By Ian Aldrich

His abrupt firing at WLW was as controversial as his 18-year run at the station.  Now rabid sports talk radio host Andy Furman has found a new home on the FM side of the dial.  Will his listeners follow him?

It’s late on a Monday afternoon in early January and the testosterone is flowing in the Toots Shor room at Jeff Ruby’s, where the walls showcase framed covers of Cigar Aficionado and the black-and-white mugs of Bogie and Brando.  Here, some 20 guys, from beefy types in Bengals T-shirts to slick businessmen in suits, have gathered to smoke stogies, quaff booze, and talk sports.  At the back of the room, at a long table chock full of papers and microphones, a cigar jammed into his mouth, is the man they’ve all come to see and hear: Andy Furman.  As guys enter the room, bursts of “Hey Furball!”–the nickname given to him by friend and fellow radio loudmouth Bill Cunningham during their 18 years together at AM juggernaut 700-WLW–are fired his way.

It’s been just three months since Furman blasted Bengals wide receiver T.J. Houshmandzadeh for failing to make a series of scheduled radio appearances with him.  The episode turned ugly when Houshmandzadeh allegedly called Furman a “punk-ass white boy” and the radio host retaliated by labeling the player a “racist” on-air.  When the dust cleared and Houshmandzadeh had taken his complaints to WLW ownership, Furman, the city’s most popular sports radio personality, was out of a job.  Tonight marks his return to the airwaves on a new station (WFTK, SuperTalk FM 96.5), in a new time slot (4-7 p.m.), and on new terrain (the FM side of the dial).  And the Furball’s anxiety is running high.

The event’s significance can be seen in the preternaturally neurotic 57-year-old’s choice of attire: Gone are his work clothes of choice–sweatshirt and wind pants–replaced by slacks, a blue and white striped Oxford, and a matching crew neck sweater.  “I just hope the guests show up,” he says to nobody in particular.

He’s got reason to be nervous.  For nearly two decades, Furman had been one of the leading faces of ratings powerhouse WLW.  Without the (bully) pulpit he once had, Furman isn’t just starting over at a new station; he’s about to find out where his popularity really stands with his former employer’s 50,000 watts stripped out of the equation.  Tonight should be a good first step.  His guest lineup is a veritable all-star cast of local sports legends, including Tom Browning, Pete Rose, Oscar Robertson, and Marvin Lewis.

Furman’s preshow jitters are temporarily put on hold when his friend and host of this afternoon’s party, Jeff Ruby, parts the crowd and walks straight up to him.  “Here’s the man, the King of the Jews!”  Furman shouts out at Ruby approaches.  Furman is himself Jewish, a fact not lost on his regular listeners, as he regularly drops Yiddishisms–”I’m shvitzing over here!”–into his broadcasts in his native Brooklynese.

“What are you doing?” asks Ruby, feigning a tough guy persona as he sticks out his right hand.  “I didn’t know you were here.”

“I got a job again!” Furman yells.

With his guests busy scarfing down free crab cakes and egg rolls, Furman starts his show talking baseball with Browning and keeps the conversation flowing with Rose, who calls in from California and ribs the host for introducing him right after his mention of River Downs.  Robertson, who shows up with former Cincinnati Royals teammate Wayne Embry, is floored by Furman’s uncanny grasp of obscure sports in history, especially when he informs the two retired NBA stars that the league’s inaugural season, in 1946, included a team from Toronto.  “Nineteen-forty-six?” Robertson asks, sounding puzzled.  “Jesus Christ.  How do you know all this stuff?”

But the most anticipated appearance of the evening is Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis.  If there are any hard feelings on Lewis’s part over the Houshmandzadeh controversy, he doesn’t show it.  Instead he warmly congratulates Furman on the new gig.  “I’m glad to be here on kick-off day,” he says.

Yet Furman isn’t exactly ducking what happened, either.  With Lewis fresh from the surprising season-ending defeat to Pittsburgh that killed his team’s playoff hopes, Furman jokingly draws a connection between Lewis’s situation and his own.  “We both had something unexpected happen to us,” he says, eliciting a big smile from Lewis.

By the time Furman sings off two hours later, he’s exhausted by exhilarated.  “I’m really humbled by this,” he tells the audience.  “I just hope I don’t get fired again.”

If You’ve Ever Heard Andy Furman On-Air, You could be excused for not recognizing him off-air.  Absent is the bluster and the volume that has characterized his radio career.  Furman, who lives in Florence with his wife, Wendy, and their two teenage sons, is soft-spoken at times and plagued by perhaps a bit too much self-doubt.  Bill Cunningham, his former WLW colleague, recalls that when he first met the seemingly quiet Furman in 1988, he wondered if the station had made a mistake.  “Then the microphone went on and I thought, ‘He’s pretty good,’ ” says Cunningham.  “Andy gets it.  He’s the best radio talk show host in this market.”

