Jim Rose

Radio is like baseball: There's a game every day

When Jim Rose moved away from Nebraska less than two years ago, he nearly abandoned his dream of becoming the voice of Husker football, a job he had coveted at least since his college days.

  “I looked at the landscape and thought the time and place just wouldn’t happen,” Rose said.

  So Rose left his job at Pinnacle Sports Productions in Nebraska to become the sports director at KMBZ in Kansas City, where he also hosted a talk show. Rose, his wife Jana and two kids — Jackson and Alexis — were prepared to settle down for good.

  “We fully expected to stay in Kansas City for the rest of our lives,” said Rose, a 1985 broadcasting graduate. “But if you don’t think God has a sense of humor, tell him your plans, and he’ll fix that.”

  In November, Pinnacle president Paul Aaron announced Warren Swain was leaving at the end of the 2001 season — his sixth — and Rose would be his replacement.

  “He’s wanted this since high school or even before,” said Rose’s mother, Felice Rose. “This has been his dream, and he talked about it frequently.”

  Just over six months after his hiring, which also includes the play-by-play duties for Nebraska baseball and a morning show on KFAB, Rose isn’t drawing much attention. But he knows that won’t last long.

  “I’m starting to feel the pressure because I know this person (doing play-by-play) represents the university,” Rose said. “I know this person represents all the guys who have done it in the past, and he represents a very important conduit between the fans and the team.

  “I don’t feel the pressure to do the job, but I do feel the weight of expectations. A lot is expected of me, but I hope I can live up to it.”

  Husker fans often criticized Swain for what Rose considered his predecessor’s best trait.

  “Warren is a dedicated professional and broadcaster who brings the down, the distance, the time and the score accurately every time out,” Rose said.

  But fans seem to want more than that, and Rose hopes to bring it to them. His style, Rose said, is that of a Nebraskan.

  “There needs to be a moderate amount of exuberance on the air,” he said. “I think they want an excited Nebraskan to be excited about the game and how we’re doing. I would think that, as a Nebraska fan, that would appeal to me.”

  The 39-year-old’s talk-show style — brash and bold in the past — has earned Rose his share of fans and detractors. But with one of the most high-profile radio jobs in Nebraska now, Rose has toned it down.

  “I was listening to him the other day on the way back from Kansas,” said Felice Rose of her son’s morning talk show with Gary Sadlemyer. “I couldn’t believe what he was saying. He’s always been assertive, but he’s funny now.

  “He isn’t quite as robust as he was before. He’s a lot more discrete about what he says.”

  Rose has known since his sophomore year at Lincoln Southeast he wanted to be involved in the media business. But he wasn’t quite sure which aspect to choose.

  In college, Rose broadcast football, basketball and baseball on the radio for KRNU, the campus radio station operated by the College of Journalism and Mass Communi-cations. He also worked part-time at KFOR, doing high school sports, and worked behind the scenes on its Husker coverage.

  Rose did freelance television work for KOLN, learning from sports director Jeff

  Schmahl, now the director of HuskerVision. Rose’s knowledge of the game also grew from hanging around NU coaches, the Omaha World-Herald’s Tom Ash and the Lincoln Journal Star’s Randy York.

  Aside from talking football, Rose watched Ash and York cover their beats. Rose grew to admire how professionally the two handled themselves.

  “They were not shills, but they were not adversaries,” Rose said. “That impressed me, and I wanted that. I wanted to say that I could do the job well but still make friends of these guys and keep them for life — like they did.”

  After graduating, Rose did radio in Salina, Kan., before moving to Wichita where he was the sports director for a local TV station.

  Rose settled on radio as his meal ticket because of the opportunities it would bring him to hone his craft.

  “I saw radio kind of like a baseball season — there’s a game every day,” he said. “If you have a bad game on Friday, you can come back on Saturday and do well.”

  Rose realizes that, with radio, public scrutiny focuses intensely on the presentation by the man behind the microphone. And he’s ready for the challenge because he’s spent most of his life training for Aug. 24, Nebraska’s opener against Arizona State in the BCA Classic. It will officially be Rose’s first game as the voice of the Huskers.

  “You are the show on the radio,” Rose said.

  “Everything you say is what they get. If you do it well, then you’ve met their expectations. If you don’t, you’ve failed.”