Scanning the walls in Dori Monson’s home office, you probably wouldn’t know he was a Seattle radio talk show host with an Edward R. Murrow Award. The wall is all about family and a passion for coaching.
Squeezed between photos of his wife of 35 years, their three daughters, and rescue dogs they consider family, Monson’s walls are vivid reminders of his other career: coaching girls basketball.
“There’s barely one wall in my office,” the noon-3 p.m. KIRO News radio 97.3 host says from the town, not far from the Scandinavian neighborhood where he was born and raised, “but it’s more like a scrapbook of my basketball coaching life than a showcase to my `day job.’”
And yet, there is a lot of cross-over between the two for Monson, 60. Both reflect a level of competition that keeps him at the top of both games. After 35 years in the industry and a 2-A Washington state girls championship hoops coach, Monson still has a fire in his belly for both passions.
His path was wildly unpredictable.
As a 10-year-old, Monson wanted to start creating a life vastly different from the one he’d experienced up to that point: rough and tumble.
“I wanted to have a happy home,” the youngest-of-three kids said. “My father wasn’t around. Our phone was cut off. I bathed in cold water. All these things happen, and the only reference point you have is your own life.”
But Monson was determined to break the proverbial cycle.
“In retrospect, it doesn’t seem that terrible,” he said. “I thought I could change things going forward.”
One of his favorite games as a kid was the Sports Illustrated Superstar Baseball game. An obscure game, to be sure, a bit nerdy and wonky. But Monson was all over it.
“It was this dice game,” Monson said. “You could manage players like Brooks Robinson.”
At the time, the game retailed at $9.95, not a small chunk of change for a kid in the early ‘70s.
“I talked my mom into matching my $5 when I could raise it,” Monson said.
“That was a fortune. She agreed to match the money.”
Undaunted, Monson cut grass, swept driveways, anything he had to do to raise his balance of the money for the game. After finally earning his half, his mother was true to her word and coughed up her $5 match.
“I spent the next five years buried in that game,” Monson recalled. After several housing moves, he remembers losing “my original game but found another years later, and had to pay a fortune.”
Board games, he said, were easier on emotions. Real games broke his heart when he was seven years old.
“The Seattle Pilots left town,” Monson said. “The trucks were headed north from spring training, and they were diverted to Milwaukee after the sale.”
Some of those nightmares still haunt his sleep.
“I had a real love for the game in the summer of 1969,” Monson said. “I had a tree fort and strung an extension cord to the house so I could listen to games. I bought a baseball scorebook. Learned to keep score for as many games as I could.”
A self-described nerd, Monson recalls going to his local library to bolster his baseball skills. His goal: to carve a plan that would out-manage Earl Weaver of the Baltimore Orioles – his favorite team.
After graduating from high school early at 15, Monson went to the University of Washington. “I worked 70 hours a week at two jobs just to pay the tuition,” he said. “At 17, my life’s goal was to manage a warehouse.”
Then he met someone that would change his career trajectory and his life.
“I was working in a warehouse one day, and I heard a commercial for the Ron Bailey School of Broadcasting,” Monson said. “Tuition was close to $3,500 – an impossible amount of money for me at that time.”
But when the guest speaker and then KING-TV sportscaster Bill O’Mara met Monson through the school, the legendary hydroplane race caller made Monson a deal: “He told me he’d let me be his intern if I went to school and finished my degree,” Monson said. “It was a gentleman’s agreement. But he also said I had to graduate from college to make good on the deal.”
Monson went to UW Seattle for a semester but had to drop out because he couldn’t afford tuition. Two days later, Monson – who was living at home – heard a car coming up the drive.
“I don’t know how he knew where I lived, but Bill O’Mara came up to the porch and knocked,” Monson explained. “I knew he didn’t have a pot to piss in, but he peeled off six $100 bills and reminded me of our deal.
“This man had fallen on some tough times and was sleeping at his own radio station,” Monson recalled. “I went back and re-enrolled the next day.”
The Seattle radio talk show veteran credits the start of his radio career to O’Mara. O’Mara was still doing high school play-by-play into his 90s, and Monson recalls that “Sports Illustrated did a piece on him.”
