Mad About Sports

In the middle of the present baseball season, a Texas Rangers pitcher named Kenny Rogers, who was having a very good year, walked a batter, questioned the call, was removed from the game, punched a water cooler, and broke his pinky. Some in the media found this bit of self-infliction amusing, others found it downright villainous ("He let the TEAM down!"), and suddenly all the sports world's cameras were pointed at Kenny Rogers. Annoyed at this state of affairs, Rogers took the field on a sunny afternoon 12 days later, failed to properly greet a pair of cameramen, and then gave them each a good, hard shove.

This was, it turned out, the greatest development for sports talk radio since Rafael Palmeiro, the home-run hitter, started shilling Viagra. Days passed, and the folks on sports radio were still talking about Kenny Rogers. Weeks passed—Kenny Rogers! There is a good chance that, come September, some host, somewhere, will still be enraged at the perfidy of Kenny Rogers.

"Where else can they make such a big deal about Kenny Rogers?" says Dave Cokin, who, as a sports talk-show host on Las Vegas' ESPN Radio AM-920, works in the business that makes a big deal about Kenny Rogers. "It just tells you what an unreal life we're living. Kenny Rogers! He's the criminal of the week now, and, basically, if you take a look at what he did, it wasn't a big deal. That's the beauty of it: We can take any molehill and turn it into a mountain, and it's great fodder for at least a few days."

fodder—1: something fed to domestic animals; esp: coarse food for cattle, horses or sheep 2: inferior or readily available material used to supply a heavy demand

So why do we—why do I—consume this stuff? Why is it that, a month after the All-Star break, when they talk about Kenny Rogers, I am still listening?

One hesitates to tar all sports talk radio with the f(odder)-word, but tune in at any given moment to Cokin's home station or its Lotus Broadcasting sister station, Fox Sports Radio AM-1460, and the words you hear will be spoken with a passion way out of proportion with their purpose, which is not to inflict shame on Kenny Rogers, but rather to help you pass the time in traffic.

Wait. That can't be all. There must be a higher purpose. Or maybe a lower one. Other talk- radio formats are taken seriously enough to beget a grand theory or two: Howard Stern helps folks connect with their naughty inner kid, the one who never got to peek through holes in the locker-room wall. Michael Savage screams for people so apoplectic about modern times that they can hardly scream for themselves. Al Franken pilots the torpedoed refugee ship of snarky liberals. But sports fans don't want to change the world; they just want to change the subject. We fans believe passionately in the importance of the unimportant. We daydream and project and over-identify. We reject apathy, but we've got no larger agenda than to shove our personal ennui back into its corner, to tell it to sit, and to stay, and to play dead. And, because of that, we think we're a little bit healthier than the rest of you.

So, yes, we like our sports radio. And we can't help but be just a little grateful to the guys who bring it to us.

Dave Cokin leans forward; his voice is conspiratorial, the way people make their voices before they say something unflattering about the fellow in the next booth.

"Does he think the games are gonna be off the board in New York?" Cokin asks. "Does he think the Knicks games aren't on the board in New York?"

Cokin is displeased with NBA Commissioner David Stern, who, as it happens, is not in the next booth. Cokin is displeased not because he is a sports bettor—one of the best in the business—but because he is a fan, and not just any fan, but, in some ways, the voice of Las Vegas fandom, owner of the most recognizable set of pipes on local sports radio. And he cannot abide Stern's notion that Las Vegas might not be a suitable place for an NBA franchise.

"You can bet anywhere, always have been able to bet anywhere, since the beginning of time," says Cokin. "Las Vegas is a blip as far as sports wagering is concerned. What are we, less than 2 percent of the handle? We're nothing, we never have been. It's a myth."

Cokin is not on the air as he says these things. Cokin will say these things to you whether he's on the air or not, because Cokin does not have a radio persona. Cokin has a Cokin persona. If you've listened to the show Cokin hosts with John Hanson on ESPN 920 weekdays from 1-3 p.m., you essentially know the man. Now just imagine that the guy with the Kangol cap and the cowboy boots and the Rhode Island voice box aged to a sublime rasp has managed to squeeze through the speakers of Baja Fresh on Rainbow and Flamingo and start talking sports with you. Because talking sports, perhaps even more than betting sports, is what Dave Cokin likes to do, and he'd like to do it with each and every one of you.

