A Sportscasting Veteran Who Knows the Score--on TV or Radio

Not since college has sportscaster Todd Donoho worked exclusively in radio, but his bosses at ESPN don’t consider him inexperienced. They want him to do the same things he’s done for 25 years on television--just without the cameras rolling.

So “The Todd Donoho Show With Dave Stone,” which airs weekdays from 1 to 4 p.m. on KSPN-AM (1110), the area’s ESPN Radio affiliate, became the station’s second local program.

“Todd is somebody who I personally have been a fan of for a long time,” said Erik Braverman, program director at KSPN and KABC-AM (790), whether it was Donoho’s time as host of a sports trivia show on cable TV’s now-defunct Financial News Network or his decade at KABC-TV as a sportscaster and host of “Monday Night Live,” a weekly program that ran during the football season and featured trivia, sports news and guests ranging from Mickey Mantle to Milton Berle.

“If you ever saw his TV show on FNN or even ‘Monday Night Live,’ they were radio shows that happened to be on TV,” Braverman said. “Talk radio is really about the personality, and does the person have the knowledge and the warmth and the ability to connect with the listeners? Todd, as much as anyone, can deliver on those.”

He added that Stone, Donoho’s co-host and a former announcer for the Harlem Globetrotters, is serving as a combination co-pilot and color commentator.

“He’s a regular encyclopedia of Los Angeles sports knowledge,” Braverman said. “He knows the history of every single L.A. sports team, and he’s very, very passionate about whatever the subject is. It allows Todd to play off of him.”

Donoho, who lives in Valencia with his wife and three teenage sons, said he loves the free-form nature of talk radio, in which a show subject might be planned, but an unexpected call or occurrence can send the program veering off into another, even more interesting direction.

“In television, if you’re doing a three-minute segment, it’s planned down to the second. In radio it’s basically the host, the callers and the topics,” he said. “There’s a lot more spontaneity with it.

“I would like to think, in a sense, the radio show is kind of like ‘Monday Night Live’ on radio, a sports variety show,” said Donoho, 46. “A nice, fun, entertaining and analytical mix of sports, with personalities, interviews, trivia questions.”

“The Todd Donoho Show With Dave Stone” joins the station’s other locally focused program, “The McDonnell-Douglas Show,” with longtime sports-talk host Joe McDonnell and Long Beach Press-Telegram sports columnist Doug Krikorian.

Donoho’s show began in the spring as a temporary program during the Lakers’ playoff drive, when station management decided it wanted a local show to feed off the big local sports story. Braverman said the program clicked and gained a permanent spot on the schedule a week ago.

“We got to hear the program develop over time. We thought, ‘We’ve been looking for a second local show, and this is it,’ ” Braverman said.

The ebullient, clean-cut host is also returning to KLOS-FM (95.5), where Donoho does weekday morning sports reports on the “Mark & Brian Show,” as he has for the past 14 years--except for a year layoff while he was at Fox Sports Net.

There he served as an anchor on the “Southern California Sports Report,” but in spite of a local Emmy Award nomination in 2002, the network didn’t renew his contract.

Most Southern Californians know Donoho from his long stint at KABC-TV. But before that, he gained nationwide recognition and a cult of fans as host of the low-budget but highly entertaining “Timeout for Trivia” on the fledgling FNN/Score cable network, from 1985 to 1989. On a spartan set, accompanied by crowd noises and other sound effects, Donoho read sports trivia and sparred with the callers trying to answer the questions.

The show is also where he developed his trademark catchphrases, replying “Tremendous, my friend,” to someone asking how he was, and delivering dozens of different variations on “Take a hike!” to anyone giving a lamebrained answer to a trivia question.

“I still have people coming up to me and saying, ‘Timeout for Trivia--I loved that show.’ This is 13 years later,” said Donoho, who added that he doesn’t tire of fans peppering him with his own lines. “I look at it as their being kind. When somebody tells me to ‘take a hike,’ I give them a wink and a smile. It tells me they’re watching.”

And it was that show that brought him to Southern California, when the cable outlet he was working for in Cincinnati was going out of business, and the workers’ contracts were sold to the L.A.-based FNN.

“They said you can have two months’ severance pay, or you can continue in L.A.,” said Donoho, whose wife was pregnant at the time with their second child. “So I said, ‘California, here I come.’ ”

While it was tinkering with its schedule last week, adding the Donoho program and trimming “McDonnell-Douglas” from four hours to three to make room, KSPN dropped “The Tony Kornheiser Show,” hosted by the Washington Post sports columnist. By doing that it extended the air time for “The Mike & Mike in the Morning Show,” with former NFL defensive tackle Mike Golic and ESPN “SportsCenter” anchor Mike Greenberg.

“Our listeners don’t get a chance to hear how good this show is,” Braverman said.

“Mike & Mike” had been running from 3 to 7 a.m., but now it will occupy a seven-hour block, with KSPN repeating the show’s first three hours from 7 to 10 a.m.--Kornheiser’s former time slot.

“I think he does a good show. It really was the odd show out,” Braverman said of Kornheiser’s program. He added that the format of “Mike & Mike” also has more room for local segments, and he stressed that the decision to preempt Kornheiser came before his recent conflict with ESPN Radio management.

Kornheiser had been suspended for a week without pay by his ESPN bosses for criticizing them on the air about personnel moves. Management fired his senior producer and associate producer, along with two other employees, for reportedly e-mailing inappropriate material from adult Web sites to co-workers.

When ESPN Radio General Manager Eric Schoenfeld asked Kornheiser to stop talking about the matter on the air, Kornheiser continued making comments during commercial breaks--audio still available to fans listening on the Internet. Management then suspended Kornheiser, who has a five-year contract with ESPN paying him a reported $500,000 annually, and whose show is heard on about 240 stations nationwide.