Loss of North still leaves a vacuum at the Score

Picking up where I left off last week, Mike North has found a place to land some six months after leaving WSCR 670-AM. Yet the Score has not yet found a way to replace Mike North.

Because, although Mike Mulligan and Brian Hanley have stepped up nicely as morning-drive hosts, the Dan Hampton and Laurence Holmes show from 10 a.m. to noon is testimony to how little the Score planned for North's possible departure when the station made him a cut-rate extension offer last year.

Hampton was a great player, a Hall of Fame defensive lineman who epitomized the Monsters of the Midway Bears of the 1980s as much as anybody. He retains the respect of Bears fans, and he knows his sport.

He's a lousy radio host, however, and his learning curve hasn't shown much improvement since he got the gig last fall.

Holmes is a fine reporter and a fine person, a pleasant guy to chat with, but that doesn't make him a radio host either. He certainly isn't a show "driver," a guy who knows how to generate topics and a dialogue with listeners, but in that he's not all that worse than Marc Silverman, his morning-midday counterpart at WMVP 1000-AM.

Yet there's no denying the show Tom Waddle and Silvie put on from 9 a.m. to noon on WMVP is a superior product to what the Score has from 10 to noon, thanks largely to Waddle, who makes whomever he works with sound better.

Waddle had several years of experience doing an evening show with David Kaplan at WGN 720-AM when WMVP made the decision that Steve Rosenbloom and, gad, Sean Salisbury (remember him?) weren't working and brought Waddle over and teamed him with Silvie. Silvie had years of experience as well doing an evening show with Carmen DeFalco and even working alongside Jay Mariotti.

Hampton, by contrast, was largely a Bears pre- and postgame host in this market, and Holmes was being promoted from the reporter ranks. Both were expected to learn on the job, and more than four months in, the time has come to say it ain't happening.

Hampton has a stuttering, staggering manner of speech, especially when he gets trapped off topic talking about something other than football. Holmes is earnest, sometimes overly so, but hardly smooth.

I compared them at first to "Da Bull and Da Bear," Norm Van Lier and Doug Buffone when they were briefly the Score's morning hosts years ago, and I think that comparison holds as both shows are hard listens. Yet "Da Bull and Da Bear" had a goofy, amateurish charm that eludes Hamp & Holmes. They're working too hard to sound barely decent to make their show at all playful.

Holmes is overeager, and I don't know if he thinks his listeners are simple or if he's just a simpleton himself, but he doesn't push to elevate the discussion. Thursday, he began by asking listeners what they had been watching, what had held their attention, the night before on TV.

Really? That's the best you can come up with to engage listeners?

Give credit to producer Matt Weber for posting on the Chicago Sports Fan Message Board seeking listener response in how to improve the show. But in the seven pages and 150 replies, I'm not sure there's anything to make Hamp & Holmes sound better, only a few jokes at their expense.

In the air

Remotely interesting: Final ratings released this week for the NHL Winter Classic showed that the Blackhawks' game at Wrigley Field on New Year's Day attracted 4.4 million viewers nationally, making it the most watched NHL regular-season game since 1975.

NBA League Pass TV has a free preview week starting Monday. ... The MLB Network marks the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday by running "Pride and Perseverance: The Story of the Negro Leagues" at 8 p.m. Monday.

End of the dial: Comcast SportsNet Chicago's "Monsters in the Morning" can he heard live on the Internet at www.chicagosportswebio.com. The show's debut moved CSNC into the top five in the market in the key male demographics and beat ESPN2's "Mike & Mike in the Morning" in households and those demos.

I'm not usually one to cheer radio personalities' forays into print journalism - especially for a competing paper - but Dan McNeil's piece last week in the Sun-Times was sharp, bold and self-lacerating. There might be something in sports-media criticism for Danny Mac if that WMVP 1000-AM thing of his ever goes bust. ... Condolences to all family, friends and fans of Red Rush, who died this week at 81 after a battle with Alzheimer's disease. Rush established himself as the king of rhyming clichés doing Loyola basketball games and, briefly, White Sox broadcasts in the 1960s and '70s. He was know for popularizing, "He eyes it, tries it, buys it," as a basketball call, but my favorite quote of his was the sponsor tag line: "Gonella, it's swella, fella."