Op-Ed
Source: Jimmie Kaska | Civic Media
Apr 24, 2025, 8:00 AM CST
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On April 21, 2025, Wisconsin lost one of its broadcast legends. Mike Sullivan, who called college and high school games for over 40 years in Eau Claire, passed away after battling leukemia for a little over two months. “Sully” was inducted into the Wisconsin Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2015, and was still calling games after his induction, nearly 50 years after he began in Wisconsin radio.
His family has started a GoFundMe to help pay for medical costs. You can contribute by going to this link.
The commentary in this article is a personal account of Mike Sullivan’s impact on a young broadcaster’s career. It is not intended as editorial content.
Chippewa Falls, 2003: From cover band to covering sports
At a dive bar in western Wisconsin on an otherwise unremarkable day, a cover band was playing the best of hair metal and synth-rock to a crowd numbering well into the multiple dozens. It was still a little too early for the evening bar crowd, so mostly, the loud riffs and cymbal crashes echoed off of the tile and brick that held the establishment together.
Near the front of the stage was an 18-year-old kid with a mop of hair who had just begun his first year in college, hoping some day that he’d get to write about sports.
That kid was, and despite my age now, still is, me.
The band was my dad’s, in its final audition to be the house band for a 1970’s-core classic rock station in Eau Claire. Inexplicably, the band went by Phoenx, without the “I” for some reason I can’t recall over two decades later. My dad was in his early days with this band, which was rising in notability in the area, leading to the audition.
Radio station staff took up perches along the bar to take in the sounds, some of them nodding their heads along to familiar tunes. A few of them were wearing suits — not your typical dive bar attire. Those folks, I learned later, were the station’s managers and sales people. They’d be the ones who would be calling upon the band to play shows tied to radio station events.
At some point after the first set, my dad encouraged me to talk to someone from the radio station about getting a job. I looked over at the crowd of suits and middle-aged men with loud voices, and told my dad “you’re crazy.” I also was working two jobs already, so it wasn’t urgent that I needed to pick up another one. Still, he insisted.
“This will be right up your alley,” he argued.
I used to wire my own antennas living in a trailer park in northwestern Wisconsin to listen to NFL games in the fall on the radio, since we lived too far away from TV stations to pick up a signal. There are dozens of cassettes lost to history of me doing my own sports talk shows as a teenager bored out of my mind in the summer living too far away from any other kids my age to play with. So, it was a correct assessment.
I finally walked over to the group of sales folks. After some small talk, I finally asked the question: How do I work at the radio station? I was given a phone number and a promise that there was “definitely” something open for me.
In my mind, this was as close to writing about sports as I could get, something that would get me experience in media before I took on the real job I wanted in writing. So, I decided to follow up with phone calls… one per day, even weekends, for six straight weeks trying to get someone to take my call.
Finally, I broke through. “Call this number at four in the morning. Someone will pick up and get you started.” Sure enough, I caught the operations manager at four bells — just about to start his morning show shift — who told me, exasperatedly, to come to work the next evening and meet with the manager of the station’s team of sports producers.
“Oh, and one more thing, Jamie,” the ops manager said, clearly agitated.
“It’s Jimmie, but yes, wh—”
“Please, for the love of God, stop calling me. You’ve filled up my voice mail twice this month.”
# # # # #
I can’t tell the story of how Mike impacted my career (and by extension, my life) without providing the origin story.
I had no idea what I was getting into, of course when I first got started in radio. When I showed up the next night after that abrupt phone call, I was taken into a studio, shown a board, shown how to turn pots on and off, shown how to record audio. After few games of mostly taking furious notes and asking inane questions, I was given my very first solo sports production assignment.
The task: Producing a UW-Eau Claire versus UW-Stout doubleheader in basketball.
I had been an employee of what was known as Clear Channel Radio for a week and change, hadn’t even received my first paycheck, and it was sink-or-swim time. My anxiety was sky-high, a 10 out of 10. Then, one of the evening music station DJs popped his head into the studio, looked at me, turned his head, and asked, “Who are you?”
“I’m Jimmie. I’m here to run two Blugolds games.”
The man laughed, and asked me who was calling them.
“Um… I think his name is Mike something.”
Still laughing as he walked down the hallway out of the studio, he called back to me, zero hint of a joke in his voice: “Good luck, you’ve got the hardest guy we have to work with.”
Somehow, my anxiety managed to exceed 10 out of 10 that night.
Eau Claire, 2003 to 2005: Earning the trust of a legend
You ever wonder what it’s like to be a roadie for a big-time musician? That’s kind of what sports board-opping is like. The big voice on the other end of the phone line, describing the game, punctuating the big plays with impeccable timing and the right amount of flair in the description… sports play-by-play is poetic and amazing, and I immediately fell in love with it.
