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When Steve Somers first started at WFAN in 1987, the beloved former sports talk host didn’t think he’d make it past his first year on the airwaves.
“I always thought I was going to get fired,” Somers told The Post in a phone conversation. “I remember after the first year that I was there, talking to my mother and father in San Francisco, where I was crying on the phone, I was so happy I was renewed. I mean, I didn’t know whether my shtick was gonna work or not. The agent that I had at the time said I would do well in New York because of my sense of humor. Being sarcastic, being somewhat sardonic, a little bit ironic and a little bit iconic. So he thought I would do okay in New York, but he was the only one.”
Safe to say 34 years at one of the country’s best-known sports talk radio stations proved Somers’ agent right, and that rise to becoming one of the most memorable voices at WFAN is part of Somers’ new memoir coming out Nov. 18, “Me Here, You There: My Three Decades Overnight, Under the Covers, Schmoozing S-P-O-R-T-S as Captain Midnight for WFAN.”
Somers, who grew up in San Francisco, became a staple on New York sports talk radio before he retired in 2021 — he still fills in from time to time on WFAN and hosts a weekly podcast — making his Somer-isms hard to forget.
In a nearly hour-long conversation with The Post, Somers weaved his tried and true sayings in, dropping “Sacratomato” into a story about his mother’s concern over job security in New York; “My mother thought if I wanted to find security, that I should be a shoe salesman, And I told her, I don’t have a foot fetish,” he joked.
“The Fearless Forecaster” came up when he was discussing his start in radio in his teens, doing high school sports in the 1960s, which is where that particular Somer-ism was born.
And of course, there was “Ice-Landers.”
“That was something that really pissed off a number of Islander fans when I started using back and forth the rivalry between the two [hockey teams],” Somers said. “The unsung rivalry that really hit the heart of hockey fans was Rangers and Islanders and I love playing off urban versus rural. Broadway versus Old Country Road. Madison Square Garden versus the Nassau Mausoleum.”
Somers, as he recalled, would even play “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” from the movie “Oklahoma” to add to the shtick and it led to an Islanders PR person inviting him to lunch to try to convince him to stop calling them the “Ice-Landers” since it had bothered the organization and the fans.
Somers declined that request and Islanders fans eventually caught on.
“I don’t mean any harm. It’s not vile, it’s not destructive. It just infuriates one fan base against the team that I root for,” he said.
The beloved sports talk host boiled down his thought process with his Somer-isms to one simple idea: “I didn’t want to use cliches.”
“Metaphors, euphemisms, play on words. I thought there were a number of things that I did that I thought were creative and inventive,” Somers said before admitting that sometimes cliches were inevitable.
Somers referred to reaching the heights that he did at WFAN as getting to Broadway, finding it hard to believe, when asked to look back, at some of the things that he’s gotten to do during the course of his career.
And some of the friends he’s made along the way.
Among Somers’ devoted legion of fans is comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who wrote the foreword for Somers’ upcoming book, and famously called into the show over the years as Jerry from Queens.
Actor/comedian Robert Klein has also called in.
“When I started or even when I came to WFAN, I would have paid [the station] for that opportunity to finally get to Broadway,” Somers said about reaching the New York Sports talk station. “I used to say, if you were to take a flight from the West Coast to the East Coast, it’s about six hours. That flight took me 22 years and I finally got here and did okay.”
Somers said he wants the message readers take away from the book to be “don’t take no for an answer.”
“You can survive and flourish and with some good fortune and good luck, you can realize some of your goals, your dreams, your destinations,” he said. “Now, that’s a cliche, but it resonates. And I think everybody can identify with that.”
English (US)