Like all of the most attentive sports radio listeners, I often have to spend sadistically large chunks of the day in the car. The cruelty of these hours can be particularly remorseless in the heat of Vegas high summer, and I find it strangely relieving to get wound up in somebody else's argument over the athletic prowess of rich young men thousands of miles away. When I put it this way, it sounds a bit odd, but it beats the hell out of thinking about my own troubles. In any case, had I spent my car-imprisoned days tuned to, say KNPR, I would know the precise nature of political strife in Eritrea; instead, I know that when Hanson and Cokin ends, I can stay tuned for The Al Bernstein Sports Party from 3-5 p.m., and that, if my mind wanders, I can spin down to 1460 any time between 4 and 7 to catch The Papa Joe Chevalier Show. I also know that Cokin and Bernstein and Chevalier have each had a good taste of national success. And after a few thousand miles of their companionship, I know this, too: In a town where neighbors move and colleagues quit before you've learned their last name, Cokin, Bernstein and Chevalier have been friends for nearly 20 years.

Let's turn the dial back, oh, two years or so, to a time when Joe Chevalier has foolishly made another dinner bet with Al Bernstein about who will wind up with the better record, Chevalier's lowly Pittsburgh Pirates or Bernstein's suddenly-not-so-lowly Chicago Cubs. The Cubs are in the midst of a wondrous run, and Chevalier is looking forward to a different sort of bet, a bet he can win. So the two men, who agree to disagree on pretty much everything, set their sites on the presidential race, and soon enough Bernstein, the next-to-last liberal on AM radio, takes his licks. "I win all the baseball bets and Joe wins all the presidential bets," says Bernstein. "I'd be happy to pay him all the money in the world if I could win the presidential bets."

A year after the Cubs' abortive run to glory—and a week before John Kerry's—misery loses a bit of company at Lotus when Dave Cokin's beloved Red Sox take the 2004 World Series. Despite speaking through a mouthful of canary, Cokin is gracious on the air. "I couldn't give Joe and Al much grief, because they're not Yankees fans," he says. "Joe hates the Yankees. And Al's a Cubs fan. He's got enough grief already."

Listen through a few tankfulls of premium and you'll hear that these guys seem to have a good time together, if occasionally at one another's expense. Bernstein, 54, the renowned boxing analyst; Chevalier, 56, the once-and-future nationally syndicated sports curmudgeon; and Cokin, 52, the handicapping king (and Bernstein's fellow last liberal) have found more than just a midlife gig among the pups at Lotus, where even their program director, Hanson, is only 29. If Eastwood and Garner and Tommy Lee Jones were Space Cowboys, these guys are the Sports Cowboys—a brotherhood of baby boomers, fiftysomethings in an increasingly Gen X business, guys with a memory of old Vegas and a little seasoning on their opinions, men who've seen that everyone who wins, someday loses.

In the mid-1980s, when that domino of a building out on Boulder Highway—the one most recently called the Castaways—was the Showboat, Bob Arum's Top Rank promotions used to host biweekly boxing cards called "Boxing at the Boat." The following for these fights was not huge, but it was devoted, and the media group that covered them was particularly close-knit. If you wanted to break into the local sports journalism community, getting a credential and heading out to the 'Boat wasn't a bad way to start.

Al Bernstein, who at the time still lived in Chicago, analyzed the Showboat fights for ESPN television. Dave Cokin, who had come to town from Providence in 1981, covered the bouts for Lee Pete's local radio show. And Joe Chevalier, who'd arrived from Pittsburgh in 1977, was writing for The Sports Form. The fights brought the three together. Bernstein was traveling a good deal with ESPN, but Cokin and Chevalier participated in the small contests Arum used to hold for the media, with a $50 prize for the media schlub who correctly predicted the most fights in a given year. "We all used to go out to dinner together, and we'd have a banquet at the end of the year," says Cokin. "They'd give out fighter awards, like Punch of the Year and Knockout of the Year, and then they'd give this prize to the guy who picked the most fights."