Mike “something” happened to be Mike Sullivan — T. Michael Sullivan, according to his nameplate (when I asked what the “T” stood for, he said “Talented”). And Mike was not someone who you pressed buttons for in a broadcast. No, the sports producer during his games was in charge of gathering scores, finding the right music, getting highlights, and keeping the host happy.
When you showed up to run a Mike Sullivan game, there would be a packet, usually multiple pages thick, of the scores to call and gather. This was before live-scoring on websites, social media, or text chains. Making sure not to hang up on Line 1 (the broadcast), using Line 2, your job was to spend most of the game calling for updated scores so that Mike could share them during our broadcast.
Some of the numbers, of course, were radio stations. My first call in to get a score was, oddly enough, a station that this article is publishing on: WCFW. A few were people he knew that would be in the stands for those games. And, for fun, occasionally, he’d have the number to the concessions box, an office, and one time, an actual pay phone near the gym entrance that when it rang, a stranger would pick up, you’d ask for the score, and you’d get a gruff “20 to 15” with no other information before they’d hang up.
Not only that. But any mistake that Mike could hear, such as a commercial being cut off or two elements playing at the same time, would draw a loud round of criticism. “What is going on,” he said to me during halftime of the first game of the double-header, when I accidentally played two commercials at the same time. “I need to know that you’ve got this. I’m on an island here and I can’t fix it from the gym.”
It wasn’t the first mistake I made (and very far from the last), but it stood out because it’s the first time someone’s ever questioned my aptitude for something as easy as pressing a button. I was determined to be better the next time.
After a couple of games on my own with Mike, who I had never met in person, I started to find a rhythm in working his games. When the sports producers would pick which broadcasters they wanted to work with, all of them shied away from Mike, because he demanded so much more than the others, who were content to call their games and go home. As the new guy, his games fell to me most nights.
Fast forward to the following fall, 2004. When it came time to assign producers to games, I was told I would be doing mostly not-Mike games. Mike wanted someone experienced to handle his calls of UW-Eau Claire football — the biggest local broadcasts our station did.
Instead, I slid over to do UW-Stout games on another Clear Channel station with a pair of laid-back broadcasters who only needed me to put the phone line on the air and click the button. They didn’t want scores, stats, or any help doing their games. “Relax, we got this. Take it easy, Jimbo.”
I felt discouraged at the time, and after several weeks of being stuck on games with friendly, gentle announcers, I was determined to get back on to doing Mike’s games. Finally, an opportunity arose: On an October Saturday, UW-Eau Claire was playing at UW-La Crosse in their annual locally-televised game with an early start time. That would allow the station to pick up a high school game in the afternoon with the broadcaster I normally did games with that year.
Needless to say, it was another very anxious moment.
A mostly mistake-free broadcast — with a seamless transition to high school coverage — did more than I realized for earning the trust of the station’s most veteran sports broadcaster and sports director. Suddenly, I was being tapped to do more UWEC games, playoff high school football, and other events with Mike.
It culminated with a week in December being asked to run his hockey broadcasts.
For those who don’t know, high school hockey on the radio is two hours of pure chaos. There’s barely time to play ads, much less catch your breath. But Mike was a pro’s pro. He had short ads recorded for when one of the teams iced the puck. The transition from play-by-play to ad was quick and happened with almost no build-up and with almost zero warning. Of all the things we did at WBIZ, hockey was the most challenging as a producer.
Being trusted to run the board for hockey was a huge first step in earning some trust with Mike, who I still hadn’t met in person after a year of working at Clear Channel.
After several hockey games in the span of a few weeks, I got a call from the Clear Channel office of Mike Sullivan. Thinking I messed up somehow, I came to the studios during the day — a rare event, as sports producers are almost never seen unless there’s a day Brewers game — ready to be told I wasn’t good enough to produce his games again.
Instead, Mike asked me to sit down, and in a pleasant, but serious tone, followed up some small talk by asking me a question I never in a million years thought he would ask me.
“Have you ever thought about doing play-by-play?”
I stammered out a response, something along the lines of, “Who, me? Why?” I’d never done anything on the air before.
I remember this part because it’s what effectively launched my media career into a more permanent space. Mike leaned back in his chair, took a breath, then sat forward, leaning towards me with his hands moving like he was coloring in spaces on a teleprompter.
“Look, I know we haven’t talked much outside of games. But I can tell even being on the other end of it. You’re not an idiot. You have gotten a lot better,” he said, drawing out the “lot” so loudly it rattled the window in his office.
“I think if you’re serious about wanting to work in radio, you should give it a shot. And don’t worry. I’ll be there to help you get started.”
A week later, I was tagging along to games, and a few weeks after that, he turned me loose. 14 months after I spammed the radio station with daily calls for six weeks to get a $5.15-per-hour job, I was carrying broadcast gear into Durand High School to call my first-ever game. Anxious doesn’t even begin to describe my experience that night, on my own with the training wheels off.