What he gets is that shows like his are more about entertainment than information.  You want box scores or breakdowns of the Bengals secondary?  Pick up a newspaper.  You want opinion?  You want to laugh?  Crank up your radio.

“Andy knows how to stoke the fires,” says ex-Bengals receiver Cris Collinsworth, a former Furman Colleague at WLW and now an Emmy-winning pro football analyst for NBC.  “Most people believe that you come into the studio and wait for the phone lines to light up.  It’s doesn’t work like that.  You have to create interest, and Andy’s brilliant at issue-spotting.”

Which is to say Furman isn’t just a Type-A personality with a microphone.  At his core, he’s a devoted sports fan who puts in hours of research for each broadcast.  He’s quick to dismiss the oft-made comparisons between opinion-driven shows like his and blogs.  “I think of those guys walking around in their basements in their bathrobes eating Trix cereal,” he says.  Instead, Furman is a newspaper junkie, regularly arming himself with what he’s gleaned from both Cincinnati papers, The New York Times, and the New York Post, among others.  “He knows more people, speaks to more coaches, and reads more articles than most,” says Collinsworth.  You can hear it in his interviews.  He painstakingly prepares for each one by assembling a lineup of questions that he works through on-air, crossing them off one by one with a black Sharpie.  Sure, sometimes it may sound like water cooler banter–well, highly adrenalized water cooler banter–but Furman’s show is carefully planned and managed.

Of course, he likes to rankle his listeners, too.  It’s a trick he learned as a young public relations director for down-and-out sports teams and racetracks.  As he saw it, his job wasn’t to get a small blurb in the back of the sports page; it was to sell tickets and create buzz.  To do that, Furman was willing to do anything.  Once, when the Ft. Lauderdale Strikers, of the now-defunct North American Soccer League, were in the middle of a long losing streak, he has the coach rolled onto the field in a coffin just before game time.  His PR arsenal included purposeful misspellings on promotional billboards (in Buffalo, “Polish Night” was advertised using a backwards “P”) and a celebration of Bulgarian heritage in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a city in which Bulgarian immigration hadn’t really exploded.

The strategy had its limitations.  At Monticello Raceway in Monticello, New York, he got fired after sending out an invitation to a Pennsylvania Ku Klux Klan leader asking him to take advantage of the track’s “group party plan package” and bring his followers to the races.  (They never came.)  “I was a little crazy,” he explains, “but it was just shtick.”

In 1981, he landed a publicity job at Latonia Race Course in Florence.  There, he raced a horse against the slower Collinsworth and tried to break the track’s opening day attendance record by marrying Wendy at the raceway in 1984.  (He fell nearly 6,000 ticket holders short of his goal.)

By 1986, however, Furman had had his fill.  When Channel 5 offered him an off-camera sports director position, he jumped at the opportunity, as well as the chance to co-host a Sunday morning sports show on WLW radio.  But the long days spent preparing for three-minute broadcasts frustrated him.  Within a year he switched over to WLW full-time, doing sales, promotions, and a little on-air work.  Encouraged to employ the same go-for-anything attitude he had used in the publicity business, Furman was eventually teamed with Collinsworth and took the reins of Sports Talk every weeknight from 6 to 9 p.m.  Matched with his cohost’s good-guy persona, Furman was less concerned with being likeable than he was about getting callers.

“What I like to hear on the radio is a guy who has an opinion,” he says.  “I turn on the radio and hear these guys go, ‘My name is such and such and here’s my number.’  I’m in the car banging on the steering wheel, ‘You morons!  Give me a reason to call you.  Have an opinion!’ ”

At WLW, where he regularly topped the ratings for time period, Furman never lacked for opinion.  In 1988, he drew the ire of Bengals coach Sam Wyche when he jokingly claimed he had posted a cameraman in the station’s traffic helicopter to videotape the club’s practices so he could send the footage to upcoming opponents.  He had no great reverence for former Reds General Manager Jim Bowden, whom he called a “liar” and a “weasel,” and he received the silent treatment for a year from UC men’s basketball coach Bob Huggins after he made disparaging remarks about his team.

“I was a loose cannon,” he says.  “I said things without checking stuff to maybe get a response.”

That’s not to suggest Furman has curbed his tongue.  Just a year and a half ago, he angered popular Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly after he called a Dayton high school’s decision to allow a student who was born without legs to play on the varsity football team “a charade and a freak show.”  When he and Reilly discussed the comment on-air, Furman didn’t back down.

