Sullivan: A sad ending for sports talk radio host Mike Mulligan

“What a wonderful delight today was,” Mike Mulligan said Friday morning at the end of his shift on the Score.

Mulligan and WSCR-AM 670 co-host David Haugh were transitioning to the midday show with Leila Rahimi and Marshall Harris. It sounded like normal end-of-week banter — a little White Sox talk among the four before a preview of the upcoming show.

But the day would prove to be anything but a wonderful delight for Mulligan, who was fired from the Score at the end of his shift. Harris also was let go after his show in a major restructuring of the station’s morning and midday shows.

Naturally, the news quickly created a stir on social media and the internet, with many glowing tributes to Mulligan — or “Mully,” as he’s widely known — along with some angry rhetoric about the station’s decision and Haugh.

Several tweets centered on the fact Mulligan was not allowed to go out with a final goodbye to his fans, which would’ve been a nice sentiment but is probably unrealistic in the corporate world, in which ID cards are deactivated right after you step off the elevator with your cardboard box of stuff.

Mulligan declined to talk with the Tribune about his experience, so we’ll have to wait. But as a veteran journalist, he always can tell his story on Substack, the modern-day clearinghouse for transitioning writers, or wait a while and tell it on Episode 1 of a new podcast.

I worked alongside Mulligan years ago when we were young beat writers for competing papers and was briefly a baseball correspondent on the “Mully & Hanley Show” before program director Mitch Rosen realized I’m incomprehensible in the morning. I honestly don’t know Mulligan well but always enjoyed our conversations and respected his opinions, even if we disagreed on things, as a couple Irish guys from Chicago tend to do.

While sports talk radio isn’t as big as it was a couple of decades ago — like, uh, newspapers — it still has many loyal listeners. Mulligan served them a steady diet of opinions on the Bears, White Sox, Cubs and Bulls over the years. “Great stuff” was his mantra after an interview, whether it was great or not.

Mulligan had been a co-host on the morning show since 2008, originally teaming with former Sun-Times colleague Brian Hanley, who was let go in 2018 and replaced by Haugh, who wrote the Tribune’s “In the Wake of the News” column I inherited in 2020.

Morning drive time is the most important show for any station, and the Score is in heated competition with WMVP-AM 1000’s “Kap & J.Hood Show,” co-hosted by David Kaplan and Jonathan Hood. The “Mully and Haugh Show” has beaten WMVP in the ratings for quite some time, and there was no outward indication the station was unhappy with Mulligan’s performance.

Inner-office friction? It’s anyone’s guess, but the end result was someone wanted change.

Rosen wrote it was a “difficult” decision but did not give a reason for the dismissals in a memo to staffers, which ended with “I know there will be questions, and I understand that.”

There were questions. Rosen was unavailable for comment Saturday. He told staffers a new host would be announced Monday, which led to speculation former WGN-Ch. 9 sportscaster Jarrett Payton, who recently left the station, was on his way to joining Haugh for a Bears-centric pairing. Haugh was a Bears beat writer at the Tribune before becoming a columnist, and Payton is the son of Bears great Walter Payton.

Rosen has mixed-and-matched his radio personalities often, sometimes after being forced to make changes, like after firing popular hosts Dan McNeil and Dan Bernstein for their highly publicized social media implosions. It could be a case of Rosen being Rosen, creating a new chemistry experiment.

WMVP has featured much the same roster for several years, but radio is typically a business in which personalities are advised to rent, not own. And the heyday of big salaries is over, with podcasting growing every year and taking listeners away.

Haugh, who also is a co-host of Chicago Sports Network shows too numerous to mention, was on vacation and unavailable for comment. Several guests will co-host the soon-to-be-rebranded morning show this week, including regulars Gabe Ramirez and Ruthie Polinsky.

A caller to the Score’s “Inside the Clubhouse” show Saturday gave Mulligan a shoutout, which served as a de facto announcement of the news on the station’s airwaves.

Harris, a sportscaster at WLS-Ch. 7, had been with the Score for only a couple of years, so his firing was not quite as surprising. Three voices on one show is usually one too many, so Rahimi and Mark Grote will continue as co-hosts of the aptly renamed “Rahimi & Grote Show.”

Mulligan’s future in radio is uncertain. He’s certainly popular enough to head a podcast, as Bernstein did after being fired last year over tweets made while arguing with a follower on X. He seems happy in podcasting, as does Jason Goff since CHSN let him go last year as Bulls studio host.

Or perhaps Mulligan can now sleep in and relax in retirement after a long, successful career in newspapers and radio. The best thing about being fired in the social media era is getting to read all the nice things people say about you in comments under the tweet on your firing.

Sports radio personalities form a bond with listeners that sports writers at newspapers can’t match with our readers. The late Les Grobstein wasn’t the best voice in radio and ended up on overnights at the Score. But he became a local legend because of his loyal following — and the Lee Elia tape — and is still talked about in press boxes around town.

Even the best sports radio personalities know it all can end at any time, and like Mulligan, are usually grateful for the chance to serve as the voice Chicago fans tuned into over the years.

There was plenty to talk about: Jordan. Payton. Ditka. Sandberg. Kane and Toews. The Big Hurt and Ozzie. Rizzo.

How lucky can one town be?

Many of Mulligan’s listeners are understandably upset and have declared they will never listen to the Score again, just as some declared after the shocking departures of McNeil, Bernstein and Mike North. But the Score will survive, as it always has. People will always want to talk Bears in the winter, Cubs and Sox in the summer and Bears stadium nonsense year-round.

While Mully is officially gone, let’s hope the Score also makes some other changes for a better listener experience.

As a longtime listener since the early years of North, Terry Boers, Hanley, Doug Buffone and Ed O’Bradovich and Barry Rozner, I’d recommend the following seven fixes.

1. Use more local guests instead of national “Audacy experts” who rarely step foot in our ballparks or stadiums but comment on the state of our teams like they live here.

2. Less Craig Counsell. The Cubs manager sounds like he’s only doing his weekly interview at gunpoint.

3. Stop giving Cubs business president Crane Kenney and Sox vice president Brooks Boyer a platform. Let them buy an ad. No executive in American sports history has received more publicity on sports radio than those two.

4. Cut down on the gambling talk. Not everyone has a bet on the game or cares about the odds of someone hitting a home run.

5. Open the phone lines more often while weeding out the same callers.

6. Stop calling the mayor of Hammond until a stadium deal is done.

7. And by all means ban those annoying “Cars for Kids” commercials.

I’ll hang up now and listen for your answer.