Soon Cokin, Bernstein and Chevalier knew each other well enough to move beyond boxing talk and start tossing poison darts at each other's political preferences. ("We're the best of political enemies," Chevalier says.) The sportscasters speak of the Top Rank years the way running backs with blown-out knees talk about that long-ago trip to the state championship game. In the radio business, it figures that pals from the old days would long since have scattered to the winds in search of better jobs, or any job at all. It's a small miracle that after two decades of accomplishment and relocation and a bit of fame these three guys have wound up working under the same roof.

"Joe and myself, God, we've been friends for a long time," says Cokin. "We're at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but that can make for great conversation, and it doesn't have anything to do with what a person's really like. Joe's a great guy—Al, same thing. I've known Al a long time now, and I've always respected what he's done. He's a tremendous boxing analyst. And Al's got a good voice. Al had a record out—two, I think. And Joe—you ever hear Joe sing? He's terrific. And they both have hair. I hate those guys."

A HISTORIC NUGGET FROM THE WORLDWIDE WEB, UTTERLY USELESS OTHER THAN FOR THE PURPOSES OF THIS STORY:

No, handicapping tournaments aren't quite the Las Vegas equivalent of bowling leagues—I'd be interested to find a bowling league with a 10K prize—but they can be a bonding mechanism, if only in that they allow you to spend a year taunting the losers you've left in your wake. The Stardust competition, of course, was no ordinary contest: This one was invite-only, and everyone involved had a name in the handicapping or sports media world. But the beauty of handicapping (again, like bowling) is that it's very much a game for regular guys, and though the best of these regular guys—Cokin and Chevalier, for instance—have minds that analyze sports data the way Gary Kasparov analyzes a chessboard, an ordinary mortal can, conceivably, whip a pro on any given Sunday. (Though over 16 Sundays he hasn't got a prayer.) In other words, the sports betting world is one in which wage-earners can compete against wagerers—Al Bernstein, for instance can compete against Joe Chevalier—and as a result of the competition they'll know each other just a little bit better. Maybe they'll hate each other, but, then again, maybe a friendship grows. In sports betting, everyone's looking for an edge; but the fun of it is that, for all the handicapping industry's objective window dressing, you're still predicting the future. And the unknown is the great equalizer; I can talk to Dave Cokin about who'll win the next NBA title in a way that I can't play one-on-one with Shaquille O'Neal. Scratch most bettors and you'll find a fan, scratch most fans and you'll find a kid. And listen to ESPN 920 and Fox 1460 for a day or so and you'll agree that the resident graybeards, or at least their on-air versions of themselves, have gloriously avoided growing up.

Joe Chevalier was known simply as Joe Chevalier until one day in the early 90s when a caller pinned a nickname on him; subsequent callers kept sticking the pin in until it stuck, and Joe Chevalier became forevermore "Papa Joe" Chevalier. The nickname, we are happy to announce, is not an oblique reference to the former Haitian dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, but rather to a 1963 hit by the Dixiebelles called "(Down at) Papa Joe's." (The song, in turn, is a tribute to a legendary Bourbon Street bar.)

Chevalier is precisely the type of host who is called names by his callers—their feelings about sports and society invariably stand in for their feelings about him. Some radio hosts are like snipers, taking aim at the sports world from a remote perch; Chevalier, though, stands at the center of the debate, and a debate on anything always seems to wind up, by proxy, a debate about him. Is Papa Joe "The Commissioner," as he likes to call himself—the big, jolly guy who thinks far more clearly than the milquetoasts who run sports, not to mention those who run the United Nations? Or is he the big, jolly guy who talks himself into areas beyond his depth just for the sheer pleasure of hearing himself speak? Either way, it seems fair flattery or condemnation to call him the Rush Limbaugh of sports talk, a guy who regularly crosses over from his utter dismay with the continued existence of the Dallas Cowboys to his utter dismay with the continued existence of the Democratic Party.