The other producers at the station said it was the “perfect” game for me to get started on. “I don’t think either team has won more than a couple games,” one of them told me. On my way out the door, I checked in with Mike to make sure he was sure he was ready to put me on a game.
“Did you prepare?”
“Yes,” I said, holding up a notebook page filled with notes and stats.
“Do you know where you are going?”
“I hope so,” I replied, holding up another set of papers with printed MapQuest directions.
“OK,” he said, going back to preparing for his own game. “Just remember, it’s the most important game you’ve ever done.”
I scoffed, and I said, “Well, it’s the only game I’ve ever done.”
Without looking up, he said, “Then it truly is the most important game you’ve ever done.”
He promised to review my game as I headed out. I didn’t think much of it then, that this game was the most important one. Why wouldn’t it be? At the time, I dismissed it as sarcasm.
After the game, I wasn’t surprised when there was a black cassette tape waiting for me at the station when I got back to Eau Claire to put the gear away. I was even less surprised that there was a piece of paper attached to it — after all, I had asked the producer (the same one who originally trained me) to record my first-ever game for me.
What was surprising was that the page was filled completely full, even in the margins, with timestamps and notes. Mike had the night off, but took the night to listen to my game and give me pointers for the next time out. I’m not exaggerating when I say he probably ran out of ink at some point because it was written in red, then black, and then red again.
Mike kept his word. He would be there for me. And he did not sugarcoat a single thing about my work, other than the acknowledgement at the top that I had never done a game solo before. But you know what part of the note stood out to me? The bolded, underlined part at the end.
“You got better as the game went along.”
It wasn’t talent holding me back. It was experience.
That cassette, by the way, still exists.
# # # # #
My first stint with WBIZ and WMEQ ended later that year. In 2005, after nearly two years of producing sports and even calling a handful of games, I took a radio job in Madison and enrolled at UW-Whitewater. For many young broadcasters, that’s the end of the chapter of being mentored by a veteran and then moving on to bigger things.
For me, it was the start of my education in sports broadcasting with Mike Sullivan.
Madison, 2005 to 2008: Staying in touch
Early in my career, I ended up taking a position further away from home. It was during this stretch that I worked on Wisconsin Badgers broadcasts and still managed to find excuses to call Mike to bug him about broadcasting (and life).
While I didn’t get to work with him on any broadcasts while I was out of Eau Claire for two and a half years, he would count me towards his “broadcasting alums” now working in other markets, from the Twin Cities to Las Vegas to Milwaukee.
What’s remarkable is that I had only really worked with Mike as a broadcaster for really only part of one sports season, but he treated me like I was his running buddy for years any time I talked to him. Any time I started having imposter syndrome, there was someone in my corner telling me I was good enough to do this.
It wasn’t a ton of phone calls or emails, but it was enough that in January 2008, when I was at a low point personally and professionally, after my network radio position was eliminated and I had left college, I could stay in the business: Mike said Eau Claire had an opening, but it was as entry level as it gets.
I produced one last day of syndicated radio on a mid-January Friday, with the hosts I worked with celebrating my short tenure on the program, and on the following Monday, I was back in northern Wisconsin handing out Mountain Dew from the back of the Z100 Hummer on a -10 degree day at a gas station in Cameron.
Eau Claire, 2008-2009: A clean slate and a fresh start
My career really began to take off once I returned to Eau Claire. I didn’t think it at the time standing outside of gas stations and shopping malls handing out pop to strangers, playing the fall guy to Z100’s morning show host, but coming home ended up being the catalyst that turned my fledgling part-time job into a full-time career.
Almost immediately, I was back doing sports broadcasts, but with the experience of dozens of Badgers network broadcasts under my belt, I had a fresh take on what our high school games should sound like. By the end of winter sports season — a turnaround of eight weeks — the expectations for each broadcast as a producer were changed significantly.
These changes were met with enthusiasm from Mike, who appreciated someone putting time and energy into transforming our sports broadcasts into something approaching professional. They were not met with the same gusto by the rest of the sports production staff, a few of whom opted to leave the station rather than put a little more effort into games.
By the summer of 2008, there were only three people working in the sports production department in Eau Claire, with a particularly fond memory of a night with four sports broadcasts happening and two of us available to run games, both of us standing in the hallway darting into a studio whenever one of the games would go to break.
This reinvigoration of broadcasts brought out a different side of Mike, at least to me. In my first stint, I rarely saw him. Now, I was in the building during regular hours, having regular office visits and going over our broadcasts. He had dreamed of having produced intros and liners for games, and was thrilled that we were starting to archive broadcasts after I had returned.
