On his way out, Boers finally knows the score
Sports radio personality preparing to retire
after 25 years on air
Terry Boers didn't have any goals, really.
OK, he “saved every penny I made from 1966 to '69” at the Chicago Heights Jack in the Box and the Park Forest Marshall Field's for a brand new Dodge Charger RT he bought with $3,300 cash a year out of Bloom Township High School.
But along the way, there was a teacher who found a goal for him.
“I had a creative writing teacher my junior year at Bloom, Mrs. (Vera) Kohloff, who asked me one day, ‘Have you ever thought about writing for a living?' ” Boers said. “I answered, ‘No, I have not.' ”
Kohloff asked Boers to consider it for a weekend. Because, he said, “I wanted to please her,” consider it he did.
Chatting last week from his Orland Park home, Boers said, “She told me, ‘You have a certain knack, a flair to your writing I don't see much here.' Nobody'd ever said anything like that to me.
“She planted that seed. It sort of became my fallback position. If anybody asked what I wanted to do for a living, I'd say, ‘Journalism.' ”
Eventually, Boers spent 20 years in newspapers — the Lansing Sun Journal, the Chicago Heights Star, the Detroit Free Press and Chicago Sun-Times — before helping to launch Chicago's first all-sports talk radio station, WSCR, in January 1992.
On Jan. 5, Boers, 66, will work his last edition of the Score's “Boers and Bernstein Show,” 25 years and three days after starting at the station. He announced his retirement, which will end the longest-running sports talk duo in Chicago, last week on the air.
We spoke two days after that announcement, and Boers was awash in well-wishes.
“I've gotten 250 letters in two days — I don't think I have 250 friends,” he said. “I can't believe the reaction.”
But he understands it. Boers has spent more time off the air than on in recent months, battling an illness that has sent him to the hospital for multiple surgeries. As has been his public stance throughout, Boers declined to discuss the specifics.
“The radio is so personal. It's so putting yourself out there,” he said. “Over a period of time, it brings you closer.
“It's interesting how you touch peoples' lives. I heard from a guy who said, ‘I'm in the car for five hours a day — all I have is you.' I heard from a guy a year behind me at Bloom who knew my dad from the Dixie Dairy.
“I had no idea. I know people are listening. I can read the numbers. I know what the Cubs meant to this station. But so many people have been on this journey with me — and I don't know what other business there is where you have that chance to connect with people for five hours a day.”
I crossed paths with Boers a few times in his sportswriting days. He was the funniest, loudest voice in the press box — as long as you weren't in his crosshairs.
“I'm often told I was aloof — that's the way newspaper people were,” he said. “I'd walk in and give whole rooms of people grief.”
That sharp wit served him well in his earliest radio days. Still working at the Sun-Times when the Score began, he went to radio — and a 7
“I knew the newspaper thing was about done,” he said. “It wasn't that tough a decision.”
The quick and caustic Boers meshed well the verbose, bellicose McNeil. But high school dropout Mike North, paired with ex-Bears lineman and Harvard graduate Dan Jiggetts, became the station's star.
In 1999, North was given a solo show. Dan Bernstein, a former Bears and Bulls reporter and update man, was paired with Boers, and Jiggetts with McNeil.
“Of the three, the one you thought wouldn't have worked was Boers and Bernstein — but it did,” Boers said.
It worked in part because Boers was willing to let it.
“Ron (Gleason, then the WSCR program director) took me out behind the old bunker on Belmont (Avenue) and said, ‘All right, Terry, this is your show and he's part of it,' ” Boers said. “I said, ‘No, Ron, it's our show.'
“There's a certain something there. Our chemistry was always good.”
They were bright, curious and funny interviewers, with reporters' sources and “Meet the Press” ready opinions. They also had zero patience for callers who were uninformed or simply too nervous to quickly make a coherent point.
The withering dismissal of such callers largely has been ceded to Bernstein in recent years. In fact, the entire Score lineup is populated with gentler souls than those who dominated in the early days.
“The first thing you hear about the show is Dan's too mean to people,” Boers said. “I used to do it too. I don't anymore.
“Some people like the stupid being taken to task. Others don't. … Dan is really the only one left who does that.”
Boers ticked off the names on the Score roster: Veteran morning drive tandem Mike Mulligan and Brian Hanley, midday hosts Matt Spiegel and Jason Goff, evening stalwart Laurence Holmes.
“Laurence doesn't do that. Spiegs and Jason don't do that. Mully and Hanley certainly don't do that,” Boers said. “But if that's who Dan is, let him do it. Do I think in three or four years he might change? It's possible — he'll turn 50 in a few years, and we all lose that edge a little bit.
“But whatever stage of life you're in — be that guy. Don't be something you're not. It's important to be who you are.”
Certainly, that's Boers' plan moving forward, once he puts the health issues behind him.
“Supposedly, I'm going to,” he said. “There's no dire prognosis.”
His wife of 45 years, Carolyn, will get plenty of time, as will his four children and five grandchildren. But there also is a book to finish, 12 chapters of which have been written.
“I'm hoping within six months I'll have this done and in someone's hands before people forget me,” he said.
“I'm writing life, sports, the Score — I hope it's interesting. ... I think the inner workings of the station will be interesting.”
Will the stupid be taken to task? Possibly. To put it in the argot of Boers and Bernstein, will there be a loud and persistent rapping at someone's back door? Probably.
But remember, Uncle Terry has mellowed.
“I think you have to change — not who you are, but how you think about things,” he said. “I think what I've found — at a time when we're somewhat confused as a people … underneath all of this, there's still an inherent goodness to an awful lot of people.”
The aloof newspaperman is gone, transformed by the media niche he helped define.
“I've made connections you just can't make as a newspaper guy,” he said. “I discovered this side of me I like — I would never have dreamed this side of me existed.”
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