Kiro's `Mound Of Sound' Concludes 21-Year Sportscasting Career Tomorrow

"It's simple," Wayne Cody said of the Kingdome situation. "Shut up and play there.

"There is nothing wrong with that stadium for football, nothing wrong with it for baseball."

It was only six-something in the morning, between sportscasts on news-talk KIRO-AM (710), and the familiar voice with the Midwest twang and swift cadence was on a roll.

". . . I mean, they play 10 games a year in that stadium. If they have a good team instead of a stink team, they're going to sell it out."

The Mound of Sound, as he is known, paused as if measuring his next words - as if.

"Ken Behring is a dipweed," he said of the Seahawk owner. "That's D-I-P-W-E-E-D. Bubba. Used-car Bubba."

Quintessential Cody: the view of the common man, delivered by an old-school announcer who understands that sports isn't a business, it's entertainment.

So get on with the show already!

Wayne Cody, the son of vaudeville performers who went on to Broadway (his mother) and a 53-year career in radio (his father), will retire from daily broadcasting tomorrow. (If the Seahawks stick around, he hopes to be on the air Sundays next fall.)

An on-the-air celebration at Duke's on South Lake Union, during morning drive time on KIRO-AM, will mark his departure from his 21-year home on the radio dial.

Although radio has been the constant in his career, Cody is better known as a local-TV icon. He did sports for 14 years, until 1992, on KIRO-TV (Channel 7).

He's recognized by anyone who has lived here for 10 or more years and has a TV. He's known more for his stunts and counter-intuitive television charisma than for his sports coverage.

Retirement is looking good

A pension quirk, the grueling early-morning hours, disenchantment with radio of late and a desire to play more golf, to gamble, to travel - all make retirement attractive, said Cody, who is in his mid-50s.

"I want to do some fun stuff before I fall apart and go to the home and they feed me Pablum," he said. "I want to be able to travel. I play a lot of poker. Poker tournaments. I'll go down and play the World Series again. Play some golf while I still can.

"I'm not in great shape to play anymore. I've lost the feeling in my feet due to diabetes. But I'm going to try to play again this year," Cody said. "I've got some bandits from Tacoma who operate card rooms, and we all play and gamble on everything."

If he is experiencing any melancholy, Cody isn't showing it. He claims he has been counting the days.

"Let me outta here!" he said to veteran KIRO-AM morning host Bill Yeend after one sportscast this week. Some 43,000 sportscasts down, eight more - tomorrow - to go.

Broadcasting just isn't what it used to be, Cody said.

"I can't stand the screaming radio today, where the guy is barking and invites people to call up and then insults them and they scream and holler scores and, `You're the man! You're the man!' That's just absolute B.S. radio. . . . If that's what they want in radio today, they can have it.

"The one thing I took pride in is if I didn't know, I said I didn't know," Cody said. "I said I'll ask somebody. There's thousands of people out there who know more about basketball and baseball and football than I do.

"What I hoped I was was the old minstrel-show interlocutor - the guy who sat in the middle and tied the whole thing together, that's all.

"I never really thought it was sports," Cody said. "It was entertainment."

Which might explain why his sports knowledge and coverage are widely criticized by others on the beat. And, paradoxically, why no one in modern Seattle sports media is as widely recognized.

You want entertainment?

He brought a horse into the TV studio to assist in reporting racing results. He did a sportscast from a hot tub. Magician Doug Henning made him disappear. Cody tried to make himself disappear by losing 75 pounds in a weight-loss promotion.

Launched live-comedy scene

Cody is pretty much responsible for getting Seattle's live-comedy scene started 17 years ago, launching the first stand-up club here. Restaurants bore his name for a few years.

All of those things made him visible, but mostly the guy can talk.

He started by hosting "Sportsline" at night on KIRO-AM and talked and talked and talked until he was everywhere - on radio, on TV, on commercials, at golf benefits, at the hydroplane races.

