When Pat Smith thinks back to his childhood, the sound of Jack Buck’s voice is one of the first things that comes to mind. Those memories are only but happy ones, because it represents a time when KMOX radio in St.Louis helped plant a passion that’s turned into an incredible career.
Since the age of three, right along the same time his family moved to southeast Missouri, Smith has been naturally drawn to the aura of radio. So much so that even after his family left Missouri for Birmingham, AL during his teenage years, Smith would use all means necessary to ensure he could listen to Cardinals games on KMOX.
“I would literally go down in my parent’s car at night because KMOX had such a blowtorch signal, you could pick it up at night time,” said Smith. “I literally would sit in the car and listen to Cardinal games in the garage off my parent’s car radio just to be able to get that excitement.”
Smith would often even take cassette tapes in the car and record the games off the speakers to be able to go back and listen. He wasn’t the only kid fascinated by sports in his neighborhood. Far from it. But you would have been hard-pressed to find a kid as passionate about a future career in the sports media industry.
What’s interesting is Smith’s path to radio happened by a twist of fate. Though he grew up listening to radio it was television Smith pursued while in college at UAB. It was the early 90s and as he was close to graduating, UAB started its football team. The year was 1992 and Smith became the first-ever color analyst for UAB football. It was an incredible opportunity for a kid that didn’t even have his diploma yet. And it arguably was the biggest reason why he ended up in sports radio.
“Somebody on a radio station heard me and called me out of the blue,” said Smith. “It was a gentleman by the name of Matt Colter, who was doing an afternoon sports talk show on the news talk station in Birmingham, and asked if I needed an internship. I didn’t think anything about doing radio, because I was a television major. We didn’t even have any radio apparatus at my college. I said sure I needed an internship and to get out of school, so I did it.”
Fate can happen in different ways, but for Smith, it came via an internship with a sports talk radio show. Once he got into the studio it didn’t take him long at all to catch the bug. Once he caught it, he couldn’t shake it. Sports radio was his new calling.
“I looked at it this way, going from television to radio,” said Smith. “If I was going to be a TV sports anchor, I was going to be looking at getting three to four minutes a day during a newscast. When I got into the sports talk genre, it was relatively new, but I thought it was so cool. They talked about sports for four hours every afternoon. This isn’t three minutes during a newscast, this is four hours of talking sports. By getting my toe dipped in the water, by the time I graduated later in that summer 1993, I got the bug. I got the fever.”
When Smith started in 1993, Alabama football was coming off the 1992 national championship. Later that fall, the host Smith was working for had his contract come up and left the station. A replacement needed to be hired. Luckily, the station found not only a talented voice, but one of the most legendary voices to ever host a radio show in the South.
“A guy named Paul Finebaum happened to walk into the radio station and we started working together in 1993,” said Smith, “We did over 5,000 shows together after that date. I just happened to be at the right place, at the right time.”
At the time, Finebaum already was a popular figure, due to his columns in the Birmingham Post-Herald. Smith wanted to bring those big opinions from the newspaper and put them on the radio show. It couldn’t have been a better idea. Once that was brought to the radio show, things started to take off for Smith and Finebaum. The show was growing in popularity across the region.
Success was coming to Smith, even if it was in a platform he didn’t have much prior experience in. During his time at UAB, he was studying how to be a sports reporter on a newscast. But learning to do radio was something he essentially had to figure out on his own.
“There were no mistakes back then, it was, ‘We’re going to shoot from the hip and ask questions later’,” said Smith. “A lot of times we got into trouble, but a lot stuck.”
The early days of the show even broke news on the air, though Smith and Finebaum took those journalism ethics seriously and were always careful to get the story right. When you think of Finebaum’s radio career, you most certainly think of the cast of characters that have called his show for years. That started when he was with Smith.
“We would take phone calls and get outrageous characters,” laughed Smith. “We started developing that rapport with certain people that called into the show every day. Also, we understood the entertainment value, which was letting people have a say, because being in Birmingham, you have wonderful checks and balances between Alabama and Auburn fans. So if one fan base is up, the other is probably down and they’re going to go after each other, it just made for a perfect environment for us.”
The climate was perfect for what Smith and Finebaum were doing on the air. The duo brought entertainment, along with information, and crazy callers to a radio show. Most importantly, they were predominately talking about what everyone wanted to hear in the South: college football. It was mayhem at times, but a beautiful blend of what shaped sports talk radio in the region.
Smith was skilled at stirring the pot between Alabama, Auburn, and other SEC fanbases. Growing up in the Midwest and being a UAB grad, he could come up with opinions that weren’t necessarily viewed as pro-Alabama or Auburn.
“If I did a parody song that was ripping Alabama or the Auburn coaching hire, I didn’t have an ax to grind,” said Smith. “The one thing that people never understood over the years, we’d be sitting in a press box on a Saturday and we’d be looking at each other and we’d be thinking about the outcome of the game and how that would affect us on Monday. And the next week.
“We wanted the outcome to be the craziest it possibly could be because that meant we were going to be in line for a great show on Monday and for the next week. That was always the mantra. When people came after us, we said we were an equal opportunity hater. We‘re going to jump on the program that’s going to be the best for us from a radio perspective.”
Those magical years may have shaped the way sports radio was thought of in the South, but it also shaped Smith and Finebaum’s radio careers. Smith was a key reason why the Paul Finebaum Radio Network went from being a local show in the Birmingham market to a nationally syndicated radio program.
Still today, the duo’s fingerprints are all over the sports radio format in the region. When you think of college football on the radio, you immediately think of JOX in Birmingham. And rightfully so, seeing as the station has made it a point to serve college football fans all across the region and country. Nobody pushed that harder than Smith and Finebaum.
Smith still believes in that strategy and implements it every weekday on the 3 Man Front at JOX, along with Landrum Roberts and John SaBerre.
“It’s college football all the time,” said Smith. “The one thing about JOX, it’s the standard for sports content in the whole state. And not just the whole state, but the whole region. We get so much feedback on our text line or Twitter from places like Nashville, Memphis, Atlanta, Jacksonville, New Orleans, people all over the SEC footprint that listen to us every day, because they know, if you’re a college football fan, we are talking about it every single day.”
Just like Smith was hovered around his radio as a kid when Jack Buck was calling Cardinals games, Alabama, Auburn, and other SEC fan bases have hovered around theirs the Monday after a college football Saturday. It’s not the path Smith originally chased, but it’s one he wouldn’t change for the world. Fate found him at the perfect time.
“Almost every single day, we take the organic approach to whatever is happening in college football,” said Smith. “I would say 95 percent of our conversation year round is about college football.”
