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After 20 years, NBC Sports Chicago goes dark, but its impact will shine forever

1 October 2024Last Update :
After 20 years, NBC Sports Chicago goes dark, but its impact will shine forever

There are 20 years worth of stories and Kevin Cross, who started as a nighttime producer and ended as the big boss, doesn’t want to single anybody out.

But if there was a story that typified the attitude and hustle of the regional sports network that started as Comcast SportsNet Chicago in 2004 and ended as NBC Sports Chicago in 2024, it’s ol’ Joe Collins and his bicycle.

The year is 2010 and the Blackhawks, fresh off their Stanley Cup win in Philadelphia, are on parade in the streets of Chicago. Nothing was more important than that team, not at CSN.

For the first few years of the station’s existence, the Blackhawks were barely a participant. Bill Wirtz wouldn’t allow home games to be televised, an anachronism to protect a dwindling season-ticket base. The team was all but ignored in the city.

But then Bill died and his son Rocky took over and they started broadcasting all of the games. The Blackhawks’ youth movement took off and next thing you know, CSN Chicago is broadcasting live from a beer-soaked dressing room in Philadelphia.

This was the network’s second championship parade. CSN Chicago was in its prime and it had big ideas. It was televising the festivities live and had reporters on Blackhawks buses, but they couldn’t beam the interviews back to the station. The day before the parade the crew brainstormed solutions. Collins, a producer, had an idea.

“He said, ‘I’m going to get on my bike and I’m going to ride to the bus,” Cross said. “The camera folks are going to shoot the interview. They’re going to drop the tape down to me on my bike and I’m going to ride my bike back to the station so that we can air them.” I heard this plan and I’m like, yo, no shot. There’s no way that’s going to work. And he made it work.”

Collins met the buses at the corner of Washington and Ogden. The cameraman had to be ready at the northeast corner because Collins didn’t want to cross the parade route. And, oh yeah, he had to underhand-toss the tapes. Then, Collins just had to catch the tapes and bike 2 miles east to the studio.

“A great adrenaline rush and I really love riding my bike — especially in the city,” Collins told me. “But I had to be strategic in the way I got back to the station. In those days, the Fulton Market district wasn’t fully built up the way it is now. So I had to dodge forklifts and whatnot.”

The plan worked and the interviews aired before the Hawks’ rally began at Grant Park.

“It’s just examples like that where people would go above and beyond,” Cross said.

You could fill a book with stories like that. Or write a eulogy.

It’s late on a Friday night and I’m sitting near Chuck Garfien’s desk. Throughout the final weeks of NBC Sports Chicago’s 20-year run, which officially ended late Monday night, Garfien turned the detritus of his desk into a bit on the White Sox postgame show. He has been in the same spot in the newsroom since they moved the new network from a temporary studio in Oak Brook to the building across from the Merchandise Mart.

Garfien hosted the last live show of the station’s existence after Sunday’s White Sox game and he also provided the first “viral” moment of the station’s existence back in 2004.

Not that he found it so amusing back then.

“I thought the start of my Chicago sportscasting career was the end of my Chicago sports career,” said Garfien, a south suburban native.

What happened was Pat Boyle, the host in the studio, tossed it to Garfien, on location at Notre Dame, but a technical glitch meant that Garfien didn’t know he was on the air. So he wandered out of the shot as Boyle cracked a well-timed joke at his expense.

“It took me a long time to get over it,” Garfien said.

Kristina Quinn, a graphic artist at the time, remembers that moment more fondly.

“It was almost too perfect because it kind of let everyone take a sigh of relief,” she said. “It was like we got the first mistake out of the way, let’s do the rest.”

Garfien didn’t lose his job and he thrived along with the station. He ended his run as the co-host of the wildly popular White Sox postgame show, where, in the last original broadcast on the channel, he offered a touching monologue to honor the station’s history.

