(though Costa, right, has no tolerance for lady persons in the locker room or officiating games between M-E-N, he’s quick to cite biblical passages extolling their skills in serving beer, wings, etc.)
In May of this year, I suggested Dino Costa’s unique brand of sports radio hate fuckery hadn’t received nearly enough attention. Dino was quick to correct me — it seems he’s made nearly a dozen appearances in Bob Raissman’s NY Daily News sports media column, and if that weren’t enough, Costa recently received some favorable attention from the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle (commonly referred to as, “The Paper Of Record”, I believe). Not only did the latter feature a hot picture of Dino in what appeared to be a 10 year old’s bedroom, but also included the fascinating tidbit that, “the father of two talks of running for mayor of Cheyenne someday, saying current Mayor Rick Kaysen is ‘on notice’ at the next election.” Though a Costa campaign would undoubtedly provide consistent blog fodder the likes not seen since Rick Santorum’s run for the Oval Office, I have a sneaking suspicion that given Dino’s early efforts to curry favor with the locals, this mayoral run will remain — like so many other things in Dinoland — a pipe dream.
That said, it’s not all delusions of grandeur for Mad Dog Radio’s weeknight host. Men’s Journal has declared Costa, “the poster boy and rising new standard bearer of our nation’s sizable Angry White Man contingent,”, suggesting that Dino, “could become the next Jim Rome or Rush Limbaugh – if he doesn’t get fired first.” Though I’m certain Costa would bristle at the comparison to Rome, it’s not entirely clear why any thoughtful publisher (or in this case, Men’s Journal) would think there’s a shortage of would-be Romes and Limabughs. There’s a lot of Angry White Men yelling on the radio, several of them on Costa’s own channel. Of course, none except the article’s subject can be credited with what’s described as “a controversial but nonetheless winning formula”. To wit, “he takes overheated sports-talk-radio argumentativeness, infuses it with Tea Party-inspired politics (Obama is ‘the worst president in the history of the country’) and evangelical sermonizing (diatribes against the ‘gay and lesbian lifestyle’) and then adds a healthy dose of politically incorrect boundary-pushing (i.e., the NBA All-Star Game should pit white players against black)”.
I’m not sure on what planet that would be considered, “a winning formula”, commercially or otherwise. The excerpts on the Men’s Journal site fail to detail Costa’s ratings, nor is there any mention of the oft-noted drive for Twitter followers that even his own Sirius/XM colleagues considered blatantly fraudulent. Perhaps a trip to one of the nation’s few remaining newsstands is required to find out whether or not Men’s Journal quizzed Costa about the irony of a self-styled renegade who routinely blocks critics (and the general public) from a twitter feed he’s begged them to follow. Or whether or not “a winning formula” consists of endless self-aggrandizing clips at the top of every hour, ostensibly intended to promote a program his audience has already tuned in to.
Anyhow, I’m unlikely to find out for sure unless I find myself hanging around Supercuts. My doctor’s office opts for The Austin American-Statesman, and if they chose to put another megalomaniac in the paper, Art Acevedo might get jealous.
As a subscriber to Men’s Journal, I had the opportunity to peruse the whole article. Not much there but it is comforting to know Dino is on his third wife which at the age of 48 puts him on a rate to rival Larry King.
There was a brief mention of a 24 year old son who he did not raise that was shot and killed in a Seattle nightclub which is terribly sad but even more confusing as Dino is a major proponent of the right to bear arms and has said he would have taken care of the Batman shooter if he was in the theater at the time.
All in all it seemed like a very dated and thin piece in which Men’s Journal, as they say in the newspaper business, was trying to “throw out with the trash.”