Listeners occasionally point out that Chevalier's views on sports, which tend to favor competitive balance, are out of sync with his politics, but Chevalier—who is, in any case, less neocon than just plain old-fashioned—fights back: His assertion that George Steinbrenner's aggressive overspending is ruining baseball, he'll bellow (when he bellows, he does it in a way that is at once good-natured and implacable), is not inconsistent with his admiration of the free market, because baseball, properly seen, is not 30 separate medium-sized businesses, but one very big one, whose subsidiaries feed off one another's strength. The ultimate example of this, he says, is the very successful American business called the NFL, where salaries are capped and revenue is shared. Chevalier's unabashed, nonideological love of the NFL is most endearingly displayed once a week during the season, when he singsongs the latest point-spread line to the accompaniment of the cancan.

As much as anyone in sports radio, Chevalier has paid his dues. When he came to town in 1977 to write for The Sports Form, the paper's founder, Chuck DiRocco, gave him one bit of advice: "Get a job in the gaming industry so you don't starve." Chevalier, a Duquesne graduate, went back to school and learned how to deal craps, but the ensuing gig didn't work out well. "One day the pit boss walked up to me and said, ‘Chevalier, if they hang you for being a craps dealer it'll be an injustice to the rope.'" So, while continuing to write for The Sports Form, Chevalier went into surveillance and worked off and on for 12 years as an eye-in-the-sky for the Hilton and the Four Queens.

One night, bored at the Four Queens, Chevalier put in a call to a local sort-of-sports talk show on KVEG, and after the call he was invited to start sitting in regularly. Soon the station gave him his own show, then came a gig with Cokin on the short-lived Star Network, and then a key role with the locally-based, nationally-broadcasting Sports Entertainment Network. In 1994, the network was purchased by an out-of-town concern and became One-on-One Sports, and Chevalier had to move to Chicago. It turned out to be his big break—sudden as a big break can be that was 17 years in the making. Eventually One-on-One became Sporting News Radio, and Chevalier became a star.

From 1994-2004, The Papa Joe Chevalier Show was the flagship of the network, and Chevalier built a national following of provocateurs, cranks and Pirates fans who called him, simply, "Papa," and spoke in a wonderful mix of grass-roots accents. (One suspects that Chevalier's following was more blue collar than that of, say, the theatrically supercilious Dan Patrick.) Chevalier, though, missed Las Vegas and loathed Chicago—or at least Chicago weather. He kept up a running on-air commentary on this unhappiness, and soon enough managed to wrangle from Sporting News a deal in which he spent several weeks a year broadcasting from Mandalay Bay. Still, he continued to refer to the company's corporate bosses as "the chiselers," and last year, after a contractual dispute—the network refused Chevalier's request to broadcast full time from Las Vegas—he abruptly disappeared from the airwaves.

"It was tough," says Chevalier. "You don't know how much you miss something until you're not doing it." For all his political stump speeches, the blasts across the bow at Hillary Clinton and Title IX, Chevalier is first and foremost a sports fan, and one can easily imagine the Wile E. Coyote moment a professional sports talker experiences when he no longer has anyplace to talk sports: Don't look down. Fans—both the Papa Joes of the world and those of us who tune them in—need not only the games, but the swirling, rambunctious conversation about the games. On those long days when we're anxious about something but we can't say quite what, or we can say but we'd rather not, there's always a game, with its unspoken offer: Here! Be anxious about me! Sports radio collects the free-floating jitters of modern life the way porcelain mantel figurines collect dust. If Chevalier's fans were missing him during his months of radio silence, it's pretty clear he missed them even more.

Chevalier came back to town and began putting in guest appearances whenever he could on The Al Bernstein Sports Party and Hanson and Cokin. "He was always offering to come in for an hour," says John Hanson, who is program director for both ESPN 920 and Fox Sports Radio 1460. "I think he was definitely getting bored. Joe's a worker; he hates days off. He hates hours off." By the fall of 2004, Chevalier had taken over his old drive-time slot on 1460. "We were extremely fortunate to have a guy of that caliber want to come here," says Hanson. "Of the three most famous sports talk-show hosts we now have one of them here."

The other two famous voices? ESPN SportsCenter veteran Patrick and the nationally syndicated one-man media industry known as Jim Rome. (Patrick's national show airs on 920, Rome's on 1460.) Hanson knows Chevalier will soon be back in the their company on the national airwaves—perhaps as soon as this month, when the new network Chevalier's been putting together is set to start broadcasting. But even when he goes national, Chevalier is committed to staying in Las Vegas, and on Las Vegas radio, and Hanson is committed to keeping him there.

