Michael Kay did not aspire to be a full-time radio host.
Back when he called Yankees games on WABC, Kay would occasionally host three-hour talk shows for the station during the MLB offseason.
It was an enjoyable gig for Kay, but Tim McCarthy, the longtime general manager of WABC, envisioned him doing more.
So when McCarthy helped launch the ESPN New York radio station in September of 2001, he urged Kay to host a show.
Kay, as he recalled in a recent interview, was intrigued, but he questioned whether he would be able to balance his Yankees play-by-play work with a weekday radio program.
“I wanted to be able to give both things the effort and the respect they deserve,” Kay told the Daily News. “[McCarthy] finally wore me down. I started with a noon show and then moved into 10-1, and then, finally, they decided to have me and Don [La Greca] move into the afternoon drive spot. The rest, as they say, is history.”
That history refers to “The Michael Kay Show,” which, over its 22-year run, turned hosts Kay, La Greca and Peter Rosenberg into indelible staples of the sports radio scene. They delivered thought-provoking commentary, newsmaking interviews and viral segments, and, ultimately, unseated WFAN’s Mike Francesa atop the ratings.
Dec. 13 marked the final episode of that iteration of the show. Kay is set to begin a solo version of “The Michael Kay Show” in the 1-3 p.m. time slot on Jan. 6, while Alan Hahn is joining La Greca and Rosenberg in the 3-7 p.m. window for a new program called “Don, Hahn & Rosenberg.”
The move allows Kay, who turns 64 in February, to spend more time with his school-aged kids, and catapults La Greca and Rosenberg further into the spotlight.
It’s a bittersweet switch for the hosts, who are each excited for their new programs but acknowledge their time-tested chemistry allowed the “Kay Show” to prevail.
“We were able to juggle being fans but also being journalists,” La Greca, who is also a radio voice of the Rangers for the station, told The News. “Being able to really do all of that at the same time, it was just so, so much different than a lot of other shows. It wasn’t the same structure. ‘Go to break at this time. Talk about this for a period of time. Take calls for this period of time.’
“I really thought we thought outside the box to allow our personalities to be as much a part of the show as the sports.”
“The Michael Kay Show” debuted on July 15, 2002, with Kay and La Greca as co-hosts.
Kay, with his newspaper background and Yankees insight, and La Greca, a hockey expert with an everyman appeal, proved a dynamic pairing in the 10-1 time slot.
When their show shifted to the coveted afternoon drive slot in March of 2005, La Greca wondered if the move would affect the show’s staying power, considering the new hours would conflict more with Kay’s play-by-play duties for the YES Network.
“We’re talking about a guy that’s going to be extending his day, going from transitioning from one to the other, constantly being away,” La Greca, 56, said.
“We wouldn’t be connected together, so you wondered how long is he going to want to do that? How long are we going to be able to make it work, where I’m going to be doing the show because the Yankees are playing a day game or Michael’s got to travel from one place to another? And he made it work, and we made it work.”
And the show worked, too.
In 2011, Kay asked Eli Manning if he considered himself an elite quarterback. Manning replied in the affirmative, sparking national conversation about whether the then-Giants star’s perception was accurate. Six months later, Manning would lead the Giants to their second Super Bowl victory in four years.
La Greca regularly went viral for his epic rants. He melted down as he contended Ed Kranepool was the Mets’ lone “forever player” and flipped out when Evan Neal dismissed booing Giants fans as “hamburger flippers.”
In 2014, the YES Network began simulcasting the “Kay Show.” It replaced a simulcast of Francesa’s show.
The following year, the “Kay Show” added Rosenberg, who, despite not having professional sports-talk experience, was a known commodity in the market as a host on the hip-hop-focused Hot 97 show “Ebro in the Morning.”
Kay and La Greca were admittedly skeptical of Rosenberg’s addition, but he quickly brought a new dynamic with his youthful sensibilities, pop-culture prowess and witty one-liners.
“For some people, it was like, ‘Who is this guy?’” Rosenberg, 45, recalled to The News. “But here was a whole other demo who had not ever really spent time on ESPN New York, that, when they heard my voice, were like, ‘Oh, that’s my guy from Hot 97!’