“There’s certain things handicapped people can’t and shouldn’t do, and one of them is play football,” he told the columnist.  “Would you put Stevie Wonder behind the wheel of a car?”

Through It All Furman contends he never had reason to question WLW’s support.  He got reprimanded from time to time–in one instance the station took him off the air for three days (with pay) following his comments about Huggins’s team–but job security was never an issue.  That is, until last October’s spat with Houshmandzadeh.  Details about what happened are still cloudy.  Bengals officials, as well as Houshmandzadeh and his representatives, chose not to comment for this story, and Furman and WLW executives are limited in what they can say due to a confidentiality agreement that was signed last December.

What’s known is this: In late summer, WLW hired Houshmandzadeh to sit in on SportsTalk every Thursday for an hour.  According to Furman, problems with his new co-host began immediately.  After being late for the first two shows, Houshmandzadeh failed to appear at all for the third, on October 5.

Whether it was a mix-up or simply a case of the receiver blowing Furman off, no one will say.  But that night, Furman went on-air to “fire” Houshmandzadeh.  According to The Cincinnati Enquirer, shortly afterwards, during a phone conversation with a WLW employee, Houshmandzadeh allegedly called the host a “punk-ass white boy.”  The next day, Furman stepped up the attack, labeling the receiver a “racist” for making the comment.

Houshmandzadeh denied making the comment, but he didn’t deny he was angry at Furman.  “I told him, ‘Andy Furman you can go [expletive deleted] yourself,’ ” he later told reporters.  “That’s the bottom line.  And he twisted it into all whatever he wants to.”

Houshmandzadeh backed up the bravado by going straight to WLW’s parent company, Clear Channel Communications, to complain about Furman’s on-air attacks.  According to Furman, the following Monday, October 9, he had a meeting with former WLW general manager Karie Sudbrack and program director Darryl Parks at the station, at which they told him “we need to take care of this.”

Furman agreed and offered to put together an apology that the station could run as a promo, with one caveat: Houshmandzadeh would have to say he was sorry, too.  It never happened.  Instead, four days later, Furman was informed he was being suspended indefinitely without pay.  “I thought it would be a great publicity stunt,” he says of the suspension.  “I figured it would go on for a while, maybe through the football season.”  But three weeks later, on November 1, Parks, in a two-paragraph memo to WLW employees, announced that Furman would not be returning to the station

“You can’t live in fear, and good managers know that and they’re there to defend you and put out the fires,” says Furman, who was in the middle of a five-year contract when he was let go.  “The nature of the beast with talk radio is brush fires, and anybody with talent will create a brush fire.  Since I’ve left, nobody has created a brush fire–and that’s not a good thing.  I don’t do intentionally, but I take a stance and I don’t think anybody there has the balls to take a stance.”

Furman’s Firing generated a fair amount of ink in the local papers and got some national play.  But Sudbrack implied that his exit was in the works even before the incident took place.

“The focus obviously is on the [Houshmandzadeh situation] because that’s the most important thing that had occurred in terms of programming and [Furman's] controlling the air waves, but I can say that decisions we made were independent of any particular situation,” says Sudbrack, who refused to elaborate.  (In a twist of radio irony, Sudbrack left WLW in late February for the position of vice president/market manager at Cumulus Broadcasting Cincinnati, WFTK’s parent company, where she will oversee Furman yet again.)

Then there’s the whole timing issue.  Just as the story roared into the headlines, Clear Channel, WLW’s owner and the country’s largest radio company, was gearing up to announce that it was going up for sale.  With a price tag that would eventually reach $27 billion, some believe that company officials wanted to quickly dispatch any ugliness that could stymie negotiations.  To get rid of the Houshmandzadeh headache, the theory goes, the company may have calculated that it needed to get rid of Furman first.

“I’m convinced that none of his bosses or officials at [WLW] had anything to do with this or wanted him fired,” says Rick Bird, a writer for The Cincinnati Post.  “[Clear Channel was] laying off hundreds around the country and then all of a sudden they had this pimple in Cincinnati.”

Sudbrack dismisses such a claim, saying that “all of our decisions are made on a local basis.  As we determine a direction or any changes…we do communicate with our corporate office.”

Still, it’s an argument that at least sounds credible when you consider that just before Furman’s suspension, WLW was running spots poking fun at Houshmandzadeh’s tardiness, complete with a soundtrack of whining children.  It seemed to fly in the face of what was circulating around the office soon after Furman was let go.