CSN replaced Fox Sports Chicago as the RSN home of the four teams (they also aired on WGN), which replaced SportsChannel which replaced SportsVision, the before-its-time cable failure. Jim Corno Sr., a veteran of SportsVision, was in charge of the channel at its launch. Corno, who passed away in 2013, remains revered.

“It always felt like a family business,” producer Ryan McGuffey said. “I felt like he made it feel that way. And I always felt like you were doing something that was bigger than you. And I felt that way for a long time.”

Boyle, Garfien, McGuffey and Quinn, who moved up to be an art designer and a do-it-all staple of the channel, all were there from the beginning to the end.

Boyle and Garfien will move to the new Chicago Sports Network (CHSN), which debuts Tuesday. Boyle is already signed and Garfien is working on his deal, while Quinn and McGuffey, among others, are taking their sizable severances from NBC and spending some time with their families.

CHSN is a fresh start. It will be housed at the United Center (with a satellite office at Sox Park) and it will have a new cast of characters. Blackhawks, Bulls and White Sox games will continue to be aired. Even for those going over to CHSN and doing the same jobs, there is a sense of loss, of finality.

What this crew saw and covered and lived through will never be topped. Many of them were from Chicago and fans of the teams and somehow found themselves in their dream jobs.

There were Hawks fans who got to drink out of the Cup, White Sox fans who saw their team win the World Series before the Cubs, and Cubs fans who saw history in 2016. The Bears fans got a Super Bowl run and the Bulls crew was front row for the brief but memorable Derrick Rose experience.

“We’ve had a 20-year life cycle in television that really is unparalleled in this town because we had so many championships and so many firsts,” McGuffey said. “The fact that all those championships were won under our umbrella, it’s been a very reflective time.”

In 2017, Sarah Kustok was named the Brooklyn Nets’ full-time TV analyst, the first woman to have that role in the NBA.

But she started her TV career in full in 2009 for her hometown TV station doing whatever they needed her to do. Kustok, a star basketball player at DePaul, was the Blackhawks reporter, she covered Bulls games, she did high school games, she did everything.

“I know it sounds corny,” she said. “But there’s no way I would ever be the broadcaster or professional that I am without my experience there because of the comprehensive nature of everything we did, everything we covered. And then the truly amazing people that were so willing to help lift everyone up.”

She was new at this job and found a newsroom full of mentors.

“Mark Schanowski, Pat Boyle, Luke Stuckmeyer, in particular, he was one of the most helpful because it was tough love from him and his honest critiques of like, hey, you really want to be good at this?” Kustok said.

She said she could go on and on and she did in our phone call. Gail Fischer, Kip Lewis, John Schippman, McGuffey, Sarah Lauch …

A year after she started, she found herself in the middle of the biggest sports story in the city. She was on that bus interviewing Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews during the Hawks parade.

“I was calling the studio on my cell phone and we did a phone interview to air live on air on the show,” she said. “I mean, you think about how much has changed.”

Later that year, Kustok’s life was turned upside down because of an unspeakable tragedy. Her mother, Jeanie, was shot and killed in her Orland Park home. Her father, Allan, was charged with her murder and was sentenced to 60 years in prison in 2014.

In the aftermath, Kustok found out how much her second family meant to her. Those long hours created deep friendships. Kustok wanted to go back to work, if only as an escape, but it was only possible because of the bonds she formed with people at the network who knew her.

“Not just as a professional but as a person,” she said. “There was a comfort and there was a safety. I truly can’t put into words what that meant.”

She left in 2012 to work the sidelines for Nets games on the YES Network, but those relationships remain.

“At the core of it, the people and how much they cared about the teams and the sports and each other, to me is just absolutely incomparable,” she said.

Before 2008, David Kaplan still had some hair and rocked a goatee and he was a voice in Chicago, but not a face. And then CSN Chicago hired him to host their daily reporters show, then known as Chicago Tribune Live. It almost didn’t happen.

He auditioned for the show, but after they offered him the job, his WGN Radio bosses told him he couldn’t do it. He was hosting the Cubs’ pregame and postgame shows (and a general sports talk show) on the radio. The Tribune CEO at the time, Dennis FitzSimons, had to get involved.

