December 5, 2025 • 28 mins
Ben Maller (produced by Danny G.) has a great Friday for you! He talks: Two important sports figures passing this week, & more!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Kabbooms.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
If you thought four hours a day, twelve hundred minutes
a week was enough, think again. He's the last remnants
of the old republic, a sol fashion of fairness. He
treats crackheads in the ghetto gutter the same as the
rich pill poppers in the penthouse. Wow to clearinghouse of
hot takes, break free for something special. The Fifth Hour
(00:23):
with Ben Maller starts right now in.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
The air everywhere, The Fifth Hour with me, Ben Mahler
in Danny G Radio, as we kick off the weekend
festivities here in the Magic pod Box. And you have
become a p one by listening to the Fifth Hour podcast.
You are a higher level of audio consumer. So we
(00:53):
thank you for that. And unfortunately there are days in
this goofy, little wacky sports radio business that I've chosen
to spend my life in that the sports take can wait. Now.
We don't normally get real sporty on the Fifth Hour Podcast.
It's more about just things that are out in my
(01:13):
world that I share with you, and I thank you
for putting up with that. So I'm not going to
sit here and talk about a quarterback controversy or a
coaching hot seed, or why this team stinks or that
team's good, or any of that background noise. It's all
background noise because there's something much heavier that happened this week.
And this is unfortunately one of those days where and
(01:36):
I want to share this with you, and I was
going to talk about it on the radio show and
it didn't come up in conversation, and I thought this
would be the perfect platform to talk about the events
that took place this week. So earlier this week, I
got a text from a number I did not recognize
out of the four to one six that's the area
(01:57):
code for Toronto. Now I have some friend in Toronto,
people I've worked with over the years. Canadian mic comes
to mind. But I didn't recognize this number and it
wasn't in my phone, so I figured it was spam,
And like any good red blooded American or Canadian for
that matter, I just decided not to not to answer
(02:18):
the thing. I said, I'm not going to respond to
the text, and so I thought it was some bot,
some spam bot say can I confirm your Costco executive
membership number? Or telling me to pay a toll from
a road trip I didn't take or warning me that
the Apple Pay is locked. I don't use Apple Pay,
but it's locked, you know the drill. So hours later
(02:42):
now I got the text. I was sleeping hours later
while I was out hustling doing the day to day adulting.
I was at Costco, because that's what you do when
gas is four ninety nine and you're trying to squeeze
every penny until Lincoln screams no mob. So I get
the call, the same number as before. I was like, well,
(03:05):
that's probably not spam. And it wasn't spam. It was
my past coming back. It was a voice from the
Fox Sports Radio Alumni Association, my buddy Josh, one of
the original expansion team guys from twenty five years ago,
calling me out of the blue. This guy, Josh's father,
(03:27):
was a legendary hockey announcer for the Columbus Blue Jackets
who just retired maybe in the last ten years. He
had worked for a bunch of other teams in the
NHL as well, and so Josh worked at our place
when we started up, and Josh had the kind of
news that changes the temperature and the automobile the malamobile
(03:48):
by twenty degrees. So one of our former teammates had
died and Josh called me to share the news before
it got out in the media. And it was sudden.
It was, you know, one of the are you telling
me the truth kind of thing. I mean that kind
of thing. You know, this can't be real. There was
no warning shot, not even a whisper, and just that's it.
(04:13):
You know, game over crossed the Great Divide and this one.
This is one of the weird inconvenient truths about when
you get to the age I'm at your friends, your colleges.
Like when I was younger, I lost relatives. I lost aunts, uncles, grandparents,
(04:34):
things like that. It's a circle of life. And you
get to my age. Now it's your friends, your colleagues.
You're really the co stars in the documentary of your life.
We're all doing our own documentary, our own life story.
And in mind, this was one of the people that
was a part of it. And these people start disappearing.
You're like, where did that person go? What happened? In't
(04:55):
heard from that person? Oh man, And it sneaks up
on you, it's like, how did that happened? One day,
you're all a bunch of kids trying to crack the
code of sports talk radio, trying to make your mark
in the media business, and you're cracking jokes and eating
Denny's at five in the morning after you worked all night,
(05:15):
and you're wandering around farting on each other in the hallways,
and you're doing two or three jobs or eating microwave
hot pockets, and then suddenly, in my case, I'm still
holding down the overnight post. I haven't left. And the
other people I work with in those days, they've all
scattered all over the United States and Canada and in
(05:37):
countries around the world, and they're all building their own lives.
Many of them already have chasing dreams, living their existence.
And so this one hurt because the voice that we lost,
a early Fox Sports Radio voice, belonged to Sarge. He
was given the birth name Steven Charles Pickman Sarge. If
(06:00):
you don't know, if you're not familiar with his work,
a comedian, a performer, and in my book, a Fox
Sports Radio original. I don't know if he was there
right when the network started, but he was a total
mench in every sense of the word. He's born I
believe he was born like New York, but he was
I know he was raised on Long Island and had
(06:22):
a very interesting childhood. We had him on the podcast
last year. Sarge was adopted right after birth, and you know,
he's a kid. He loved entertainment and all that knew.
He wanted to be a guy holding a microphone and
(06:42):
told the story that when he was a kid, his
grandfather took him to the Catskill Mountains where he would
hang out and that was kind of his playground. And
then growing up in New York, that's where you go
and a lot of old school entertainers, the legend of
the cat Skills, which I don't think is really a
thing anymore, but back in the day, that was the spot.
And he was like seven years old and he's sitting
(07:05):
on a folding chair next to his grandpa watching these
famous comedians perform. And he then eventually that would be
his life, that would be his oxygen. And Sarge went
to Boston University, the School of Public Communications. How about that?