"He's kind of like Willard Scott," said Mike West, who works mornings on adult-alternative KMTT-FM. "He's a character."

West, a Seattle native, broke into rock radio here about the time Cody was on his roll, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As an example of Cody's self-deprecating style, West used to do dead-on impressions of Cody on his rock shows on KISW-FM and KXRX-FM - and Cody ran them on his sports-talk show on KIRO-AM.

Besides his distinctive delivery, Cody's girth was a running joke in Seattle. He was big enough to have time zones across his front, and yet he was Seattle's hottest TV star. Anomalous, unfortunately.

Cody himself seems to marvel at the opportunity he seized two decades ago when KIRO-AM first hired him for the sports-talk job that eventually landed him on KIRO-TV for 14 years.

"Seattle took a fat guy - and I was weighing 325 when I went on TV here - with a beard, and put him on TV," Cody says. "That is not your cookie-cutter, Channel-5-now-looking sportscaster. I've always thanked Seattle for doing that."

Said KIRO-TV news anchor Steve Raible, a former Seahawk player who worked with Cody: "He has always described himself first as a showman. He would be the first to tell you don't ask him the minutiae of the sports scene. But he has an overall knowledge of sports and, most important, has a great feeling for the people."

People like a good story, and Cody is a storyteller. For example: his knack with women. How does he do it?

On Sonic road games, "We'd go out at night after the game, and we'd go to a disco, in Houston or New York or wherever, and I'd push Tom Chambers through the door, Jack Sikma through the door, Wally Walker through the door - and then I'd say, `Girls, I'm with them!' I had a chance then after following those guys."

Then there was the time Cody covered the first KIRO radio broadcast of a Seattle Sounders soccer game, from Aberdeen in 1977. Cody had just returned from England and figured Scotland. It was Aberdeen, Wash., and it was raining very hard.

"I got to the stadium and they had a big pallet to lift me up on top of the stadium roof, because the hole in the back of the grandstand to go up to the press box was only yea-big. I couldn't get through it. So they take us up on this crane on this pallet, and about 30 feet in the air the guy running the crane said the only thing I didn't want to hear: `Uh-oh.'

"We're caught there for about 25 minutes, swaying in the rain. All the notes I had written in red pen are now dripping on the ground. So we get to the press box and there are no phones. . . .

"Then this little telephone guy shows up with a pink Princess phone and a green Princess phone. He plugs them in and we call the station and we're on the air 40 minutes late. "Six kicks it to nine, and nine kicks it to four." . . .

"Second half, Tommy hands me his phone and I listen in and this woman says, "Hi, Marge, yes we'll be behind the church at 4:30 and we've got a case of Pepsi and I'll get two buckets of chicken for the kids." And I said, "Hello," I said, "we're on the radio on a 50,000-watt station doing soccer. Could we ask you to get off the phone?" This woman says, "You're an impertinent young man. We're having a conversation about our picnic this afternoon," and she said "just get off our line please." This is all going out over KIRO.

"I went over to a Chinese restaurant after that game and had a very long conversation about soccer with Jack Daniels and Jim Beam. That was the first soccer game on KIRO."

He's got a million of them, starting with his first radio job at KNEB-AM in Scottsbluff, Neb. During a wintery football play-by-play, Cody's wet lip touched the microphone - and stayed there.

Some 35 years later, Seattle's motormouth has an entire broadcasting era frozen in time. Nothing is scripted. He reads the scores out of USA Today, recalls what he saw on the highlight tapes. He overemphasizes syllables in classic style.

"LAKE-ers end up LOS-ing last night. . . . The RAP-tors beat the Chicago Bulls. . . . Only five more games for the Mariners in that OOOOOO-old Cactus-League GO-round. . . ."

After that sportscast, Yeend played a recorded telephone testimonial over the air. It was former Seahawks coach Tom Flores.

"Wayne, I met you in 1979 when you were a voice. Then you became a person - a large person."