Papa Joe left town once. He has no intention of doing it again.

Before Al Bernstein became a celebrated TV boxing analyst, he worked his way up to managing editor of the Skokie News in his native Illinois. A devoted fight fan in childhood and an amateur boxer in his teens, Bernstein was still a creature of the print media—and, stranger still, of the news pages—when ESPN television tabbed him as an emergency fill-in at a 1980 Chicago bout when the slated analyst, welterweight champ Thomas Hearns, proved less comfortable behind a mike than he was in the ring. Bernstein was impressive, and the accidental gig turned into an 18-year ESPN career that made Bernstein something of a celebrity in the sports world and, more importantly, earned him the respect of both fighters and the sport's grandees, from former Ring Magazine publisher Bert Sugar to Top Rank promoter Bob Arum.

Bernstein's fight analyst career continues today at Showtime, but the appeal of his very odd local radio show—which has aired on ESPN 920 since 2001 and combines sports talk with politics, the Vegas show business scene and regular movie reviews (and which, for a time, had bumper music written and crooned by Bernstein himself)—springs from his days as an editor: Bernstein may have made his name by knowing a lot about one thing, but before that he made a living knowing a little bit about everything. Whether this explains Bernstein's being the courtliest guy in sports talk is another matter. Spin the dial as much as you wish, you won't find another host this side of Garrison Keillor who refers to a guest as "a very nice man." Bernstein has also been known to refer to a newspaper beat scribe or two as "a wonderful writer" and his 28-year-old producer/co-host Mitch Moss as "young man." In a business where sharp and merciless opinions often fuel popularity, Bernstein says he broadcasts with a central question in mind: "Am I being fair enough that the person I'm talking about would hear it and understand that it's not a personal attack?"

Bernstein, who moved to Las Vegas from Chicago in 1988, has a 6-year-old son, so it makes sense that The Al Bernstein Sports Party is perhaps the only sports talk show in town that anyone's 6-year-old son can listen to. Sports radio in general has gone a bit blue in the past decade or so, and Las Vegas sports radio in particular is home to almost ceaseless strip-club advertisements, which often dovetail with talk about various experiences hosts may or may not have had in strip clubs.

"I don't do what a lot of the other shows do, which is to make everything that's not about sports wink-wink double-entendre talk," says Bernstein. "That's the Maxim approach to radio. I'm less likely to shoot from the hip. Sometimes, though, I'm castigating myself for being that way. A 32-year-old guy should feel comfortable listening to my show and not feel it's dated."

Bernstein understands how hosts can talk their way into NC-17 territory from time to time. "The radio's a different and seductive medium in that you can think you're just talking to the microphone, or a friend, when in fact you're talking to a large group of people," he says. "Even though you put boundaries on yourself, there's tremendous freedom."

And freedom, as they say, comes at a price: Sports sometimes seem marginalized on sports radio, pushed aside by tamed excerpts from Penthouse Letters or the wish-fulfillment blog of a 10th-grade boy. A good deal of this stuff—which is by no means limited to Las Vegas—is part of a conscious attempt by radio stations to court a young, male demographic. Bernstein's old friend Cokin, for one, isn't thrilled with the trend.

"It's gone from straight sports talk to what they call ‘guy talk,'" Cokin says. "I mean, I hear some stuff on the other shows and I just cringe. I'm not a prig by any means, but it's just not my style."

"There's no question there's been an evolution in the business where people feel more comfortable talking about things besides batting average and rushing yardage," says Chevalier. But for Chevalier, the trend away from pure sports means a good, healthy bit of railing at al Qaeda, rather than discussions like the one that took place a few months back on 1460's The Wise Guys about a colleague who left a club to have sex in his car.

If sports radio once was a place for fathers and sons to hear people talk about the ball game, it has now become a virtual gentlemen's club, an escape from wives and girlfriends and all the scolding voices in a culture that is at once remorselessly coarse and politically correct. The we're-not-role-models churlishness even extends to pure sports talk: ESPN's national morning host Colin Cowherd (a former Las Vegas sportscaster) once delivered a rant in defense of pitchers who throw at batters, and when a caller told him he was "setting a piss-poor example for kids," Cowherd, reasonably enough, responded that kids shouldn't be listening to the show.