In college, Monson majored in communications and did play-by-play work for the Huskies on the campus station. He knew he could do it because he’d been practicing in his room as a kid.
“I’d been doing my own play-by-play calls with the Orioles games when I was seven years old in the summer of 1972,” he recalls.
Monson later got a job in sports at KING-TV to watch ball games and write timecodes. “I dug in and started knocking on station doors until I made something happen. I started doing high school recaps on Saturday morning. Then they gave me a shot doing morning sports.”
Those segments were taped as Monson was finishing up his night work.
“Then the new television news director told me I had to quit radio. When I asked why he said he didn’t have to tell me. I assume it was because he had something against the radio side and wanted to stick it to them.”
That’s when Monson had to choose. Would it be radio or television?
“I went in and met our radio news director Steve Wexler and told him I was thinking of choosing radio over television. He kind of grimaced and said he wouldn’t do that if he were me,” Monson said. Wexler told him even though he’d only been with the station for a week, he already knew he was going to make some changes and might go a different direction. In other words, Monson figured he was going to get canned.
Monson called his wife and let her know about his dilemma. She assured him he’d make the right decision. “I went to the television news director and told him I quit,” Monson said. “I had no backup plan.”
The next day he went back to Wexler’s office and said he’d quit the television job. “Wexler started laughing,” Monson said. “I told him if he still fired me, that’s his call. But he was fair with me. I asked him to just give me 30 days more to see if I got better in his eyes. See if I grew on him. Get some coaching. I think he liked my gumption because he agreed.”
Since he no longer had to work nights at the television station, he could devote all his time to his radio gig.
“I came in even earlier and did some fill-in for the lead host. I wanted to make myself indispensable.”
His wishes came true.
He’s been in his current position for 27 years and is known by everyone within listening distance. “The last couple of years have been great,” Monson said. “I have a couple of friends that dissect ratings, and they tell me we are the highest local news and talk station in the country for the past two years. That isn’t a formal study, but these guys know what they’re talking about.”
From 2010 to 2017, Monson balanced his radio work with his role as head coach of the Shorecrest High School girls basketball team in Shoreline, Washington. “I stepped aside three years ago,” Monson explained.
In 2016, his team won the Washington state 2-A girls basketball championship, and Monson was recognized as the state Coach of the Year.
Coaching has long been something close to Monson’s heart. He found it gratifying because he was able to impart life lessons to student-athletes.
“Coaches were so important to me when I was a kid. My wife and I have been blessed with three daughters. Only my youngest played basketball throughout high school, but the others were active in tennis. My wife too.”
While he didn’t say he was all about destiny, Monson thinks there is some deliberate force in the universe.
“I don’t think some things that happen in life are by accident,” Monson said. “I had only one class in my entire college career with assigned seating. It was a children’s literary class, and my future wife and I were assigned to sit next to each other.”
Today, Monson hosts The Dori Monson Show on KIRO Newsradio, weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. It’s a life he loves. Monson’s daily show is topical. It allows him to share his thoughts, humor, and just be himself.
“Seattle is a very liberal place,” he said. “I think people view me here as someone who can help balance the rest of the media. I have things to discuss that aren’t political. I want to be a companion for people stuck in traffic. Make them laugh. I take a great deal of pride in that.”
He said he and his staff break lots of news as they have a connection with listeners. “We get a ton of tips from listeners,” Monson said. “They turn out to be good stories for us as listeners have become fine-tuned to our show and what we talk about.”
Several years ago, it earned him an Edward R. Murrow award.
Monson said he took advantage of the challenges Covid presented. “It was a game-changer for me. I started doing my show at home and still do. I can still interact with my anchor at the studio and my producer.”
In the evening, he spends four to five hours preparing for the next day’s show. Monson’s show is the only one in prime time listening that doesn’t have a co-host.
Monson said he’ll continue with this gig as long as he has a functioning voice and brain.
“I love what I’m doing. I’ve worked 40 years to get to this point. I want people to hear what I have to say for as long as they want me to.”