Another way we began to bond over broadcasts was that I was much more keen to detail. Our network broadcast promos were overhauled, and our local games had their own produced imaging as well. WBIZ and WMEQ began sounding like someone was actually at the wheel, a rarity in small-market corporate radio. As a result, the station’s management had me take over some administration of the two talk stations and help in decision-making.
By the fall, we had changed the entire sound of our broadcasts. Mike, a UW-Eau Claire Hall of Famer, was especially happy that I had completely taken over the sounds of Blugolds broadcasts. Our intros, rejoins, even a broadcast close were all music from the very large (and very good) Blugold Marching Band. Each game was recorded. Promos ran consistently. Highlights were in sports broadcasts and updates, and even sent along to Learfield, which distributed audio to major college networks. It resulted in the occasional Mike Sullivan highlight being used in a scoreboard during Badgers games.
Within a year of me returning, we had turned over all but two members of the sports production staff, added flair to our local coverage, and had nearly daily local sports talk show coverage on our stations after I started a one-hour show for afternoon drive. Along the way, Mike was my enabler, signing off on ideas and selling the segments that could be sold to help justify our coverage.
For my first seven years in broadcasting, I had worked with Mike for more than half of it. Most of it was behind-the-scenes, getting to do the occasional broadcast together but mostly me growing into a role that put me at the helm of pushing for more local sports coverage and getting the ear of management to do so. Now, our office had two people pounding the table to do more games in town, and with Mike calling sometimes six games a week and me hosting six days worth of talk shows while also producing some of those games, we had built something incredible in a short amount of time.
In just two years, the structure was in place. After my run in larger-market radio, I brought those ideas back with me to Eau Claire. We can do big-time radio right here was my belief. It was a shared vision with Mike, who was agreeable even to some of my weirdest ideas (let’s not talk about the promo campaign for the launch of my talk show). With the operations in place, the next challenge in my career was setting up in early 2010, when I was truly taken under Mike’s wing.
Eau Claire, 2010 to 2013: “Would you like to call some games?”
The winter of 2010 stands out to me for a number of reasons. I had helped put together a pretty amazing staff of producers in addition to two holdovers from previous regimes. Zach Finch, my former manager, was incredible in that he could easily do anything needed and never pushed back against the ideas I had brought back to WBIZ from my time in Madison.
The other mainstay, and easily the most dedicated sports producer I’ve ever worked with in my career, was Dan Price; when we still had someone running it live, Dan hadn’t missed a Sunday church broadcast in decades. There’s not a single person I’d trust to run one of my games more than Dan, and that’s true even as I write this. He won’t ever get his due with a Wisconsin Broadcasters Association award, he shies away from public recognition, and he is almost embarrassed any time I try to pump him up, but he’s one of one in his tier of sports broadcast professionals.
With an abundance of capable producers, and the games sounding more and more professional each time out, Mike had a different problem for me to solve as we headed for the meat of the winter sports season in 2010: Finding more sports broadcasters.
We were in his office, at the end of the building at 619 Cameron Street; he had his own room with a window, right by the exit and furthest from the entrance. Most days, you’d find him tapping away at the computer or on the phone. During the summer, during Philadelphia Phillies day games, you’d see him agonizing over live stat updates of those contests. You learned early on in meeting Mike that the only thing he was more passionate about than sports broadcasting was the Phillies, to the point I checked their game times to avoid calling or visiting him when they were in action.
Mike was a tall, but unimposing figure, because he would always say something to put you at ease and usually with a smile on his face. He was a guy who wore his emotions in his speech and tone — after all, he was a broadcaster. When he had to be, he could put on a face and voice to get you to sit up straight in a chair, but he almost always took a softer approach to managing people. That extended to his sales pitches, where he managed relationships and not client accounts. Most of our local sports sponsors were people he was buddies with.
In his later days in sales, with corporate antics squeezing out the smaller sports sponsors he spent decades cultivating, he would say his style shifted to ‘smile and dial’ in order to appease sales goals and pay for local sports coverage, but he never stopped doing that part of the job.
For this talk, he again had his familiar lean-back into his chair before coming forward and putting his elbows on his desk, animating his hands to help make his point. In this case, he was setting me up for something that I didn’t fully appreciate until years later.
“I know you’re doing a lot here, and I’m impressed,” he said. “I’m wondering if you’d like to do even more.”
I remember asking what he had in mind, thinking I was already doing quite a bit. I was working two other jobs at that point, and not making much at any one of them.
“You’re already doing the shows, which sound great, by the way,” he said, using the palms of his hand to point towards me. “And you’re the best producer I’ve gotten to work with in a long time.”
He paused, letting the compliment sink in.
“So, would you like to call some games?”
Again, this is a man whose passions are sports play-by-play and the Philadelphia Phillies. It was taboo to bug him when the Phillies were playing. The invitation was something he had given some thought to, after years of seeing me work in several other broadcast roles.