Look at that, smart, Serge, And and if the movie
(07:26):
ended there, it's like, okay, well that's fine. You know,
great kid, big dreams on the up and up, and
his story and he's been he's very open about it.
Serge the comedian that worked at our place, because his
life was not a Disney movie. It was not a
fairy tale. And that's the way life off it is. Right,
there's plot twist, there's upstairs, downs, the rise, the fall,
(07:48):
the rise again, and Sarge fell into a diction Hart
like Serge. We talked off the air a few times like, well,
you could have been one of my callers, like you
could have been mouthwash Mike, or beer drinking Ran or
keg drinking Steve or one of these characters that calls
the show. He spent part of his young life Sarge homeless,
literally sleeping in Manhattan under the Manhattan Bridge and doing
(08:14):
copious amounts of drugs and hovering in the shadowy no
man's land where people pretend like they don't see you
and they hope that you don't approach him because you
look like you haven't showered since the nineties, and for
many that's where it ends, unfortunately, and he just kind
(08:34):
of fade out. Game over. Sarge, though, was able to
pull off one of the great miracles. He back thirty
some odd years ago. He was really down his luck
and he had this lightning bolt epiphany the Holy Cow.
As we say. The term we use on the show
(08:55):
a lot is they come to Jesus meeting with himself.
And he decided, it's not Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving has already happened
back a month ago. It's late December. I'm going to
have you know, I'm going to have some turkey. I'm
gonna have a cold turkey. No rehab, no halfway house.
They don't tell you to do this, no supervised program.
He just made a decision one day, the day after
(09:17):
Christmas nineteen ninety he said, that's it. I'm done. I'm
done living this life. I want to do something else.
And he never looked back. Thirty years of sobriety for
my man Sarge and just a great mitzvah that that
he pulled that off. And from that point forward it
(09:38):
did become a Disney movie. It was. It was someone
who had turned on the stage lights and yell, all right, serge,
you're up. And he wrote, produced, performed on the best
damn sports show period if you remember that show, very
popular show at the time, and he worked at our
place at Fox Sports Radio. That's why he was an
alumni member. He hosted a show, actually did a show
with Jason Smith in the early and I sat in
(10:01):
on that show a few times, and we talked a
lot in the hallways back in the wild early two
thousands what we call now looking back, we call the
expansion era of Fox Sports Radio because it started out
of nowhere, and this is when ESPN Radio was the
Roman Empire and we were the barbarian tribe trying to
(10:22):
scale the walls, and we didn't have any weapons. We
just had duct tape and a couple of microphones and
a VU meter. And the roster back then feels like
a mythological group of people. We had Kevin Frazier who's
gone on and done great things in entertainment, Chris Myers
(10:42):
who does NFL games, the Hall of Famer, the goat
of sports radio, Tony Bruno, Bob Golick, who was the
more famous Goliic, more famous than his brother, who would
be part of the Mike and Mike and rich Arera,
the great Rich Arero did Tampa Bay Rays baseball for
years period post Kevin Kylie who Chuck Booms comedian that
(11:06):
did a lot of great stuff. Andrew Cecilian who's the
voice of the Cleveland Browns now Steve Zabin, Zabe's an
all time great what a peach Zabe is And that
was the kind of line up you look back at
it now, I was like, Wow, how do we all
work in the same building and then we violate some
kind of fire code or something like that. But this
is about not about those people. It's about Sarge. Sarge
(11:27):
was right in the middle of all of it. He
wasn't loud off the air. He had a great shtick,
not overbearing. He was just present. He was his study, heartbeat,
a guy very funny obviously as a comedian, and a
guy whose talent didn't need you know, the loud volume,
you know all that stuff. His impersonations were legendary, like
(11:50):
Mike Tyson, marv Albert, Gilbert Godfrey. There's some great stories
about Gilbert Godfreed Kermit the Frog. He could do it all,
and he went from being homeless. He performed worldwide. He
performed at the iconic Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan.
The Major League Baseball All Star Game, they brought Sarge
(12:11):
out to perform late night TV back when that matted.
People watch that with Craig Ferguson. There were clubs, theaters,
cruise ships. He told me his life on the cruise ship.
And I've repeated that story a few times over the years,
but how depressing that was. On the cruise ship. You think, Okay,
I'm on the ocean, I've got my own plays, i
(12:33):
have to perform a couple shows a night, I've got
free food and all. That's kind of depressing. And he'd
performed at cathedrals, temples, retirement communities. He had told me
his niche was the retirement communities of South Florida. Not
only retirement hoa's, the Jewish community centers, the condo places
(12:55):
where audiences really loved this comedian went in and telling
jokes and gags and all that, and Serge gave them
what they wanted. It wanted somebody who was warm and
fun and was a storyteller, and he gave gave that
to them and anybody that came across Serge. And so
here's what I want to remember most. Last year I
(13:17):
had him on this podcast, the Fifth Hour podcast, and
it was great to catch up and it was one
of those conversations when you blink and you know, time
just disappears right. And he told the story about cold calling.
This is back when you could do this and like
the I guess the early nineties, he cold called television
(13:38):
executives because he wanted to work at CB I think
it was CBS, and he ended up getting the job.
