WIP Smart

Meet Phil from Mt. Airy, the rare enlightened sports-radio caller.

by Frank Rubino

It’s an overcast Tuesday, and Phil from Mt. Airy is sounding off on WIP for the second time in as many days.

That’s a lot of airtime—too much, actually—even for a caller this entertaining. But given recent events, a frustrated Eagles fan needs somewhere to vent, doesn’t he?

It hasn’t even been 48 hours since former New York whipping boy Eli Manning led the Giants to a historic Super Bowl upset over previously undefeated New England.

Having commiserated a dozen hours earlier with WIP nighttime host Glen Macnow over Manning’s zero-to-hero transformation, Phil throws a loaded question to midday guys Anthony Gargano and Steve Martorano.

“Let me ask you guys this,” he says in a voice at once streetwise and sophisticated: “Do the Eagles have a wide receiver who could’ve made the play Plaxico Burress [who caught Manning’s game-winning pass] made?”

Pretty banal stuff from a dude who’s called to talk about the raw athleticism Eagles linebacker Chris Gocong displays on films of his college games at Cal-Poly and about the downward trajectory of Phillies farmhand Joe Savery’s curveball.

Phil from Mt. Airy is no WIP Joe from Mayfair type. But today he sounds like one, and that’s fired up Martorano’s sadistic side.

“Do [the Eagles] have a quarterback who gets that ball there?” the talk jock fires back.

Martorano’s not finished: “I said this yesterday, Phil, and it’s worth repeating: In the big game, against the same team, their quarterback grew up and yours threw up.”

Ouch.

Phil can do without being reminded of the Eagles’ inglorious 2005 Super Bowl performance when Donovan McNabb allegedly barfed instead of marshaling a dramatic come-from-behind victory.

Phil was at the Super Bowl in Jacksonville, Fla., that day, suffering through the defeat in person. Philadelphia sports fans always suffer. It’s a hometown universal Phil knows better than most.

You could ask him.

Or you could instead tune your radio to 610 AM and just wait until you hear him. It shouldn’t take long.

Soon you’ll hear Phil labeling Phils front-office boss Dave Montgomery a racketeer, or Eagles head coach Andy Reid a bonehead. Or maybe you’ll catch Phil lamenting the fact that no major Philly-based professional sports franchise has won a championship since the ’83 76ers.

That was 25 years ago.

“Ridiculous,” says Phil.

So he holds forth, and not back—passionately, comically and yes, intelligently, over the 24/7 sports-talk station’s airwaves. Lots of people hear him. So many, in fact, that Phil’s voice has made him a celebrity of sorts.

“I get it all the time—in the mall or the supermarket—as soon as I open my mouth,” Phil says. “I was in a fender-bender the other day, and when I asked the lady for her information, she said, ‘Yo, you that dude that calls ’IP, right?’”

Though Phil calls only a handful of WIP hosts—Gargano and Martorano, Macnow, Big Daddy Graham and part-timer Mark Eckel—he calls enough to raise eyebrows at the station, which likes its callers to observe a once-a-week, once-on-the-weekend limit.

“He calls more frequently than he ought to,” says Macnow, “but he has pretty compelling views on what’s happening in Philadelphia sports most of the time.”

“He does it slick,” chuckles Graham, a standup comic when he isn’t doing sports radio. “I get a call from Phil maybe once a week or once every two weeks, but I hear him more often than that.”

Martorano thinks a weekly call from Phil approaches overkill because he’s so strong: “He calls us and he calls two other shows. That’s a lot of Phil.”

Martorano pauses. He reflects. He shrugs. “If this were a radio station that played music, callers would be records, and you’d want to play hits. Phil’s calls are hits. They’re good calls.”

Phil pleads an inability to restrain himself.

“I’ll be sitting here on the computer with my radio on, minding my own business, right?” he explains. “And then somebody’ll say something really fucking ridiculous, and I just can’t take it. I have to call.”

Phil, who’s married to a lovely woman named Valerie, has four daughters, a son, three grandchildren and a cat. He makes his living buying and reselling books. He owns an attractive single home in, of course, Mt. Airy.

Though Phil’s joys and family responsibilities transcend the tortuous world of Philly sports, it’s easy to see he’s obsessed with the latter.