“He was like, it’s Chicago Tribune Live. He works for the Tribune Company. Why would we not want him to do this?” Kaplan said. “And so they let me, but they made me take a pay cut.”

Being on a 50,000-watt blowtorch was a destination job, but TV is TV.

“It was way more impactful that I was on TV,” Kaplan said. “That was a huge break for my career.”

He hosted the show (which later lost the Tribune sponsorship and became Sports Talk Live) until they took it off the air during the pandemic. Always opinionated, Kaplan was the rare person who could bring together ESPN 1000 and 670 The Score hosts along with Tribune and Sun-Times writers. Everyone wanted to go on the show, and not just for the free restaurant gift cards show booker Danni Wysocki handed out. It also meant you had arrived in Chicago sports media. Sports Talk Live was a place for loud opinions, good conversation and reporters in poorly fitting suits.

Two years after he started there, Kaplan got the Cubs’ pre- and postgame show hosting on TV. He also hosted specials, worked on documentaries and broke news. That hire changed his life. And in 2016, he found himself doing his shows at the World Series.

In the late stages of Game 7, Cross was back in Chicago watching Kaplan, a lunatic Cubs fan, as much as he was watching the Cubs.

“The feed that we had from Cleveland, I had in my office, the raw feed,” Cross said. “And so I’m sitting there watching the game as it’s about to end. But I’m also watching Todd Hollandsworth and David Kaplan, and just the range of emotions that David Kaplan went through during those last 30 minutes, I will never forget in my life.”

The late, great Les Grobstein had a saying: “I was there.”

McGuffey can relate. He joined the network not long after college and never left. He got married and raised a family. So did many others. They went to weddings and funerals together. They worked long hours.

“I mean, there’s only a handful of us in this city that were in the clubhouses of the White Sox and the Cubs when they won the World Series for the first time in 88 and 108 years,” he said.

McGuffey remembers getting off the plane from Houston in 2005 and his boss Michelle Murray telling him he wasn’t working the parade because he needed a day off.

“I’m like, ‘The hell I’m not,’” he said before the station closed down. “‘I’m finishing this thing.’ And, you know, I kind of feel that way all the way up to 20 years. I want to finish this thing.”

Layoffs started to thin out the network even before 2020 as the new financial reality for RSNs became apparent and the Cubs left after 2019 to start their own network.

Everything changed after the pandemic. Shows were cut and mainstays were sent packing. Kaplan took a generous corporate retirement package. The programming devolved to mostly just the games and the pre- and postgame shows, the bare bones of an RSN.

Still, when rumors of a new station heated up last spring, there was still hope Comcast and the three teams would sign a new deal to keep this going. After all, starting a new station is really difficult.

“I’ll say Kevin Cross was always positive. He was, like, I feel good about getting a deal done. I felt the same way,” said Schippman, who rose to be the No. 2 person in charge at the station. “I said it’s the best scenario for everyone for the teams to come back to NBC.”

And then a meeting in June finalized the end.

“If you would’ve told me a year ago, I’m having this conversation with you, I would have been pretty surprised,” Quinn said.

So when the last show aired, there were fresh tears and not just from Ozzie Guillen.

After the crying came the catharsis. About 125 people showed up to a party Sunday night at Tree House on West Kinzie Street. Then there was the after-party at Boss Bar. By the time Schippman got home, it was almost 4 a.m. He will have plenty of time to rest.

Schippman’s story is emblematic of the station. Through 20 years, he rose from associate producer to the VP of Content. He met his wife, Lauch — a talented editor who left the field — at the station. He won Emmys, he saw championships, he made a life for himself. He will miss it dearly.

“I would love to work with all these people for the rest of my life,” he said. “I think when it comes down to it, this was the best RSN in the country.”

On Monday, the station aired old programming all day. And then it went dark.

(Top photo of David Kaplan and Todd Hollandsworth courtesy of NBC Sports Chicago)

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