Sports on the Air /
Sports on the Air: Jack Armstrong fans out his resume
If you’re one of the local radio listeners who have tired of WGR 550’s vision of sports talk radio, the Canadian station just to the right of it on the dial has given you another reason to give it a try.
Starting Monday, former Niagara basketball coach Jack Armstrong will host a daily show on “the Fan” 590 from 2 to 4 p. m. with Doug MacLean, the former Columbus Blue Jackets coach and general manager. Armstrong replaces Chuck Swirsky, the former Toronto Raptors play-by-play man who left the area to become the voice of the Chicago Bulls.
The MacLean and Armstrong show is called “the Game Plan.”
“I’ve drawn enough lousy ones, that’s why I’m in broadcasting,” cracked Armstrong, who initially wondered if he could do the full-time radio job.
“My wife said, ‘How many times will you be offered a job in a top-five market to host a show two hours a day?’ Opportunities don’t come along often.”
Armstrong, the Raptors television and radio analyst who lives in Lewiston and is a Sabres and Bills season ticket holder, is joining a regular 590 lineup that already includes former Buffalo News columnist Jim Kelley. Kelley teams with the station’s top sports talker, Bob McCown, from 4 to 7 p. m. weekdays every other week.
That’s right. Two of Western New York’s experts on basketball and hockey, who used to have regular TV and radio gigs here, now talk sports for a Canadian station.
“We laugh about it all the time,” said Armstrong in his still-thick Brooklyn accent.
“We find it ironic,” said Kelley. “We’re doing something we never set out to do in the same city and the same radio station. The odds of that happening are pretty bizarre.”
Kelley added that Armstrong is tremendously popular and “a genuine personality” in Toronto who was named “Toronto’s Irishman of the Year” by an Irish pub.
Armstrong, who has made regular visits on 590 for 10 years, admits that Canadians talk about his accent all the time, too. “I think that’s part of the appeal,” he said.
Unlike WGR, which concentrates on the Bills and Sabres, the accent on 590 is on all sports.
“No offense to Chuck from Cheektowaga,” said Kelley, “but we get people who make decisions. We’re not just opinions. We also talk to the people involved in the stories.”
Armstrong has worked with WGR staffers Mike Schopp, Howard Simon and Chris Parker so he isn’t about to say anything negative about them. But pressed, he acknowledges that he approached WGR Program Director Andy Roth a few years ago about the possibility of bringing his basketball expertise to the station on a weekly basis.
“They weren’t interested,” said Armstrong. “If it isn’t about the Bills or the Sabres, they’re not interested. I was really upset, not for myself but for NBA and college basketball fans. I was ticked off.”
Though primarily a basketball expert, Armstrong is from Brooklyn so he has opinions about baseball, football, hockey and all sports. Naturally, the Fan focuses on Toronto’s teams — the Leafs, Raptors, the Jays, the Argos. And now, gulp, the Bills.
“There is an emphasis there now,” said Armstrong of the Bills. “There is a fan base of people from Toronto who go to one or two games in Orchard Park.”
Armstrong can’t talk enough about his personal good fortune since being fired by Niagara.
He feels he’s living the title of a book, “Outrageous Good Fortune,” he was given years ago by the late Niagara trainer, Ray Kist, about former New York Yankees executive Michael Burke.
Armstrong remembers that Frank Layden, the former Niagara and Utah Jazz coach, called him after he was fired to say that he’d eventually realize the NU priests did him a favor.
“I am grateful to the good fathers that they let me go,” said Armstrong. “By no means am I a millionaire. But I’m in sports and I’m dealing with the good. There are no agents, no pressure. All I have to do is talk about sports.”
If the hiring of Armstrong by 590 puts a little more pressure on WGR to expand its thinking beyond the Bills and Sabres, it would be Western New York’s good fortune.