“Sure, I guess.” I have no idea what I actually said. I just know that I understated my enthusiasm for the idea during that conversation, because I had done it as a fill-in here and there, but never fully embraced the idea of becoming one of the folks that actually called games regularly given our stable of capable game-callers. As someone keeping the station’s schedule on track, though, it made sense for me to become more versatile.
As the winter sports season headed towards the postseason, “JAK” started appearing on the schedule more. That carried over into the spring and summer, where I infamously called part of a game during a visible tornado warning. Each time out, Mike would say the same thing: “It’s the most important game you’ve ever done.”
I never questioned it, and accepted it as perhaps something he did to help us get in the right mindset to call a game. He had shown me how to prep, where to go to find information, how to have courage to call a coach to get lineups ahead of time. The more I did games, the more I tuned it out. I had a job to do and it wasn’t possible to treat every game as important, right?
By the time winter rolled around, I was calling more games than producing. And in 2011, I wasn’t producing games at all. I had transitioned fully to on-air broadcaster, covering sports for the cluster, calling games, hosting and producing talk shows, and managing logs and imaging for the stations I worked on the most.
In the fall of 2011, Mike and I had taken the lead for WBIZ broadcasts: Mike stayed mostly with UW-Eau Claire, I called games for high school events. Several times, we did the games together. My role continued to expand through the 2012 and 2013 seasons, to the point I was helping select some of our coverage, calling to arrange venue setups, and learning how to repair and manage equipment.
On the top of our 2013 broadcast calendar in the WBIZ studio, we usually included a slightly snarky line about observations for the year. In 2010, it was a joke about new Star Wars movies. In 2012, commentary about the state of politics in America. For the 2013 calendar? “Still the most important games we’ve ever done.”
Yes, everyone who ever did a game under Sully had heard those words.
# # # # #
A little-known fact: WBIZ has a spreadsheet of every local and network sports broadcast going back to 1999. Thousands of games with the time, date, station, producer, and broadcasters. That helped tremendously in detailing this commentary, having over 25 years of broadcast details at my fingertips.
Eau Claire, 2014-2016: Succeeding a legend
40 years after starting in Eau Claire radio, Mike Sullivan likely made his biggest career mistake: Naming me his successor as the third sports director for WBIZ.
At first I thought it was a joke, because Mike would be sports director forever, I thought. But he was serious, and had been cutting back on the number of games he was doing to better manage his time and health.
“You’re ready,” he said. “You’ve been ready for a long time, but I didn’t want to let it go.”
Mike said that the time was right because he saw me as someone who cared about the work to cover local sports, and with a recent promotion to the cluster’s director of digital efforts, had full-time standing to help pay for the responsibilities of the title.
Of course, I agreed, and for the next year and a half, we got to do some pretty cool things. In one calendar year, we put 320 locally-originating broadcasts on the air. That season, the Minnesota Twins hosted the MLB All-Star Game, and Mike and I went as station reps. And, we had brought on board one of the absolute best play-by-play broadcasters I’ve ever gotten to work with, Pete Knutson.
At the same time, I was pushing forward professionally and personally. I had bought a house for the first time. I got engaged. I also began freelancing a bit, doing a state title football game for the station in Madison I worked at earlier in my career. My intent was to get better to serve Eau Claire better, but it led to something different.
In the spring of 2015, I got a text message from my former boss. They needed an executive producer for sports and news/talk. My work freelancing for their state title football game surprised him in that he had no idea I was able to do on-air work. A decade after I first started in Madison, I was strongly considering the offer.
I sat in Mike’s office, and he immediately knew what was going on. His intuition was one of his strongest traits, and he could read people like a book.
“So, Madison.”
“Yeah…” I replied, shrugging my shoulders. “I mean, it’s definitely tempting.”
“You’re not going to take it though, are you?”
“I dunno. It’s weird that it came up now. I only did a couple of games for them,” I said. I had also called into one of the news/talk shows to wish the host a happy birthday – the same host that had apparently begun pushing for the station to bring me back as I had run that show in my first run at WIBA.
“Well,” Mike said, leaning back into his chair, keeping eye contact with me. “It’s good to be wanted. It’s good to have options.”
Sully never advised me one way or another on a career-making decision. He didn’t lobby for me to stay or make me feel guilty for even considering the offer. After weeks of going back and forth on it, I returned to his office. With a deep breath, I stepped inside the door. Before I could say a word, I saw his shoulders sink. After a sigh, he gathered his words.
“I’m proud of you. And Madison is getting a good one. Don’t let them forget it.”
Mike was not a person that would make you feel guilty just to serve his own interested. He believed in me and believed I could carry the torch for high school sports in Eau Claire. I believed it too. For me, I saw a new challenge, and a chance to redeem myself after flaming out in my first stint in network radio.