He it was wild, like classic Sarge hustle move off
the air years when we worked together, he was good
friends with Gilbert Godfrey. They were all coming up as
comedians together, Gilbert, Sarge, there were a couple of other
(13:59):
big names comedians, and Sarge told the story about how
he and Gilbert were on the boats, the cruise ships,
and they were all single, and they were trying to
get Gilbert to hook up with the ladies, unsuccessfully, by
the way, to try to get Gilbert Godfried, the iconic
(14:20):
commedey who also just passed away not that long ago,
to flirt with women. And it went about as well
as you'd expect. Godfreed, that twitchy, nervous comedic genius. It
just did not, shall we say, translate into becoming Don
Juan of the Open Seas, just did not. And I
(14:41):
still smile when I hear Sarge describing what the lengths
these guys went to try to get Gilbert Godfried to
have some fun with the ladies. But after we wrapped
up the pod. That was usually that's it, you know,
you go your separate way. But Sarge hit the road
and there was I forget the town. He was in
(15:01):
the boondocks outside Boston and he was eating eggs and
pancakes at some rusty roadside diner and it was during
football season and they had the TV on and kind
of flickering behind. He was sitting at the bar and
they had the TV on. It was an old TV
and they had they had Benny Versus the Penny, and
(15:21):
he recognized me, and he didn't know about the show
because he lived in Miami. We wereent on in Miami,
and so Sarge's having breakfast at the diner that's probably
like late at night, and and then he sends me
a message. He reaches hey, I saw your TV show.
It's like the absurdity of life. And it was really
(15:43):
cool that he reached out to me. And I was
excited that he seemed excited about that. And I was like, oh, yeah,
I'm a little embarrassed by that, but I don't look
good on TV. And he's like, yeah, I don't worry
about it. But that's who he was. He would travel
as a comedian you travel all over a performer. He
survived a very hard beginning to his life, well actually
not even the beginning. He's a good childhood, and then
(16:05):
went through some stuff, as we all do. But he
stared down the darkest alley imaginable and walked out the
other side. It wasn't bitter about it. He used that
as a launch pad and spent a lot of his
life giving back to people that were also fighting the demons.
(16:25):
His last Sergeant's last Facebook post was November twenty seventh.
He was wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving. He's got a son,
I was married, obviously, all that, and he said, see
as soon, Sarge, And that's it, just like that. There
will not be another post there. There won't be another
gig in Boca, another impersonation, you know, playing the piano,
(16:49):
any of that stuff. He won't be able to tell
the stories he told about when he was homeless and
the things that he had to do in Manhattan and
all that stuff, and all that that ends with what
I mean, I guess that's just it. And you know,
a life like Sarge is doesn't vanish. It kind of echoes, right,
(17:12):
And for those that he came across and in every
comic who got a break because Sarge encouraged them, and
people that liked his comedy, the Jewish community centers in Boca,
in every Fox Sports Radio alum who remembers hanging out
in the Expansion era as chaotic and messy and hilarious
(17:33):
and unforgettable, with Sarge being part of that. It's because
of people like him. And what am I going to
remember about Sarge? I'm gonna remember everything. And I wanted
to do this podcast in part so I could put
my thoughts together about Sarga. The fact that he was
very tough overcoming the homelessness, his talent as a comedian
(17:54):
doing impersonations, his kindness, the stories he told me, many
of them cannot be repeated even in death, from what
he saw on the road traveling around with other comedians,
and these were some of the people like became huge stars,
like Kilbert Godfrey was a megastar, and Sarge was. He
never got to that level, yet he was around all
(18:15):
of those people. You know, he was in that. And
there's these cliques and comedy. You hear comedians talk about
this all the time, like this group that you're together
with and your ride and Die group. You all come
up together as comedians and and so he had that group.
Many of them went on to these amazing things. And
he had a great run too. He had a great run.
(18:35):
And he lived essentially three lives in one. He was
the beloved kid has adopted but memories of the catskills
growing up, and then he had the really tough part
of his life when he was a young adult, and
then the sober, reborn entertainer who found a way to
(18:56):
bring joy and did TV and radio and all this stuff.
And most of us one act. Serge got three and
should have had a fourth act. And as far as
I'm concerned, he landed every time. He stuck the landing
every time. And again he was a mens that's a
word I guess I've used already, but he's a men's
(19:18):
that's what he was. And he was one of us,
you know, he got he loved the radio stuff and
it was it was fun for him to talk sports,
and he did it his way. And I just imagine
now he's performing for the audience beyond the Pearly Gates,
probably doing a Marv Albert impersonation for Don Rickles. While
some angels are in the background trying to keep a
(19:40):
straight face and all that stuff. And so we'll miss
your Serge. But I'm glad that our lives crossed. Path
our paths crossed in life, I should say, And and
what a life you lived. And my condolence is to
your son and your your wife and everyone that is
closer than I am to you. But I'm really really
(20:01):
happy I had you on the podcast, and rest in
peace to the great Serge. So turning the page on
that listen, there's no good transaction or transition, I should say,
or transaction, but we lose people every year in sports
as well. It's the rhythm of time, right, the drum beat.
This is very depressing podcast, but just bear with I
(20:23):
don't think it's that depressent because this is part of life, right,
You live, you die, That's how it goes. So the
drum beat that none of us can muffle, even though
we all try to muffle it, you know. I was like, Oh,
it's not going to happen to me. It happens to you.
And sometimes the news comes in bunches, they say in Hollywood,
it happens in threes. Well, this is sports and this
is entertainment. And you know, these things roll in like
(20:45):
waves and refuse to stop crashing. So this week it
wasn't just Sarge. The last like two weeks, it wasn't
just Serge the Fox Sports Radio original. We just talked
about who crossed the invisible boundary. There were two men
that I was not friends with, but professionally I talked
to them quite a bit. They were playing a sport
(21:07):
I was a young reporter. These are two men who
we covered two fixtures from the years when the NBA
still smelled like rosin and adrenaline and they didn't do
load management and all that, and when the forum buzzed
even during lean times. We lost Elvin Campbell and also
(21:28):
a player that he played against who spent a lot
of time at the LA Memorial Sports Arena with the
people's team, the Clippers, Rodney Rogers. Two entirely different spirits
tied together now by memory, and I wanted to give
a mention. I figured, hey, we're talking about Serge, and
these things came across Elden Campbell. His death was like,
(21:51):
wait a minute, he wasn't sick or anything like. He drowned.