Take, for instance, a recent Saturday night in his living room. Phil’s wearing an Eagles T.O. jersey. He and Valerie are entertaining his brother and his brother’s girlfriend. While they socialize, Phil references baseball almanacs, checks the Sixers score on his computer and ups the volume on his radio (which is of course tuned to WIP). When the conversation wanes, he reminisces about playing street hockey after the Flyers electrified the city by winning Stanley cups in ’74 and ’75.

Sipping a Long Island iced tea, Phil asks his wife and guests to testify to his lifetime sports addiction. They all roll their eyes. His 12-year-old daughter Kendall walks through the room. She rolls hers too.

Valerie, director of Penn’s African American Resource Center, is asked how she stands the madness.

“If you only knew how many people have asked me that,” she sighs.

Phil is grooming his 7-year-old son Philip to follow in his footsteps. The kid’s bedroom is a shrine to the Eagles. There’s an Eagles bedspread, an Eagles locker, Eagles curtains, a replica of the Lincoln Financial Field scoreboard and a floor model of the playing field.

“Everything Eagles,” shouts Philip, who’s wearing an Eagles hoodie.

If only Phil could rediscover his son’s youthful exuberance.

But Phil’s jaded about sports in his hometown, even though he and his family attend some 15 Phillies games every season and make cross-country Eagles road trips.

He’s especially pissed at the Phillies.

“It’s all actuarial to them,” he says. “They’ll be lucky to win 85 games this year. It’s all accounting. It’s the fucking RICO Act.”

Huh?

Radioheads: Phil Allen enjoys a rare in-person confab with WIP midday guys Steve Martorano (left) and Anthony Gargano.

“They’re gangsters,” he continues. “They held us hostage for 10 years and told us, ‘Until we get a new stadium, we’re not spending any money.’ So they got their new stadium, and they’re gonna fuck with Ryan Howard over a couple million dollars? When they use him in every marketing strategy, every commercial? Nobody’s buying tickets to see David Montgomery. People are buying tickets to see Ryan Howard make that bigass bell ring.”

As for the Eagles, Phil suspects there’s too much self-congratulating going on. He notes that the franchise still hasn’t won a Super Bowl. (Every other team in the Birds’ division has taken at least three.)

“I don’t think there’s anybody down there that’ll say to Andy Reid or Joe Banner without fear, ‘Dude, this is wrong. You need a top-shelf receiver. You need people who can make plays, period.’”

Phil thinks the embattled Reid has taken the Eagles as far as he can and that they need a new coach if they’re ever going to pop champagne corks in February.

“A lot of times [a coach like Reid] has to come along and right the ship, get it moving in the right direction,” he says. “Then they lop his head and bring somebody else in to get it over the top. That’s what the Eagles didn’t do.”

Here, live and in person, he could go on all night.

But on the air he has but a couple minutes, a constraint that doesn’t keep him from dishing esoteric sports fare along with his standard Phillies and Eagles rants.

He recently called a WIP host around 3 in the morning to complain about a $20 service charge attached to online ticket purchases for a Wachovia Center wrestling show.

“He’s always giving you something like that,” says host Big Daddy Graham. “He’s far and away better than most callers. I’m glad when he calls, or I wouldn’t put him on the air.”

You have to figure out what you’re going to say. You have to stay on hold often for 20 minutes or longer. You have to overcome jitters and hosts with short fuses. Most important, you have to laugh it off when the host tells you, in so many words, to pull your head out of your ass.

Phil learned this the first time he called WIP. It was back in the early ’90s, and he was calling to lambaste the Phillies on afternoon rudeboy Howard Eskin’s program. Eskin wasn’t having it.

“Howard called me a dope, of course,” Phil recalls.

Undaunted, Phil began calling other shows. But he didn’t join “the circuit” until ex-New York Post reporter Gargano, who grew up at 18th and Ritner in South Philly, showed up at WIP in 2001.

Gargano, a sports-savvy Joe Everyman, comes off on the air as a guy you’d enjoy downing a few cold ones with during a ballgame.

Phil says it isn’t shtick.

“Anthony’s the real deal,” he says. “The first time I heard him, I said, ‘that’s me.’ Ant just wants to win. Eff the salary cap, eff the GM, eff the personality crap. Are we gonna win?”

Gargano’s fond of Phil too. “Phil’s just a great, great sports fan,” he says. “I gotta tell you, his passion’s real.”

But their mutual admiration doesn’t mean they always agree. Gargano disagrees, for instance, with Allen’s perception that the Phillies care only about putting backsides in seats.