In any case, tamed by years of TV broadcasting and a pesky case of common decency, Bernstein hosts a show the kids can listen to. ("But you have to turn it down when the ads are on," he says.) Lord knows children aren't anywhere on anyone's demographic chart, but they're the biggest, fiercest sports fans of all. No doubt today's kids have more pressing things to do, but from 3-5 p.m., on the road from school to soccer to home, when the overgrown boy in the front seat turns on sports talk, the genuine article in the backseat can listen in.

When I was 7 years old, I began listening to Dodger games on KDWN AM-720; home games ended at the ungodly hour of 10 p.m., when I was supposed to be sound asleep. My father, complicit in my crime of wakefulness, stood in the doorway of my darkened room, catching the game's final outs, and the postgame interview, and Vin Scully's parting remarks, and the old Dodger bumper music, "It's a Beautiful Day for a Ball Game," and then, as if rooted to his spot, he remained for the beginning of Lee Pete's local radio show. Lee Pete had—and has—the greatest voice in the history of talk radio, a deep, smooth bass, a voice you'd expect to come out of the chest of a old-time multi-sport star, as Pete had been back in his home state of Ohio. We kept listening for as long as the talk stayed on the subject of sports in general; only when it turned to point spreads, as, alas, it inevitably did, would I reach over and send sports radio into quiet oblivion.

From the doorway—a whisper: "Good night, big fella."

"Good night, Dad."

Lee Pete was grandfatherly back then—I saw him once at a remote broadcast, his hair as white as sea-foam—and now, from the perspective of that little boy grown up, it's hard for me to fathom that he's just 80. Neither he nor the Dodgers are any longer on 50,000-watt, clear-as-a-bell KDWN—Pete's retired, and it's been several years since the Dodgers were cast into the staticky sea, where at some hours, with the antenna at odd angles, I can still hear them from my home in Henderson. (They're on AM-1140, for you fellow searchers.) In any case, it's been a good five years since my presets changed, and today, when I'm looking for the most distinctive voice in sports talk, one a whole lot less smooth than Pete's but almost as compelling, I turn to Dave Cokin, who, as it turns out, got his start in broadcasting in 1987 as Lee Pete's sidekick.

Pete had been a football and baseball star at the University of Toledo—"He was one of those guys who could have been a 10-sport athlete," says Cokin—and his show always had a folksy, retired-jock-next-door quality. To this Cokin added a bit of impassioned fast-talking, and the mix worked well. Soon a new national network, Sports Fan Radio, came calling on Cokin, and he got a gig with a new Pete—Pete Rose—and for a while the ace sports bettor and the baseball player who denied betting on baseball had a fruitful broadcasting partnership. When Sports Fan ran into financial troubles, Cokin and longtime Las Vegas sportscaster Seat Williams started The Clubhouse Show on KENO 1460, which is now Fox Sports Radio. Cokin stayed with The Clubhouse until 2003, when he was paired with Hanson. (Williams still hosts The Clubhouse, together with Paul Howard, 5-7 p.m. on ESPN 920.)

Cokin has settled comfortably into his role as truth-teller to Hanson's genial drinking-buddy-next-door, a role in which he's not the sort to suffer fools gladly. (He's been known to tell a caller or two that they have no idea what they're talking about.) At the same time, he manages to come across as an eminently nice guy. The nice guy bit, it turns out, is no act. "I know he has an irascible personality on the air and will go at it with callers," says Bernstein. "But the next cross word that I have with Dave Cokin will be the first."

This mix of humanity and hardheadedness—not to mention an encyclopedic knowledge of everything from the NFL to Ultimate Fighting—has served Cokin well: The National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association named a guy who made his name as a bettor and never sniffed the inside of a broadcasting school Nevada's 2004 Sportscaster of the Year.

