re: worst BR talk show host, take your pick

quote:

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'I'm fed up'

In the studio, Condon's co-host, Dave Michaels, turns up music to drown out one of Condon's verbal crescendos. But Condon just keeps going, talking over "Rush" (the rock band, not Limbaugh). "I mean it, Dave! I'm fed up about it!" Condon shouts as a bass line thrums in.

At a break, a rush of breath escapes from Condon's lips and he sits back, exhausted, blinking. He pushes away from the counter and stops at a small desk piled high with almanacs and papers.

"Can I get you a cup of coffee? Water? Anything?" he asks solicitously, transforming into a different person.

Those close to Condon, 42, insist he's not an inyour-face kind of guy off the air. Outside, around town, in his life, he's a gentleman. He drives carpool. He takes out the garbage.

"I wouldn't have stayed married to him for 18 years if he was like that at home," says Condon's wife, Sue.

"He tells me, 'Sue, I could get on the radio and be monotonous and go with the flow and never mix it up, but then I wouldn't be on the radio anymore.' "

Condon says his on-air personality is just a character he plays, no harm meant, though he does believe what he is saying.

"Somebody who juggles with the bowling pins at birthday parties, magicians or a clown doing tricks, it's just a show. When you go to work, and then you go home, you're a little bit different at work. On radio, it's a little bit different. It's an extreme," he says.

Michaels says it's common for radio people to be like that: Loud, then quiet. Rude, then nice. "There are a lot of insecure people in radio," Michaels says.

Ask Condon off the air why he flips between tough radio guy and nice everyman, and he says it's because he's not all that sure of himself. Tough guy Condon is someone he wishes he could be sometimes.

Condon spent his early childhood in a shotgun house on the corner of Ninth and Chippewa in New Orleans, part of what's known as the Irish Channel.

Life in the Channel was simple back in those days, recalls Condon's father, Richard Condon II.

You didn't have to lock your doors. On summer evenings, talk drifted in and out of open windows and pressed through screen doors. Kids played stickball in the street, and you didn't have to feel bad for drinking beer all day on a Saturday.

"If you cooked something and the neighbor liked it, you always made sure you cooked a little extra and brought it over," the elder Condon says.

"The Irish Channel is the core of who I am," says Condon, the son.

On the radio, Condon paints his rough Irish Channel upbringing in broad, stylized strokes. It's as if, when that on-air button is pressed, he returns to a world that's frozen in a glass globe.

There, the women are broads. Parents slap their children around. And everyone has cigarettes rolled up in their T-shirt sleeves.

Actually, Condon wasn't a badass, his mother, Florence Condon, says. His big passion in high school? Meteorology. He used to rush home from dates to catch the 10 o'clock news.

"He's so different on-air than he is in person," his mother says.

"I got beaten up a bunch," Condon says. "I was shy until I got out of high school. Seriously. I didn't do well with the girls. I was just 125 pounds when I graduated from high school. My dad was pretty hard on me, so I never spread my wings."

'Son-of-a-buggers'

Condon graduated from LSU in 1983 and worked a number of odd jobs until he started doing an afternoon radio show on a station dubbed "The Tiger" in the early '90s.

He was a natural talking about sports. He was even better when he got on the players.

In 1994, Condon scored when he went off on LSU's quarterback, Jamie Howard, after a legendary collapse and loss to Auburn.

"Howard fumbled the center snap," Condon recalls. "He fumbled it, and Wainwright picked it up and started going the opposite way. Jamie Howard didn't even try to tackle him. He just kind of like said, 'Whatever. I'm the quarterback, that's somebody else's job.' And I couldn't believe it."

Condon raised hell about Howard. Howard heard the show and called Condon on the air.

"He says, 'I'm going to come down there and whip your arse.' I said, 'let me tell you how to get here. Where are you coming from?' I said, 'You're coming from LSU, all you have to do is go down Stanford, take a right on Perkins, you get to Essen, you take a left. And right when you get to Benny's Carwash, we're right here.' "

Ratings soared. Condon's run-in with Howard got play on the evening news and in newspapers around the state. Condon got crank calls. Angry fans egged his house.

But pushing the envelope got people's attention, so Condon kept doing it.

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