“Ed Snider wants to win, David Montgomery wants to win, they all want to win,” he says. “I’ve buried the Phillies for not doing the right thing when I felt that way, and I know people are talking about Ryan Howard and saying, ‘They’re just about the payroll,’ and to an extent I’d agree. But the fact is they’re winning now.”

Eckel, a Trenton Times columnist and ex-beat writer who’s covered the Eagles since 1985, says he respects Phil for refusing to swallow every spin-job the suits who run the franchise throw out.

“Phil isn’t a Kool-Aid drinker,” Eckel says. “He sees the faults in his teams. He doesn’t have that blind loyalty, you know, ‘Well the Eagles say this is right, so it must be right.’ I think that’s a good fan.”

Nor does Eckel think Phil’s wrong about the Eagles brass doing too much internal backslapping.

“The Eagles are very pleased with their success,” he says. “And we can’t deny that they’ve won a lot of games and they’ve been to the playoffs more than they haven’t. But it hasn’t been enough. They have to win it all, and until they do, it’s not good enough.”

“As an organization, we appreciate the fans’ support of our team,” writes Eagles assistant director of media services Bob Lange in an email response. “They are passionate and prideful of the Eagles.”

Phillies PR man Larry Shenk writes, “The fans in this area deserve a championship and we will continue to work toward that goal. We believe our payroll, seventh in the majors a year ago, reflects our philosophy. This year’s payroll will be higher.”

Could it get any sweeter for this Philly sports diehard?

“A championship parade down Broad Street would be better,” deadpans Phil.

WIP’s Macnow agrees.

“The fans of this town really need to get laid, and I mean that in the sports sense,” Macnow says. “Collectively, we need to get laid.”

Unfortunately, nobody in Philadelphia—including Gargano—expects to be getting laid, metaphorically speaking, anytime soon.

“The Eagles lost against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the last game at the Vet where they were a favorite and should’ve gone to the Super Bowl,” he says. “That was it. That was the chance.”

Martorano feels especially bad for younger fans.

“There’s a difference between having your balls broken and your heart broken,” he says.

He says fans like Phil, who’ve witnessed championships, fall into the latter category since they know their teams actually can win it all.

“But if you’ve never seen a championship, you tend to think the teams are breaking your balls,” Martorano continues. “Like they’re doing this on purpose. You talk to a 24-year-old guy, tell him, ‘Keep hope alive,’ he thinks it’s bullshit.”

Phil agrees. “Who’s gonna end the drought? What team is right there? None of them.”

The real bummer, Phil continues, is that the city’s missing out on a terrific party, one that millions are jonesing for.

Macnow, who believes sports owners have an obligation to try to give their fans reasons to celebrate, feels certain the bash Phil longs for will eventually happen.

When that happens is another question.

“It’s going to be like someone took a magnum of champagne and for 25 years put it on one of those machines they have in hardware stores that stir the paint cans, and then uncorked it,” Macnow says.

Phil says you can just kill him afterward.

Answering the Call

Phil isn’t the only serial WIP caller. He’s part of what Martorano dubs “the regulars,” a cadre of callers with handles like “Chuck from Lansdowne,” “Mitchie Tools,” “Sly from West Philly,” “Mike the Weasel” and “Cowboy Dave.”

These are all callers with lives that allegedly extend beyond their radios and phones. Take Mitchell Cohen, aka “Mitchie Tools”—47, married with kids, and the proprietor of a hardware store at Fifth and Passyunk. Like Phil, he usually calls Gargano and Martorano. But unlike Phil, he doesn’t care about sports all that much.

“I’m not on top of the stats and everything,” he says. “Actually, I like it when they talk about other stuff.”

Cohen does impersonations. “He thinks he can do them but he can’t,” corrects Gargano. “That’s what’s funny. He calls and imitates Elvira from Scarface and [Fox football sideline reporter] Tony Siragusa.”

“Once in a while I get off a good one,” Cohen counters. “I do lines from The Godfather too.”

Olney’s Michael Mitchell, aka “Mike the Weasel,” also calls the midday show weekly. He’s a disabled 49-year-old father of three. Allen knows him, and attests that he’s a responsible person.

Nonetheless, “the Weasel” once stole a traffic light from the intersection of 17th Street and Belfield Avenue. “I was DJing, and I used it in my light show,” he explains.

He wanted to confess to Gargano and Martorano one afternoon but couldn’t. “The line just stayed busy,” he says. “They were asking whether anybody ever stole a street sign.”