And we found out this week that Elvin drowned. He
was fifty seven, born in Inglewood, went to Clemson, played
for the hometown team from his childhood, the Lakers, and
we covered Eldon at a time when the Lakers were
stuck in NBA purgatory. The historians it was like this
(22:16):
dead zone between the Magic showtime Lakers with Kareem and
Worthy in those guys and the volcanic arrival of Shaq
and Kobe, and the Forum in those years wasn't quite
as Hollywood. You still had Jack and Diane. Cannon was
out there in a few of the celebrities, but it
(22:37):
was pretty much at a holding pattern. You had Eldon
and Club said, Cedric Sabalos was there, and they were
the Constance and Nick van Exell, and so they had
some anchors. They weren't great, they were mediocre, and Elvin
was the guy that they thought was going to be
really good. He was a gentle, giant seven footer, built
(22:59):
like a bank vault, and his temperament was not alpha.
He was pretty pretty mellow. More than once. You'd walk
into the form locker room, I go there do the
pregame stuff, and Elden would be sitting at his locker
in full uniform, sleeping, sitting up. I still remember that.
I can close my eyes and see that grabbing a
(23:20):
cat nap before the night shift. And he treated the
NBA pregame like a Sunday afternoon siesta and that mellow vibe.
The Lakers always wanted him to be a more aggressive player,
but that was just not his personality. It wasn't. And
the greatest Elden Campbell quote was when somebody interviewed him
(23:43):
and he asked Eldon. They said, hey, Eldon, did you
earned a degree there at Clemson? And in that slow,
kind of bashful tone, he delivered one of the all
time great lines. Elden Campbell, when asked about his degree
from Clemson, said it has to be earned it he said, nope,
(24:05):
but they gave me one anyway. That's pretty good. That's
a Hall of Fame quote right there. That is it's
a malarism waiting to happen, and that's that's Eldon. And
I did that dead, dead pan comedy and delivered. You know,
he had some big nights and the he played fifteen
(24:25):
years in the NBA. But he leaves behind a wife
and four kids and a bunch of siblings and all
that and an entire generation of historian Laker historians who
will not put him on murals like Kobe and all that, obviously,
but they remember those years and Eldon wasn't flashy, and
he wasn't It wasn't Neon, wasn't Hollywood, even though he
(24:47):
grew up in Inglewood. He was studying and he had
some he had good numbers, but not great numbers as
a player. And then there's Rodney Rogers, and I was
around Rodney a lot too. Rodney came to La like
a kid walking into Disneyland holding the Golden ticket. You
got a golden ticket. He didn't know he had the
golden ticket, but boy was he happy with it. Fresh
(25:08):
off the plane from Denver, he played for the Nuggets,
eyes wide open. I remember they had a news conference.
The Clippers had traded Antonio mcdice the number two pick
to Denver. They got Brent Barry. He was part of that.
Brian Williams, who would be murdered on a boat I believe,
was also on that trade. And then Rodney Rogers and
(25:31):
Rodney I remember they had a news comers at a
hotel in downtown LA and he was so you know,
eyes wide open. It's like he'd just seen the Pacific
for the first time. I was like, dude, you've been
in the NBA for a couple of years, you've seen LA.
And he was like a small town guy. He's from
North Carolina, and you know, North Carolina does produce some
(25:51):
tough people, grounded people, and LA is a different solar
system when you're from North Carolina. And Rodney looked around
like he had been launched into orbit. I remember the look,
and very nice man, built like a Donnis kind soul
player that could bulldoze you like like a runway shopping
(26:12):
cart one minute and then stretched the floor the next.
And there was not a lot of arrogance. There was
no pretense. He was appreciative of the moment and the
journey and all that. And he had a very difficult life. Also,
you know, he got a tough hand Rodney. After he
I think he was already out of the NBA, but
(26:32):
he had an ATV accident and he was paralyzed and
from the neck down. He was paralyzed, confined to a wheelchair.
And most people would crumble and be like, oh man,
I can't, I can't go on, But Rodney didn't. He
radiated positivity and became a beacon for people that went
through a similar situation. And he had really a lousy
(26:56):
hand of cards tossed at him, you know, twos and
threes across the board. It was not good there, and
still found a way to smile. And that's the kind
of internal wiring that you can't teach, right, You can't
coach that that and you don't know that you have it,
or you don't have it until something happens. So, couple
(27:17):
of guys, couple of stories I wanted to share with you,
And you know, I wasn't friendly with these guys, but
I ask him, Hey, what happened on that play in
the fourth quarter? Why'd you guys lose the game? That
kind of bull crap. And in the days before social
media and all that good stuff. So rest rest easy,
Eldon Campbell, Rest easy, Rodney Rogers. The scoreboard of life
(27:42):
does not tell you the whole story. The people who
knew you will tell the whole story. So on that
will put the baby to bed. And I think I've
done enough eulogies for the year, so let's try out
to have anyone remember last year we had a bunch
of callers die at the end end of the year. Man,
it was very depressing, and so Sarge Eldon Campbell, Rodney
(28:05):
Rogers a melancholy edition of the Fifth Hour. But we'll
have some fun on the Saturday Pod. Hopefully you can
join us for that. Have a great rest of your day.
Aloha mahalo Later skater, Did I get that right? Danny? Now?
Is it? Osta pasta? Now? All right? Osta pasta? Boom?