Cokin's mother was the youngest of 12 children, and his uncles were betting men. Growing up in Providence, Cokin learned the family business—"One of the things I learned fairly early," he says, "was what not to do"—and by the time he was a teenager he had developed a preternatural instinct for knowing which way a betting line was going. He also had a strong sense of what he calls "scheduling dynamics" and the rest of us call group psychology: Cokin could judge with uncanny accuracy at what points in its schedule a team would be up or down. By the time he was accepted to college, he was already making a living as a bookmaker—a good enough living that he decided to skip college. There were, however, two problems: First, gambling was not legal. Second, the fact that it was not legal made it somewhat difficult to collect from those who would rather not pay.

"When I got burned for about $13,000, that was pretty much the finishing touch for me," says Cokin. "So I said, ‘I think I'll go out where if I win a bet I can actually get paid for it.'"

Cokin came to Las Vegas in 1981, and in a very short time everyone in the business knew exactly who he was.

"I entered this contest run by the American Association of Documented Sports Services, and I just had this huge run over one calendar year in all three sports," says Cokin. "The picks were all published in the newspaper, and the phone just started ringing."

Sports bettors traditionally make their livings in two ways: through their own bets, and through their services that offer predictions to less accomplished bettors. Within a year of coming to Las Vegas, Cokin was doing well on both fronts, and, though he hit a bad sophomore slump in '82 ("I got lazy," he says), he rebounded the next year and has been building on his reputation ever since.

Against this background, there is one striking thing about Cokin's radio career, a thing that distinguishes him from most of the other sports bettors who take to the airwaves: Not only does he not tout his service; he rarely even discusses wagering.

"I don't talk gambling," Cokin says. "My sense when I started with Seat was that, at that time, the town didn't have a sports talk show, a regular sports talk show where you have guests on to talk sports. And I thought I may as well do it. What do they need us to give out the lines for? There are enough sources to get the lines out there.

"Basically, I wanted to broaden my horizons. As long as I stayed strictly to gambling, how many people could I talk to? A lot of people just wouldn't be able to come on. I can't have, say, John Robinson on if I'm talking gambling. I never talk gambling with these people. Obviously we're not gonna be talking and, all of a sudden, ‘By the way, Coach, you're three-and-a-half point favorites tonight, what do you think of that?'"

Hanson says Cokin relishes the chance to talk sports outside the wagering context.

"Dave doesn't get rich doing what he does with us," says Hanson. "He just has fun, and that's always been his motivation. If he didn't do it, he'd get bored. He'd wake up and do his research for his handicapping and then he can only go to Café Mastrioni so many times."

Ah, Café Mastrioni. To understand Cokin, you must understand two things: One—a sports bettor is not a sports-loving boy gone sour, but merely a sports-loving boy who grows up and still wants to spend his day thinking about the sports he loves. Two—Café Mastrioni is the place, more than any other place in the world, where Cokin would like to spend his lunchtimes, and his dinnertimes, and his just-after-lunch-but-not-quite-dinner snack times. For a guy who could use the average man's shoelace for a belt, Cokin is very fond of Italian food, and if Mastrioni were open at 11 a.m., Baja Fresh would almost certainly have had to wait another day for Cokin's business.

If it seems that Cokin's choice of hangout is immaterial to an even marginally substantive article about sports radio in Las Vegas, you don't know very much about sports radio in Las Vegas, where, for one thing, any confession of a hangout that is not Cheetahs is automatically big news, and, for another, Cokin's colleagues earn about half their salary talking sports and the other half talking about one another. Most of this needling takes place between the younger hosts—Bernstein is too demonstratively decent and Chevalier is, perhaps, too new to get the full treatment. But Cokin, in spite of the generation gap, remains very much one of the guys, and is therefore fair game.

"Dave's made a few bucks in this town, but he's always in the tight Wranglers, always the cowboy boots, always the Kangol cap," says Hanson. "Dave's Wranglers were the first edition of what they now call spandex."

Cokin doesn't mind the teasing.

"As long as they keep paying me, I'll show up. Hell, I hope I'll still do it in 20 years," he says. "My ideal show is not the ideal show anymore, and you've got to change with the times if you want to stay on board. Right now everything's gotta have an edge. But I think that pendulum's gone to the point now where it really has to swing back the other way. I just like having guys on who are absolute experts in their field, firing questions at them and seeing what they have to say. And I still believe that, in the end, that's what the audience wants to hear."