A big factor, which I acknowledged in that meeting, was that Pete Knutson was on board, and he was a stronger broadcaster than I was. He also possessed the drive to deliver quality local coverage. So, we already had a successor in place. Without Pete being part of our crew, I probably would have opted to stay and preserve Mike’s nearly half-century legacy of local Eau Claire sports broadcast coverage. With Pete there, it was an easy handoff.
“It’s the most important thing you’ve ever done.”
# # # # #
That same year, Mike was inducted into the Wisconsin Broadcasters Hall of Fame. Mike has a lot of fans in the Chippewa Valley, and his inductions into various athletics hall of fames is proof of his impact.
In the same year I left WBIZ, a health scare took him off from his normal busy routine of play-by-play for a short time. The year after, UW-Eau Claire unceremoniously dropped Mike from their broadcasts. He never said anything, but I could tell that the situation had bothered him, because he spent decades crossing the country covering the Blugolds, calling some of their biggest moments in football, basketball, and hockey over the years.
Mike’s legacy is many things, and different things depending on whether you had worked with him or simply enjoyed his broadcasts. Above all else, Mike deeply cared about the work he did and the people he did it for. That’s why I know the move bugged him, and it’s a subject I didn’t bring up for several years, at least until I was tabbed as the newest voice for another WIAC program, UW-Platteville.
My life away from Eau Claire meant less time working daily with Mike, but unlike my first trip away from the Chippewa Valley, I now had a great friend to check in with any time I came home.
Mike Sullivan worked in almost every aspect of radio broadcasting from DJ to Station Manager during his 44-year career, but he is best known for his deep commitment to local news and sports in the Eau Claire market. His enthusiastic work on the air and behind the scenes was instrumental in the growth of sports radio broadcasting in Wisconsin. He called more than 3,600 local games in 30-plus states and, in 1992, turned WBIZ Radio in Eau Claire into the state’s first all-sports station. He also mentored many young announcers who went on to successful careers in other markets.
Sullivan attended Swarthmore College and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and he graduated from Brown Institute in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He broke into broadcasting in 1971 as an overnight disc jockey at WMKC-FM in Oshkosh and, in 1974, joined the Eau Claire stations of what is now iHeartMedia. He worked as part of a Marconi Award-winning morning-show team at WBIZ-FM, where he was on-air for approximately 6,000 shows. As a reporter, he won several awards for documentaries and spot news coverage.
– Wisconsin Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame entry for Mike Sullivan
Madison, 2016 to 2019: Occasional co-conspirator
My work took me to Madison (and eventually Milwaukee), which meant less time to be back home. However, I still got called to do some games for my former market, and sometimes, it meant a chance to work with Mike on a state broadcast.
While I was in Eau Claire, I never had a chance to call a hockey game. Mike’s passion was hockey coverage (he even created a historical website detailing the all-time history of Eau Claire high school hockey programs) and that would be the absolute last thing he would give up. However, his passion spilled over to me, and I took a zest for hockey calls to southern Wisconsin, resulting in several trips to the state tournament as a freelancer for stations in Beloit, Monroe, and Fond du Lac to call hockey games.
It became an annual tradition of sorts, where Mike and I would take in state hockey together. I would do color and run to get interviews, whether it was hockey, football, basketball, or baseball state tournaments. Anything Mike needed, even if it was a state quarterfinal at two in the morning, I was ready to do for the sake of getting a chance to work with him.
Mike’s advice to me never changed. “It’s the most important game you’ve ever done,” he’d tell me. Even though I was piling up WBA awards, he still took time to listen critically to my broadcasts. The feedback he’d give me kept helping me develop even though he had no obligation to my career any more. Mike was happy being the mentor.
In 2017, I was called to fill in to broadcast a Wisconsin women’s basketball game against La Salle. It was the first (and last) time that I was asked to call a Badgers game. Instead of my normal prep routine, I spent extra time making a spotter board, making sure that I got all the details right to execute the broadcast.
After the game, I was feeling great. I thought I nailed it. I was proud enough of it that I wanted to make sure I did a good job. So, I sent the game to Mike for an aircheck.
Mike pulls zero punches in an aircheck. He is direct, fair, and correct in how he assesses a broadcast. I usually sought him out for one or two games a year to make sure I was getting better, and he’d always have a list of notes for me to work on.
The email I got back from Mike was absolutely massive, which at first made my heart sink. But then I started reading some of the tips:
- Where is the ball on the court? On 3 different possessions in the game, the play wasn’t located
- Your player ID is still your weakness. Who has the ball? Who is moving on the screen?
- Verbiage – not enough different words in your vocabulary
There were more, but I plugged in my game and listened to it again to see if I could hear what he was hearing. It blew my mind how the things he could call out became incredibly obvious with his notes in hand. You don’t know what you don’t know, right? His skill to break down the technical elements of a broadcast and turn it into a learning experience is unmatched, at least as far as the people I’ve worked with.
