm, and a sensitive soul — far too sensitive for a demanding city like Philadelphia.

In his only Super Bowl appearance, he vomited during a drive in the fourth quarter that consumed too much of the clock in a devastating three‐point loss to the New England Patriots.

He choked. Literally.

McNabb denies that moment of weakness took place, despite the eyewitness reports of teammates (including three who came on my show to say it happened). Since then, he ran out of time in Philly, bombed in Washington and Minnesota, and ended his career with no rings and no bigger regret than how we treated him on his first day as an Eagle.

A few years after the debacle in New York, he agreed to appear as a guest on my TV show, Angelo and Company, on Comcast SportsNet — a regional network that featured the games of the Phillies, Flyers, and 76ers. Since he had boycotted my radio show, I was stunned when he actually arrived at the TV studio.

We shook hands briefly, he took his place at the broadcast desk, and graciously answered questions. Early in the interview, I apologized for my stupidity at the 1999 draft, and he accepted my words of solace with a pained smile. Then we went to break. His tepid grin vanished. Despite my efforts to engage in small talk — never one of my strengths — he didn’t utter another word until we went back on the air.

He hated me then. I suspect he still hates me now. Hey, you can’t win ‘em all.

For 33 outrageous, insane years, I was the maestro of the mania, the conductor of the symphony of vitriol that blares through the car radios every morning in the most passionate sports city in America. How could a shy nerd from Providence, R.I., end up with this huge responsibility? I’ll try my best to explain my evolution from a totally untrained radio performer to the first member (with my early partner, the far more accomplished Tom Brookshier) of the WIP Hall of Fame. It was the second‐best honor of my career.

The best was simply being associated with the most endearing and misunderstood fan base in the country. I went on the air every day with a simple mission: talk about what the city is talking about, in the same tone. In other words, I screamed a lot, complained most of the time, and tried never to forget to laugh about it all, too. Our four major sports teams won two championships in 132 tries while I was in front of a microphone, so, for sanity’s sake, laughter seemed a better option than tears.

When I finally retired in 2023, after the Eagles blew a 10‐point halftime lead and lost the Super Bowl, I was a 71‐year‐old journalist/radio host with 50 years in the media and enough stories to fill a book (I hope).

For example, I hosted for 26 years arguably the craziest radio promotion in history, Wing Bowl, which annually attracted 20,000 fans at 6 a.m. to watch men eat chicken wings. I dealt with clinical depression that led to the end of my 24‐year marriage. I was physically attacked twice by people I was covering. I watched a devoted fan die right across the street from Veterans Stadium. I got a clause in my contract that prevented my boss from talking to me.

And then there are the heroes I got to meet and interview, some of the most important people in the world. They included two presidents (before they were elected), Barack Obama and Donald Trump. I sat, one on one, with the most famous athlete in our lifetime, Muhammad Ali; my childhood sports hero, Wilt Chamberlain; the most controversial baseball player in history, Pete Rose; the basketball legend Larry Bird; and entertainment stars like Mark Wahlberg, Dennis Quaid, Joe Piscopo, Janet Leigh, Cliff Robertson, Debbie Gibson, Tippi Hedren, and Ray Liotta. I even got pelted one day with golf balls thrown by Arnold Palmer.

The interview that will remain etched in my brain forever is the hour‐long visit we had with boxing great Sugar Ray Leonard just minutes before the planes crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. How did he know to write out, in full, the date on the gloves he signed for me that day?

Yes, I definitely have some stories.

My résumé may surprise those who knew me only by my abrasive work on the radio. I attended the best journalism school in the world, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York City, where I made a promise to ask the toughest questions and make no friends among the sports stars I covered. That message must have stuck because, while employed by The Inquirer, I was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 after exposing the lies Buddy Ryan told in his first year as Eagles head coach.

Then I threw it all away, at 38, to try sports radio during its infancy. I never lost the critical eye I developed at Columbia, but I added enough humor to survive in a radio world dominated by icons like Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh. Eventually, I made a lot of money for the only station where I ever worked, and for myself. None of this would have happened without brilliant cohosts like Tom Brookshier, Al Morganti, Rhea Hughes, Tony Bruno, and Keith Jones; a gifted impressionist, Joe Conklin; and a fantastic producer, Joe Weachter.

If I learned anything during that incredible run, it was to embrace the fan base, with all of its imperfections. I never gave a damn about the owners, the coaches, the managers, or the players. Oh, they didn’t like what I had to say? Too bad. I outlasted all of them. Not a single owner, coach, manager, or player made it through all 33 years I was on the air. The fans were the only constant. They were also the only ones I could count on to be honest and genuine in good times and bad. They were the only ones there the whole time.

And they were a fantastic source of entertainment. Whenever I am asked to name the single most outrageous act by a fan I ever saw, there is no doubt. None at all. It was Oct. 5, 1992, in the final hour of a 15‐hour pregame show before Monday Night Football that I hosted.

It was my brilliant idea — in my first football season without Brookshier — to start our show at its usual time of 6 a.m. from a massive tent outside Veterans Stadium.

To gain a little extra attention for the annual visit of the despised Dallas Cowboys, I got the approval of WIP’s management to move the entire station lineup to the tent that day and to bill the event as the longest pregame show in sports history. (This claim went unchallenged; we did no research to confirm it.)

What none of us calculated was that fans would start drinking in our tent 15 hours before the game and lose control long before kickoff. Especially in that era, the fan base used every Eagles game as an excuse to overindulge, and night games were often a license to get crocked. Unwittingly, we were inviting a new level of misbehavior.

Security removed frenzied fans from the tent throughout the day, but the crowd got so big that, as game time approached, the private police were powerless to restore order.

In the final hour before the game, an odd fellow who went by the name “Chainsaw” arrived with a posse, and he was determined to make his mark before the crowd made the trek across the street to the Vet. Chainsaw brought with him two items — an inflatable doll with a Troy Aikman jersey on it, and a fully functional chainsaw.

Much like the ill‐advised boo at the draft, Chainsaw clearly had not thought through the plan, which was to sever the head of the Dallas quarterback with the chainsaw. But Chainsaw never calculated what would happen the instant the blade hit the air‐filled doll.

“This is what the Eagles are going to do to Troy Aikman,” Chainsaw announced before sliding the blade under the doll’s throat.

It exploded, shards of plastic doll flying over the heads of hundreds of crazed fans. Then the chainsaw flew out of the Chainsaw’s hand and clipped the right wrist of his cousin, a limo driver named Dominic Yanni, before crashing to the ground. Yanni’s wrist was saved only because the chainsaw jammed before it could sever the bone.

The crowd filling every corner of the tent that night exploded in cheers, initially not noticing that Yanni was bleeding profusely. Even more remarkable was the victim’s reaction. He held up his bloody appendage seeking more approval — which inspired an even bigger roar. I strongly urged him to seek medical help, but my advice fell on deaf ears. He wrapped the wrist in a makeshift tourniquet and pranced triumphantly across the street with his equally impaired cousin.

The Eagles fulfilled our dreams that night, crushing the evil Cowboys, 31–7, but ultimately would disappoint the fans that season like so many other talented Philadelphia teams in that era.

As for Chainsaw, he became a regular caller, delighting in telling, over and over, the story about how his cousin got that big, ugly scar on his wrist.

Angelo Cataldi was a broadcaster on WIP-FM for more than three decades and a former sportswriter at The Inquirer.