“One story that we heard for a long time was, Man, the Bengals must be giving them a hard time about keeping him,” says one current WLW employee.  “[Furman] laid that to rest when he had Marvin Lewis on that first day.”

Meanwhile, executives at WFTK feel they have signed a franchise player in Furman.  (“He’s the master,” says Gary Lewis, former vice president/market manager, who left WFTK in early March to run Cumulus’s Atlanta stations.)  They’d better hope so.  Previously known as The Star, a country music station, WFTK is starting from stratch in its push to target make listeners between 24 and 54 years old.  That part explains the decision to move Furman into the coveted 4-7 p.m. drive-time slot.

The raw numbers certainly support the station’s optimism; Furman had topped the ratings for the last six years.  But there are a few things to consider.  For starters, he was helped greatly by the fact that WLW owns the broadcast rights to Reds games.  During baseball season, when he was essentially doing pre- and post-game shows, his listener numbers tripled.  In going to a new station, Furman is not only going to have to contend with the demands of doing a daily three-hour show year-round, he’s going to be doing it at a station where he’s the sold local weekday on-air host.  Unlike Furman’s old employer, WFTK is banking on a formula that relies heavily on syndicated talent, such as Fox loudmouth Bill O’Reilly and Howard Stern-wannabe Erich “Mancow” Muller, among others.  Can a hometown meshuggener like Furman succeed in such company?

“Andy can build excitement, build awareness, and he can get people to listen to the program,” says Rob Riggsbee, a friend of Furman’s and the president of Inside Media, a Newtown-based ad-buying firm.  “But he cannot sustain a radio station on his own.  You’ve got too much competition.  They need local and live talent.  The clock is ticking.”

Nobody Needs To remind Furman about what’s at stake.  He won’t offer up numbers but says his new contract is comparable to the one he had at WLW (“I’m doing OK,” he says.)  During the time I spent shadowing him at WFTK and at Straus Tobacconist, the downtown cigar shop where he regularly spends his mornings, trading jokes and insults with Jeff Ruby and a cadre of buddies, Furman repeatedly mentioned the pressure he’s placed on himself to make the show a success.  “They really appreciate that I’m there and I hope I don’t let them down,” he told me.

Much of the anxiety had to do with his uncertainty over whether his regular listeners would follow him to FM.  But a week later Furman seemed mildly confident that they would.  He was back to banging on the local sports teams (“They don’t have a good enough product to gauge,” he said of the recent Bengals ticket price hike) while familiar voices rang him up.  “Great to have you back!” they’d say.  And “You should so much better in FM!”  Others skipped the niceties and jumped right back into the fray.

Within two weeks of debuting his new show, Furman seemed to have settled into his routine.  His office, off a long hallway of sales cubicles, is testament to the two things most important to him: sports and family.  Pictures of his two teenage sons, whom he and Wendy adopted from Bulgaria 10 years ago, are everywhere.  There’s a beaming shot of Furman trapped in a headlock administered by former Reds outfielder Kevin Mitchell and another from 1990 of Furman’s shaved head, a look he was forced to adopt after betting against Cincinnati in the World Series.

The centerpiece of the room is Furman’s brown IBM Selectic III typewriter, which just might be the most well-used piece of equipment at the station.  Since he was in high school, Furman has been writing letters to coaches and players all around the country, to introduce himself and to enclose an article or information about a recruit they might have missed.  Before and after his show, Furman, who estimates he sends out 35 letters a day, can be found pounding away at the keys.  It helps explain how he’s able to get such normally reclusive sports figures, from Bobby Knight to Bill Belichick, to appear on his program.

On his eighth day of the new job, at just a few minutes before four, Furman was in his office jotting down a few notes.  Then he placed a stack of papers and newspapers into a black plastic crate with wheels, flipped up the handle, and made his way down the hall to the studio.  He was back in his normal attire–fleece jacket and wind pants–and as he walked through the office he looked like an airline passenger carting luggage to the gate.  “I don’t really know anybody here yet,” he cracked.  “I feel like a contractor, like a guy who comes to your house once a month to clean your sewers.”

The show went off without a hitch.  There were plenty of callers, and the interview with former Louisiana State basketball coach Dale Brown left Furman happy.  (“That was great,” he kept saying afterwards.)  By the third hour, he even had something to complain about: A recent stag party at the Five Seasons Sports Club in Crestview Hills hadn’t included him on the invite list.

“I will never set foot in the Five Seasons,” he said, he voice getting louder.  “The nerve of you! Every blockhead who claims to work in sports was there and I can’t [get invited].  Believe me when I tell you this, my hand to God: This is gonna be the number one rated show in this community.”

Then he shut up and took a call.

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