Up until his retirement in 2019, I only got to work with Mike a couple of more times on a broadcast. One of his final broadcasts was Regis in the state football championship in 2019, a game that I called for the statewide radio network and Mike did with Pete for WBIZ. I invited him in for my pregame selfie, which he obliged with a chuckle. After one final hockey broadcast, Mike hung up the headset, and with it, a career that spanned nearly half a century in the Chippewa Valley.
Southern Wisconsin, 2020 to 2025: From mentor to friend
After the 2019 high school sports season, COVID-19 settled in and knocked out essentially an entire calendar year of regular coverage. Mike, in his post-retirement, was tough to coax out to come to games, according to my friends in broadcasting in Eau Claire. He did have the press box at Hobbs Ice Arena dedicated in his name, a fitting tribute for a man who provided the soundtrack to Eau Claire hockey for generations.
For me, our relationship had shifted over time from being focused on work to being focused on family. Mike was a fiercely loyal person who would talk glowingly about his wife and daughter whenever he had the chance. His wife worked at the radio station for a long time as well before corporate layoffs eliminated her position. Mike took the date from a desk calendar when it happened and tacked it up on his wall next to the clock in his office for the rest of his time at what is now iHeartMedia, which ended up being roughly a decade.
So yeah, Mike is a guy who you definitely wanted in your corner.
To be honest, I don’t know how many times he actually had to defend me and my work to management as I cut my teeth with the misadventures of hosting a daily talk show with no oversight. Or, the hours I poured into imaging and intros for our high school and college sports broadcasts, in an attempt to make our station sound in the moment. Anecdotally, I’ve heard from multiple people that he valued my work and made moves to keep me around. In an era of reduction-in-force, my best guess is he probably saved my job in radio multiple times.
The post-Sully broadcast days were peaceful, in a way, and chaotic in others. Mike had a few health issues, which meant I was checking in every month or two just to chat on the way home from a game. The chaos was in never knowing how things truly were, because he didn’t like to talk about himself very much, but the peace was in that he loved to talk about my role as a father and that he enjoyed following updates on my children on social media.
I would say 80% of our calls in the last few years have been focused on family. We’d talk shop of course — he still tuned into my games from time to time and offered pointers, but mostly encouragement. The first person I called after I accepted the offer to become the voice of UW-Platteville was Mike, and in true Mike Sullivan fashion, he started quizzing me on former coaches and players (and I failed the test miserably! But, it did motivate me to research all of the things I got wrong).
In the last several years, I also made a handful of trips to his house with the boys, including a visit six months ago. Mike hosted us for nearly an hour, happy to talk politics, sports, trading cards, and anything my kids would walk to him and ask him about. “Why do you have goldfish?” “Can I read some of your books?” “You’re tall! How did you get so tall?”
Normally, when I go home to the Chippewa Valley, especially with my kids in tow, it’s a highly-scheduled set of appearances to see family that I don’t otherwise see in a given year. The only exception I made was to work Mike into my stops, even though he lived away from my other family members. Even though the visits were short, the familiarity made each stop feel like we had just spent a few weeks in the office going over sports planning. No matter what, Mike was always Mike.
Nothing I said during these visits made him laugh or smile as much as seeing my kids peel several books from a stack in his living room to flip through, calling out things to Mike that they knew about. I gathered that having school-aged kids in his living room wasn’t a regular occurrence, and it had probably been some time since anyone tried racing plastic dump trucks across his driveway.
# # # # #
The influences Mike had on me in the past 22 years are evident in everything I do in broadcasting.
Any hockey broadcast I did, regardless of who I was doing it for, I opened up with “It’s hockey night at…” whatever venue I was in, the same way Mike opened hundreds of hockey broadcasts on WBIZ over the years.
Any young broadcaster I got to mentor through the WBA, through a college class, or through a DM on Twitter, my two key pieces of advice were always “treat each broadcast like it matters” (a paraphrase of Mike’s line) and “be yourself” (something I picked up from the late Van Edwards, a Madison radio legend who passed away earlier in April).
The most important part of my broadcasting job? The prep. I fell in love with building boards, finding nuggets, dropping random facts on the audience. Mike advocated for “finding that nugget” to keep listeners engaged. “They should always learn something from your prep,” he’d argue. Sometimes that nugget was playing six degrees of celebrity. Sometimes, it was a local tie-in. One time, he traced a player’s lineage to an 1800’s professional baseball player. The things he would find were unbelievable, but it was Mike, so you knew it was legit.
Mike’s keen attention to detail, the preparation process, and the work in the moments leading up to the call to focus his information into a funnel to put out over the airwaves is a sight to behold. You can’t fake caring about putting that much time into a broadcast, and he did the same thing whether it was the doldrums of mid-season games between struggling teams or the state championship.