“Not only did that make an impact in that moment, where clearly people came along with me who had been listening to me for 10 years at Hot, but I would argue now … our diversity, it’s got to be up tenfold from when I got here.”
The “Kay Show” continued to gain momentum with Rosenberg in the mix.
Audiences resonated with new segments such as the “Evening Nightly News” — or “ENN” — in which Rosenberg presented each day’s sports and entertainment news, or “Drop Madness” in which listeners voted for the best “Kay Show” audio drops of the year.
In 2019, the “Kay Show” achieved what once seemed unthinkable. It beat Francesa in the ratings.
“We came very close for about two years before we finally won, and there was debate about whether you should count streaming and stuff like that,” Kay said. “So when, finally, there were no excuses whatsoever [in the fall of 2019], that was a real joyous occasion, because Mike had really talked down upon us right from the very start. He said that these guys would never even come close to him.”
La Greca described Francesa as “a monolith” who showed no respect to ESPN New York when it arrived as a startup.
“I remember we had a meeting one time, and they put up his remarks … that we’re 0.0, we’re a peashooter,” La Greca said.
“Every once in a while when you are able to do something that nobody thought you’d do, I’m not gonna lie to you, it was a really, really special moment.”
At the time, the “Kay Show” was New York’s top-rated afternoon show, including programming outside of sports. An ESPN New York show had never achieved that feat.
The “Kay Show” proved similarly impactful the following year, when sports — and the world — shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“People were locked in their houses, and for three-and-a-half hours, either listening on the radio or watching us on YES, they had an opportunity to just get away from this awful thing that was happening around the world and laugh a little bit,” Kay said.
“We’ve heard so much of that over the years, and if that’s the one thing that came out of this, that we made a segment of people happy and able to take their minds off the awfulness of what was going on in the world, then all 22 years were worth it.”
In August, ESPN New York moved to 880 AM, an iconic signal that added a spark to the station.
But August is also when the grind of two full-time jobs typically takes its toll on Kay. This year, Kay said, hit him differently.
“I started to think about all the things that I’m missing,” Kay said. “Not only was I physically and mentally drained all the time, I just felt, ‘What am I missing?’ My son’s sporting events and my daughter’s cheerleading events and things like that.
“If I either stepped away or if I ratcheted back a little bit, I’d be able to do more with them and still keep my hand in radio.”
That sentiment is what ultimately drove Kay’s decision to leave afternoon drive.
The uncertainty of what would come next was concerning at times, said La Greca. He remained under contract with ESPN New York, but Rosenberg and Hahn needed new deals.
“It was scary because we’ve got different entities, right? You’ve got Good Karma, who owns the radio station, Bristol that runs the radio station, and we’re here in Manhattan,” La Greca said.
“There was a time where everybody was on the same floor, but now we’ve all been separated, so it’s a lot of phone calls, emails, text messages. It didn’t have that personal feeling of knowing what was happening.”
Given those circumstances, Kay, La Greca and Rosenberg consider the new ESPN New York schedule the best-case scenario.
Kay’s show, still called “The Michael Kay Show,” fits his life better. It is yet to be decided if YES will continue to simulcast his show.
La Greca and Rosenberg get to continue working together in the same time slot while adding Hahn, an ESPN New York veteran and a Knicks studio analyst for MSG Network.
“Don, Hahn & Rosenberg” had a soft launch during the week of Dec. 16-20 and is set to officially start on Jan. 6.
“When you think about Don, Alan and myself, three real vets of this market at this point who have all had really good moments, where people are like, ‘This guy is awesome,’ but all of us have sort of not had the moment for us,” Rosenberg said.
“I think it’s really a fun potential story to be told about us three guys getting the marquee and really doing a lot with it. I really hope to get to a point where people think of this as just its own, completely different thing.”
For Kay, it’s not goodbye. It’s see ya a little earlier.
“I think one of my strengths is interviewing,” Kay said. “I’m going to try to get newsmakers on. People that are important voices in the sports world or even in the entertainment industry, I’m going to get them on. I’m going to involve the callers a lot. It’s going to be a lot of what we did.”