Even amid such characters, Phil from Mt. Airy stands out. “He does,” says Martorano. “Phil has a certain panache.”

And quite a history.

Phil grew up on 61st Street in West Philly, in a crowded row house headed by his mother. “My dad disappeared in the middle of the night,” he says. “My mom raised six of us by herself.”

The family was poor. Phil slept on a mattress, and he rarely had more than small change in his pocket. But that didn’t stop him from finagling his way into Veterans Stadium every summer to watch Phillies games.

“Back then, general admission seats were 50 cents for kids accompanied by adults,” he remembers. “So you’d go up to some dude in line and ask him to pretend you were with him. I saw Lefty Carlton and Mike Schmidt for 50 cents.”

Phil entered Overbrook High in 1975 but dropped out after his sophomore year and eventually joined the Navy. After basic training he found himself on a sprawling naval air station in Jacksonville. He was only 17, and his future looked promising.

But Phil’s first encounter with Jacksonville turned out even worse than the Super Bowl jaunt.

The trouble started when Phil’s supervisor in the station’s finance office showed him how to conjure up fictitious sailors and dispatch their paperwork to a central computer in Cleveland. Checks arrived for the ghosts. Phil cashed a few.

Quite a few.

“I hit ’em for a couple hundred thousand,” he says. “I had a brand-new car, a condo on the beach, a different chick every night. I don’t like to make excuses, but I grew up dead broke. When somebody showed me how to make $1,000 in a day, I was in.”

After the Naval Criminal Investigative Service cracked the scam, Phil was “in” once again. But this time that translated to a two-and-a-half-year federal prison sentence.

After his release he sold timeshares, cell phones and other legitimate products before landing in the book trade, which has treated him well. He also attended college, earning a B.A. in social services from Temple. Along the way he met Valerie Dorsey. They married on Sept. 3, 1994.

“When you meet Phil, you don’t forget him,” Valerie says of her husband.

“Without her I’d probably be homeless, riding the subway with a PlayStation,” Phil says of his wife.

Today he’s the quintessential family guy, renovating the house, attending Kendall’s dance performances, coaching Philip’s little league team, and staying in touch with his grown daughters Vanity, Victoria and Lauren. He also helps manage a foundation, Friends and Family of Adrienne Carla Allen (www.active.com/donate/lupusloop2007/mtairyphil), dedicated to his younger sister who died of lupus 20 years ago.

Perhaps most significantly, he warns his kids about fool’s gold.

“I tell them you can take shortcuts, and every now and then they’ll pay off,” he says. “But for the most part the only thing that’ll get you where you want to be and keep you there is hard work.” (F.R.)

Quotable Phil

As many regular WIP listeners know, Phil from Mt. Airy isn’t shy. And he’s not apologetic.

“Oh, please,” he implores while chilling in his living room alongside his trusty radio. “I don’t care what anybody thinks about me. Unless they pay bills and raise kids here, I really don’t.”

A classic Phil from Mt. Airy line.

And here are some others:

>> On Howard Eskin: “He’s the Eagles’ pipeline to the community. His show’s like Eagles Digest. I can’t believe he even believes all that stuff he says about them. I honestly think he does it for effect.”

>> On morning show host Angelo Cataldi: “Hilarious. I love the morning show. I’m a big fan. But I’m not sitting on hold an hour for anybody. The best thing about Angelo is [co-host] Rhea [Hughes].”

>> On Phillies coach Charlie Manuel: “The more I see of [Eagles coach] Andy Reid and [Flyers coach] John Stevens, the more I’m thinking, hey, maybe Charlie isn’t so bad after all.”

>> On Phillies left-fielder Pat Burrell: “For a guy who showed as much promise as he did coming out of the University of Miami, he might be the best example of a lack of development I’ve ever seen.”

>> On Flyers and Sixers chairman Ed Snider: “I think he’d cut his left arm off to win a cup.”

>> On Eagles president Joe Banner: “He’s an accountant. What’s his football background? Why should what he says mean anything to me?”

>> On Allen Iverson: “Every day he’s gone makes me miss A.I. the player more. But I think he missed out on an opportunity to lead kids. He worked really hard at being an asshole when he was here.”

>> On the NBA: “Their players are uncoachable for the most part, unteachable. They don’t pass the ball. Guys come down, get to the top of the key … fire! You go to a game and you’re pounded with sound and lights and advertising and dancing. I guess they have to camouflage how bad their product is.” (F.R.)