(28:29):
You fired? Got a murder. I gotta go.
Kabbooms.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
If you thought four hours a day, twelve hundred minutes
a week was enough, think again. He's the last remnants
of the old republic, a sol fashion of fairness. He
treats crackheads in the ghetto gutter the same as the
rich pill poppers in the penthouse. Wow to clearinghouse of
hot takes, break free for something special. The Fifth Hour
(00:23):
with Ben Maller starts right now in.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
The air everywhere, The Fifth Hour with me, Ben Mahler
in Danny G Radio, as we kick off the weekend
festivities here in the Magic pod Box. And you have
become a p one by listening to the Fifth Hour podcast.
You are a higher level of audio consumer. So we
(00:53):
thank you for that. And unfortunately there are days in
this goofy, little wacky sports radio business that I've chosen
to spend my life in that the sports take can wait. Now.
We don't normally get real sporty on the Fifth Hour Podcast.
It's more about just things that are out in my
(01:13):
world that I share with you, and I thank you
for putting up with that. So I'm not going to
sit here and talk about a quarterback controversy or a
coaching hot seed, or why this team stinks or that
team's good, or any of that background noise. It's all
background noise because there's something much heavier that happened this week.
And this is unfortunately one of those days where and
(01:36):
I want to share this with you, and I was
going to talk about it on the radio show and
it didn't come up in conversation, and I thought this
would be the perfect platform to talk about the events
that took place this week. So earlier this week, I
got a text from a number I did not recognize
out of the four to one six that's the area
(01:57):
code for Toronto. Now I have some friend in Toronto,
people I've worked with over the years. Canadian mic comes
to mind. But I didn't recognize this number and it
wasn't in my phone, so I figured it was spam,
And like any good red blooded American or Canadian for
that matter, I just decided not to not to answer
(02:18):
the thing. I said, I'm not going to respond to
the text, and so I thought it was some bot,
some spam bot say can I confirm your Costco executive
membership number? Or telling me to pay a toll from
a road trip I didn't take or warning me that
the Apple Pay is locked. I don't use Apple Pay,
but it's locked, you know the drill. So hours later
(02:42):
now I got the text. I was sleeping hours later
while I was out hustling doing the day to day adulting.
I was at Costco, because that's what you do when
gas is four ninety nine and you're trying to squeeze
every penny until Lincoln screams no mob. So I get
the call, the same number as before. I was like, well,
(03:05):
that's probably not spam. And it wasn't spam. It was
my past coming back. It was a voice from the
Fox Sports Radio Alumni Association, my buddy Josh, one of
the original expansion team guys from twenty five years ago,
calling me out of the blue. This guy, Josh's father,
(03:27):
was a legendary hockey announcer for the Columbus Blue Jackets
who just retired maybe in the last ten years. He
had worked for a bunch of other teams in the
NHL as well, and so Josh worked at our place
when we started up, and Josh had the kind of
news that changes the temperature and the automobile the malamobile
(03:48):
by twenty degrees. So one of our former teammates had
died and Josh called me to share the news before
it got out in the media. And it was sudden.
It was, you know, one of the are you telling
me the truth kind of thing. I mean that kind
of thing. You know, this can't be real. There was
no warning shot, not even a whisper, and just that's it.
(04:13):
You know, game over crossed the Great Divide and this one.
This is one of the weird inconvenient truths about when
you get to the age I'm at your friends, your colleges.
Like when I was younger, I lost relatives. I lost aunts, uncles, grandparents,
(04:34):
things like that. It's a circle of life. And you
get to my age. Now it's your friends, your colleagues.
You're really the co stars in the documentary of your life.
We're all doing our own documentary, our own life story.
And in mind, this was one of the people that
was a part of it. And these people start disappearing.
You're like, where did that person go? What happened? In't
(04:55):
heard from that person? Oh man, And it sneaks up
on you, it's like, how did that happened? One day,
you're all a bunch of kids trying to crack the
code of sports talk radio, trying to make your mark
in the media business, and you're cracking jokes and eating
Denny's at five in the morning after you worked all night,
(05:15):
and you're wandering around farting on each other in the hallways,
and you're doing two or three jobs or eating microwave
hot pockets, and then suddenly, in my case, I'm still
holding down the overnight post. I haven't left. And the
other people I work with in those days, they've all
scattered all over the United States and Canada and in
(05:37):
countries around the world, and they're all building their own lives.
Many of them already have chasing dreams, living their existence.
And so this one hurt because the voice that we lost,
a early Fox Sports Radio voice, belonged to Sarge. He
was given the birth name Steven Charles Pickman Sarge. If
(06:00):
you don't know, if you're not familiar with his work,
a comedian, a performer, and in my book, a Fox
Sports Radio original. I don't know if he was there
right when the network started, but he was a total
mench in every sense of the word. He's born I
believe he was born like New York, but he was
I know he was raised on Long Island and had
(06:22):
a very interesting childhood. We had him on the podcast
last year. Sarge was adopted right after birth, and you know,
he's a kid. He loved entertainment and all that knew.
He wanted to be a guy holding a microphone and
(06:42):
told the story that when he was a kid, his
grandfather took him to the Catskill Mountains where he would
hang out and that was kind of his playground. And
then growing up in New York, that's where you go
and a lot of old school entertainers, the legend of
the cat Skills, which I don't think is really a
thing anymore, but back in the day, that was the spot.
And he was like seven years old and he's sitting
(07:05):
on a folding chair next to his grandpa watching these
famous comedians perform. And he then eventually that would be
his life, that would be his oxygen. And Sarge went
to Boston University, the School of Public Communications. How about that?
