By Ronda Racha Penrice
“Make ‘em, make ‘em, make ‘em clap to this” from Eric B & Rakim’s hip-hop classic, “Eric B. Is President,” thunders familiarly over the airwaves just before Bomani Jones eases back into the topics at hand — Drake’s performance at VH1’s Hip Hop Honors, why Trojan should do STD commercials and reasons taking your girl with you to the World Cup isn’t a bad idea. Believe it or not, all of this fits neatly within Jones’s sports-centered show, “The Morning Jones”, which broadcasts from Toronto but is hosted in North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham area.
Sports may be the main dish cooking at “The Morning Jones” but music is an essential ingredient. After all, it’s no secret that music and sports have a pretty good marriage and so far this recipe has worked well for the show. Accompanied by Canadian sidekicks Corey Erdman and Sacha Kargl, Jones hosts the show from 7 am to 10 am EST for Canada’s Hardcore Sports Radio, heard on Sirius Channel 98 and available for free through iTunes.
Since its debut in January 2010 “The Morning Jones” has made a steady climb in popularity. While the program is far from the mainstream, Jones’s many appearances on ESPN, particularly on “Outside the Lines”, indicate that he is indeed one to watch. This is a very surprising turn of events for a former Ph.D. candidate in economics.
When one considers that Jones is still a few months shy of 30 the accomplishment becomes more impressive. With both parents working as college professors and holding two advanced degrees himself, Jones had his sights set on continuing the family tradition.
How he detoured from ambitions of being the next public intellectual in the vein of Michael Eric Dyson or Cornel West, might be called an accident. Although his father, esteemed political scientist Dr. Mack Jones, instilled a fanatical love of sports and his childhood was filled with endless sports activity, Jones never dreamed of a career in this area.
“I never considered doing anything in sports professionally until 2004, 2005,” said Jones, who began writing in 2000 while still an undergraduate at Clark Atlanta University. Music was his topic of choice then and he landed paying gigs with sites like Salon.com and eventually secured his own weekly column, “For Myself and Others,” on AOL’s Black Voices.
He liked writing but as graduation approached, he chose the safer bet of grad school. Writing about sports didn’t occur to him until a friend met one of Jones’s long-term idols, legendary sportswriter Ralph Wiley, at a book signing in 2003. Contact information was exchanged and, via frequent emails, Wiley and Jones established a virtual mentorship.
One day Jones suggested a topic for Wiley to tackle. Instead of penning the piece himself, Wiley shared it with his editors at ESPN.com who gave Jones a crack at it. Even as Jones submitted the piece he believed that it would be his one and only for the sports goliath. But they liked what they saw and approached him about helping to improve the offerings of Page 3, the portion of the site focusing on the intersection of sports and popular culture.
Given Jones’s early music work and passion for sports, he was a natural. Page 3 didn’t last but Jones did, regularly contributing to Page 2, which features opinion and humorous pieces.
Contributing to ESPN.com opened a floodgate of opportunity for Jones. “By being affiliated with ESPN, you start getting emails or you start getting phone calls from people, ‘Hey I just read something that you wrote, would you like to appear on my radio show?,’” Jones said. Because it was “a way to get my name out there, to talk to more people, [plus] it was cool just being asked to be on the radio.” Jones jumped at the offers.
Eventually a sports station in the Raleigh/Durham area realized that he was local and promised more collaboration. That led to not just guest appearances but eventually host fill-in spots. Before Jones knew it he was calling a few shots from 9 am to noon with “Sports Saturday with Bomani Jones” for McClatchey Broadcasting Company’s WRBZ-AM, 850 The Buzz. Not long after that, he was offered his own daily program, “The Three Hour Lunch Break” on sister station, WDNC-AM, 620 The Bull, making it possible to tune into him six days a week.
Never taking his good fortune for granted, Jones worked hard to learn his craft. He sought advice from a consultant the station hired. “’People don’t want to talk about X’s and O’s in sports,’ that was the first thing he said. ‘People don’t want to talk about what defense this team was running or what offense that team was running; they want to talk about things that relate as directly to their lives as you can possibly make them,’’’ recalled Jones.
Jones has never forgotten that insight.
It guides his development of “The Morning Jones,” which came about after his previous stations were dissolved in favor of Spanish-language programming. Just at the moment when his future in sports radio seemed most uncertain, Hardcore Sports approached Jones.
“At his core, Bomani Jones is like one of the many citizens of Hardcore Country — a devoted hardcore sports fan,” said program director Mike Gentile in a press release announcing his arrival. “A popular radio personality, who has developed his style in the middle of the Duke/North Carolina rivalry, Bomani identifies on a personal level with both fans as well as athletes.
He is the perfect bridge between the stars of sports and the people who watch them…and talk about them….” More and more those people look very different from the sports radio audiences of the past. According to Jones, traditional sports radio’s target demographic is largely “25-54 year-old males and, they won’t say it out loud, but they are really saying 25-54 year-old white males.” With his current show Jones doesn’t have to appeal to that cohort. In fact, Jones hasn’t given considerable thought to who currently comprises his audience.
“Satellite is a lot less about working around what you think your audience wants and putting together a product, than it is [about deciding] what you want it to be and then bringing the audience to it,” he explained. “I think we are forming an audience and figuring out where it is . . . it gives us a chance to really build an audience and the type of show that’s never been done in sports radio before.”
Interestingly enough, women are a key element of this audience, despite the fact that Jones doesn’t target female listeners. He believes the appeal emanates from his frank approach to discussions of sex and relationships. “Men, in general, still do not know how to talk to women or how to deal with women beyond their desire to sleep with them,” he said. “For me, I’ve never looked at things that way.”
No matter the topic, however, it is his emphasis on making a personal connection that Jones finds most effective with his audiences in Canada and the United States, male and female. “Sports are a microcosm for life. And, it sounds really corny to say that and maybe a little cliché, but, anybody that tries to navigate through an office can tell you those things that you hear people talk about in sports — chemistry and everything else, it’s the same things. There’s really no difference but the activity.”
As for those who want to follow in his footsteps, Jones advocates a more direct path. “I would never recommend to anybody that they go about this the way that I went about it. My route to where I’ve gotten is wholly untraditional,” he said. “The way I’ve gone about this has been rough. It’s probably better to go through this with some level of training.”
But even for those who choose the straight and narrow, the hustle, in Jones’ opinion, is mandatory: “Get out there and don’t be afraid to ask for advice from people you’ve only heard of. You cannot be scared and you have to work, work, work to make it through.”