Look at that, smart, Serge, And and if the movie
(07:26):
ended there, it's like, okay, well that's fine. You know,
great kid, big dreams on the up and up, and
his story and he's been he's very open about it.
Serge the comedian that worked at our place, because his
life was not a Disney movie. It was not a
fairy tale. And that's the way life off it is. Right,
there's plot twist, there's upstairs, downs, the rise, the fall,
(07:48):
the rise again, and Sarge fell into a diction Hart
like Serge. We talked off the air a few times like, well,
you could have been one of my callers, like you
could have been mouthwash Mike, or beer drinking Ran or
keg drinking Steve or one of these characters that calls
the show. He spent part of his young life Sarge homeless,
literally sleeping in Manhattan under the Manhattan Bridge and doing
(08:14):
copious amounts of drugs and hovering in the shadowy no
man's land where people pretend like they don't see you
and they hope that you don't approach him because you
look like you haven't showered since the nineties, and for
many that's where it ends, unfortunately, and he just kind
(08:34):
of fade out. Game over. Sarge, though, was able to
pull off one of the great miracles. He back thirty
some odd years ago. He was really down his luck
and he had this lightning bolt epiphany the Holy Cow.
As we say. The term we use on the show
(08:55):
a lot is they come to Jesus meeting with himself.
And he decided, it's not Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving has already happened
back a month ago. It's late December. I'm going to
have you know, I'm going to have some turkey. I'm
gonna have a cold turkey. No rehab, no halfway house.
They don't tell you to do this, no supervised program.
He just made a decision one day, the day after
(09:17):
Christmas nineteen ninety he said, that's it. I'm done. I'm
done living this life. I want to do something else.
And he never looked back. Thirty years of sobriety for
my man Sarge and just a great mitzvah that that
he pulled that off. And from that point forward it
(09:38):
did become a Disney movie. It was. It was someone
who had turned on the stage lights and yell, all right, serge,
you're up. And he wrote, produced, performed on the best
damn sports show period if you remember that show, very
popular show at the time, and he worked at our
place at Fox Sports Radio. That's why he was an
alumni member. He hosted a show, actually did a show
with Jason Smith in the early and I sat in
(10:01):
on that show a few times, and we talked a
lot in the hallways back in the wild early two
thousands what we call now looking back, we call the
expansion era of Fox Sports Radio because it started out
of nowhere, and this is when ESPN Radio was the
Roman Empire and we were the barbarian tribe trying to
(10:22):
scale the walls, and we didn't have any weapons. We
just had duct tape and a couple of microphones and
a VU meter. And the roster back then feels like
a mythological group of people. We had Kevin Frazier who's
gone on and done great things in entertainment, Chris Myers
(10:42):
who does NFL games, the Hall of Famer, the goat
of sports radio, Tony Bruno, Bob Golick, who was the
more famous Goliic, more famous than his brother, who would
be part of the Mike and Mike and rich Arera,
the great Rich Arero did Tampa Bay Rays baseball for
years period post Kevin Kylie who Chuck Booms comedian that
(11:06):
did a lot of great stuff. Andrew Cecilian who's the
voice of the Cleveland Browns now Steve Zabin, Zabe's an
all time great what a peach Zabe is And that
was the kind of line up you look back at
it now, I was like, Wow, how do we all
work in the same building and then we violate some
kind of fire code or something like that. But this
is about not about those people. It's about Sarge. Sarge
(11:27):
was right in the middle of all of it. He
wasn't loud off the air. He had a great shtick,
not overbearing. He was just present. He was his study, heartbeat,
a guy very funny obviously as a comedian, and a
guy whose talent didn't need you know, the loud volume,
you know all that stuff. His impersonations were legendary, like
(11:50):
Mike Tyson, marv Albert, Gilbert Godfrey. There's some great stories
about Gilbert Godfreed Kermit the Frog. He could do it all,
and he went from being homeless. He performed worldwide. He
performed at the iconic Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan.
The Major League Baseball All Star Game, they brought Sarge
(12:11):
out to perform late night TV back when that matted.
People watch that with Craig Ferguson. There were clubs, theaters,
cruise ships. He told me his life on the cruise ship.
And I've repeated that story a few times over the years,
but how depressing that was. On the cruise ship. You think, Okay,
I'm on the ocean, I've got my own plays, i
(12:33):
have to perform a couple shows a night, I've got
free food and all. That's kind of depressing. And he'd
performed at cathedrals, temples, retirement communities. He had told me
his niche was the retirement communities of South Florida. Not
only retirement hoa's, the Jewish community centers, the condo places
(12:55):
where audiences really loved this comedian went in and telling
jokes and gags and all that, and Serge gave them
what they wanted. It wanted somebody who was warm and
fun and was a storyteller, and he gave gave that
to them and anybody that came across Serge. And so
here's what I want to remember most. Last year I
(13:17):
had him on this podcast, the Fifth Hour podcast, and
it was great to catch up and it was one
of those conversations when you blink and you know, time
just disappears right. And he told the story about cold calling.
This is back when you could do this and like
the I guess the early nineties, he cold called television
(13:38):
executives because he wanted to work at CB I think
it was CBS, and he ended up getting the job.
He it was wild, like classic Sarge hustle move off
the air years when we worked together, he was good
friends with Gilbert Godfrey. They were all coming up as
comedians together, Gilbert, Sarge, there were a couple of other
(13:59):
big names comedians, and Sarge told the story about how
he and Gilbert were on the boats, the cruise ships,
and they were all single, and they were trying to
get Gilbert to hook up with the ladies, unsuccessfully, by
the way, to try to get Gilbert Godfried, the iconic
(14:20):
commedey who also just passed away not that long ago,
to flirt with women. And it went about as well
as you'd expect. Godfreed, that twitchy, nervous comedic genius. It
just did not, shall we say, translate into becoming Don
Juan of the Open Seas, just did not. And I
(14:41):
still smile when I hear Sarge describing what the lengths
these guys went to try to get Gilbert Godfried to
have some fun with the ladies. But after we wrapped
up the pod. That was usually that's it, you know,
you go your separate way. But Sarge hit the road
and there was I forget the town. He was in
(15:01):
the boondocks outside Boston and he was eating eggs and
pancakes at some rusty roadside diner and it was during
football season and they had the TV on and kind
of flickering behind. He was sitting at the bar and
they had the TV on. It was an old TV
and they had they had Benny Versus the Penny, and
(15:21):
he recognized me, and he didn't know about the show
because he lived in Miami. We wereent on in Miami,
and so Sarge's having breakfast at the diner that's probably
like late at night, and and then he sends me
a message. He reaches hey, I saw your TV show.
It's like the absurdity of life. And it was really
(15:43):
cool that he reached out to me. And I was
excited that he seemed excited about that. And I was like, oh, yeah,
I'm a little embarrassed by that, but I don't look
good on TV. And he's like, yeah, I don't worry
about it. But that's who he was. He would travel
as a comedian you travel all over a performer. He
survived a very hard beginning to his life, well actually
not even the beginning. He's a good childhood, and then
(16:05):
went through some stuff, as we all do. But he
stared down the darkest alley imaginable and walked out the
other side. It wasn't bitter about it. He used that
as a launch pad and spent a lot of his
life giving back to people that were also fighting the demons.
(16:25):
His last Sergeant's last Facebook post was November twenty seventh.
He was wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving. He's got a son,
I was married, obviously, all that, and he said, see
as soon, Sarge, And that's it, just like that. There
will not be another post there. There won't be another
gig in Boca, another impersonation, you know, playing the piano,
(16:49):
any of that stuff. He won't be able to tell
the stories he told about when he was homeless and
the things that he had to do in Manhattan and
all that stuff, and all that that ends with what
I mean, I guess that's just it. And you know,
a life like Sarge is doesn't vanish. It kind of echoes, right,
(17:12):
And for those that he came across and in every
comic who got a break because Sarge encouraged them, and
people that liked his comedy, the Jewish community centers in Boca,
in every Fox Sports Radio alum who remembers hanging out
in the Expansion era as chaotic and messy and hilarious
(17:33):
and unforgettable, with Sarge being part of that. It's because
of people like him. And what am I going to
remember about Sarge? I'm gonna remember everything. And I wanted
to do this podcast in part so I could put
my thoughts together about Sarga. The fact that he was
very tough overcoming the homelessness, his talent as a comedian
(17:54):
doing impersonations, his kindness, the stories he told me, many
of them cannot be repeated even in death, from what
he saw on the road traveling around with other comedians,
and these were some of the people like became huge stars,
like Kilbert Godfrey was a megastar, and Sarge was. He
never got to that level, yet he was around all
(18:15):
of those people. You know, he was in that. And
there's these cliques and comedy. You hear comedians talk about
this all the time, like this group that you're together
with and your ride and Die group. You all come
up together as comedians and and so he had that group.
Many of them went on to these amazing things. And
he had a great run too. He had a great run.
(18:35):
And he lived essentially three lives in one. He was
the beloved kid has adopted but memories of the catskills
growing up, and then he had the really tough part
of his life when he was a young adult, and
then the sober, reborn entertainer who found a way to
(18:56):
bring joy and did TV and radio and all this stuff.
And most of us one act. Serge got three and
should have had a fourth act. And as far as
I'm concerned, he landed every time. He stuck the landing
every time. And again he was a mens that's a
word I guess I've used already, but he's a men's
(19:18):
that's what he was. And he was one of us,
you know, he got he loved the radio stuff and
it was it was fun for him to talk sports,
and he did it his way. And I just imagine
now he's performing for the audience beyond the Pearly Gates,
probably doing a Marv Albert impersonation for Don Rickles. While
some angels are in the background trying to keep a
(19:40):
straight face and all that stuff. And so we'll miss
your Serge. But I'm glad that our lives crossed. Path
our paths crossed in life, I should say, And and
what a life you lived. And my condolence is to
your son and your your wife and everyone that is
closer than I am to you. But I'm really really
(20:01):
happy I had you on the podcast, and rest in
peace to the great Serge. So turning the page on
that listen, there's no good transaction or transition, I should say,
or transaction, but we lose people every year in sports
as well. It's the rhythm of time, right, the drum beat.
This is very depressing podcast, but just bear with I
(20:23):
don't think it's that depressent because this is part of life, right,
You live, you die, That's how it goes. So the
drum beat that none of us can muffle, even though
we all try to muffle it, you know. I was like, Oh,
it's not going to happen to me. It happens to you.
And sometimes the news comes in bunches, they say in Hollywood,
it happens in threes. Well, this is sports and this
is entertainment. And you know, these things roll in like
(20:45):
waves and refuse to stop crashing. So this week it
wasn't just Sarge. The last like two weeks, it wasn't
just Serge the Fox Sports Radio original. We just talked
about who crossed the invisible boundary. There were two men
that I was not friends with, but professionally I talked
to them quite a bit. They were playing a sport
(21:07):
I was a young reporter. These are two men who
we covered two fixtures from the years when the NBA
still smelled like rosin and adrenaline and they didn't do
load management and all that, and when the forum buzzed
even during lean times. We lost Elvin Campbell and also
(21:28):
a player that he played against who spent a lot
of time at the LA Memorial Sports Arena with the
people's team, the Clippers, Rodney Rogers. Two entirely different spirits
tied together now by memory, and I wanted to give
a mention. I figured, hey, we're talking about Serge, and
these things came across Elden Campbell. His death was like,
(21:51):
wait a minute, he wasn't sick or anything like. He drowned.
And we found out this week that Elvin drowned. He
was fifty seven, born in Inglewood, went to Clemson, played
for the hometown team from his childhood, the Lakers, and
we covered Eldon at a time when the Lakers were
stuck in NBA purgatory. The historians it was like this
(22:16):
dead zone between the Magic showtime Lakers with Kareem and
Worthy in those guys and the volcanic arrival of Shaq
and Kobe, and the Forum in those years wasn't quite
as Hollywood. You still had Jack and Diane. Cannon was
out there in a few of the celebrities, but it
(22:37):
was pretty much at a holding pattern. You had Eldon
and Club said, Cedric Sabalos was there, and they were
the Constance and Nick van Exell, and so they had
some anchors. They weren't great, they were mediocre, and Elvin
was the guy that they thought was going to be
really good. He was a gentle, giant seven footer, built
(22:59):
like a bank vault, and his temperament was not alpha.
He was pretty pretty mellow. More than once. You'd walk
into the form locker room, I go there do the
pregame stuff, and Elden would be sitting at his locker
in full uniform, sleeping, sitting up. I still remember that.
I can close my eyes and see that grabbing a
(23:20):
cat nap before the night shift. And he treated the
NBA pregame like a Sunday afternoon siesta and that mellow vibe.
The Lakers always wanted him to be a more aggressive player,
but that was just not his personality. It wasn't. And
the greatest Elden Campbell quote was when somebody interviewed him
(23:43):
and he asked Eldon. They said, hey, Eldon, did you
earned a degree there at Clemson? And in that slow,
kind of bashful tone, he delivered one of the all
time great lines. Elden Campbell, when asked about his degree
from Clemson, said it has to be earned it he said, nope,
(24:05):
but they gave me one anyway. That's pretty good. That's
a Hall of Fame quote right there. That is it's
a malarism waiting to happen, and that's that's Eldon. And
I did that dead, dead pan comedy and delivered. You know,
he had some big nights and the he played fifteen
(24:25):
years in the NBA. But he leaves behind a wife
and four kids and a bunch of siblings and all
that and an entire generation of historian Laker historians who
will not put him on murals like Kobe and all that, obviously,
but they remember those years and Eldon wasn't flashy, and
he wasn't It wasn't Neon, wasn't Hollywood, even though he
(24:47):
grew up in Inglewood. He was studying and he had
some he had good numbers, but not great numbers as
a player. And then there's Rodney Rogers, and I was
around Rodney a lot too. Rodney came to La like
a kid walking into Disneyland holding the Golden ticket. You
got a golden ticket. He didn't know he had the
golden ticket, but boy was he happy with it. Fresh
(25:08):
off the plane from Denver, he played for the Nuggets,
eyes wide open. I remember they had a news conference.
The Clippers had traded Antonio mcdice the number two pick
to Denver. They got Brent Barry. He was part of that.
Brian Williams, who would be murdered on a boat I believe,
was also on that trade. And then Rodney Rogers and
(25:31):
Rodney I remember they had a news comers at a
hotel in downtown LA and he was so you know,
eyes wide open. It's like he'd just seen the Pacific
for the first time. I was like, dude, you've been
in the NBA for a couple of years, you've seen LA.
And he was like a small town guy. He's from
North Carolina, and you know, North Carolina does produce some
(25:51):
tough people, grounded people, and LA is a different solar
system when you're from North Carolina. And Rodney looked around
like he had been launched into orbit. I remember the look,
and very nice man, built like a Donnis kind soul
player that could bulldoze you like like a runway shopping
(26:12):
cart one minute and then stretched the floor the next.
And there was not a lot of arrogance. There was
no pretense. He was appreciative of the moment and the
journey and all that. And he had a very difficult life. Also,
you know, he got a tough hand Rodney. After he
I think he was already out of the NBA, but
(26:32):
he had an ATV accident and he was paralyzed and
from the neck down. He was paralyzed, confined to a wheelchair.
And most people would crumble and be like, oh man,
I can't, I can't go on, But Rodney didn't. He
radiated positivity and became a beacon for people that went
through a similar situation. And he had really a lousy
(26:56):
hand of cards tossed at him, you know, twos and
threes across the board. It was not good there, and
still found a way to smile. And that's the kind
of internal wiring that you can't teach, right, You can't
coach that that and you don't know that you have it,
or you don't have it until something happens. So, couple
(27:17):
of guys, couple of stories I wanted to share with you,
And you know, I wasn't friendly with these guys, but
I ask him, Hey, what happened on that play in
the fourth quarter? Why'd you guys lose the game? That
kind of bull crap. And in the days before social
media and all that good stuff. So rest rest easy,
Eldon Campbell, Rest easy, Rodney Rogers. The scoreboard of life
(27:42):
does not tell you the whole story. The people who
knew you will tell the whole story. So on that
will put the baby to bed. And I think I've
done enough eulogies for the year, so let's try out
to have anyone remember last year we had a bunch
of callers die at the end end of the year. Man,
it was very depressing, and so Sarge Eldon Campbell, Rodney
(28:05):
Rogers a melancholy edition of the Fifth Hour. But we'll
have some fun on the Saturday Pod. Hopefully you can
join us for that. Have a great rest of your day.
Aloha mahalo Later skater, Did I get that right? Danny? Now?
Is it? Osta pasta? Now? All right? Osta pasta? Boom?
(28:29):
You fired? Got a murder. I gotta go.
Host
Ben Maller
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