The truly great people you meet in life are driven by something that doesn’t exist in most people. Mike’s passion was undeniable, and the effort he put in every single time out dared the people around him to match the work he was going to put in.
It’s not a mystery as to why we got along so well, even when we butted heads during my station management days in Eau Claire (two people chasing the same result through different means was usually the culprit). My personal identity as a broadcaster is that I am not going to be the most talented, but I will be the most prepared, and I will absolutely bring the energy to a call.
Sully had immense vocal talent, a rich vocabulary (he was an English major), and a smooth broadcasting style, but he never took those things for granted. What set him far, far apart was that he put the work in to be even better than that. He didn’t need to… but I don’t think you could coast on a career as long as his if you didn’t have the effort either.
What I lack in vocal talent and vocabulary, I make up for in being an expert on the teams I’m covering. Hours of prep, flash cards, even film study now that films are all over the internet have become a healthy, enjoyable routine.
Coaching sports is also adding loads of insight into my broadcasting work. I don’t think Mike ever tried coaching high school sports to get better at broadcasting, and I’m sure if he did, he would have succeeded. But my practical application method has paid off.
For Mike, it’s the result of carrying the motto “It’s the most important game you’ve ever done” into over 3,000 broadcasts. He believed in it, and eventually, got me to believe in it too. Especially for high school and college audiences, chances are someone new is listening that night, with the four-year turnover. How can we serve the listener or viewer? By treating it like it’s the most important game we’ve ever done.
It’s not an accident that I’ve also now carved out a decent chunk of time as a sports broadcaster — I’m not quite to Mike’s halfway point, but I’m still in it despite multiple layoffs, the challenges of freelancing, and declining opportunities for broadcasters in traditional media. There’s no way I could do it without “being like Mike” and becoming a nerd about the prep and process that goes into calling a game. Without Mike Sullivan, my career in media doesn’t exist. Period.
Signing off, one final time
My last phone call with Mike was just before his leukemia diagnosis. It was a short, otherwise unremarkable phone call. He had heard some of my recent work and commented that my energy was contagious. He lamented that the mics I use for UW-Platteville games couldn’t handle me, so my calls would get clipped sometimes. But he spent most of the call asking about my kids, and took a genuine interest in what they were up to.
He was not surprised to hear about their grades, their zest for learning, or their endless curiosity. Mike complimented me more on parenting and gave more earnest appreciation for my role as a dad more than he ever did about my broadcasting. And, maybe my broadcasting is just that poor in comparison to my kids, who are both pretty awesome. He never let me out of a conversation without telling me to enjoy time with my boys.
Perhaps the only time he ever criticized my parenting was when he learned that my boys are in over a half-dozen sports, but hockey wasn’t among them. Unfortunately, where I live, the closest hockey rink is nearly an hour away. To which Mike would shrug and tease, “I thought you liked road trips.” (For most of my WBIZ tenure, I volunteered to take the away games — a tradition I continued for several years after I left Eau Claire for games that came to southern Wisconsin).
The transition from tough broadcaster to work with to practically family didn’t happen overnight. For 22 years, we grew together, professionally and personally. Mike is a relatively private person and didn’t open up easily about the things that mattered, but he had little reservation with me, his polar opposite in that regard.
Mike’s legacy won’t be that he was a good, or even great, sports broadcaster. The Hall of Fame honors can tell you all about that. What Sully will be remembered for is that he genuinely, deeply cared about the work he did, the communities he served, and the people he worked with. Above all else, finding people who care is difficult, and there is no one who cared more than Mike.
That’s what is going to be hard for me to accept, that the roaring light of a person who cared, not just about me, but about everything he got involved in, has gone out. I didn’t grow up with many people who believed in me, and it took Mike a little time to find the potential in me too. But once he found it, he pushed me to be better than I had any business being.
It’s a common story that his former broadcasters share, and I would wager that all of them have some variation of this experience. If you cared about what you did, Mike would go out of his way to help you be better. We all got better because Sully saw things in us we couldn’t see ourselves.
I know this because for years I was adamant that I wouldn’t be a good parent, that I lacked structure, experience, or some other excuse. Mike dismissed it all and said if I put half as much work into kids as I do work, I’d be further ahead than most people. “You care, and that means you can’t fail,” he said in passing one day, hanging out in the WBIZ studio.
I made some joke about how it’s me, of course it can go wrong. He disagreed. “You’ll see.”
You can’t measure the impact a person has on someone else’s life with numbers. Quantifying what Mike has done for my career, my family, and at times, my sanity, is impossible. But I do know that of all of the people in my life since I turned 18, there hasn’t been anyone else that has done as much for me as Mike, with the obvious exceptions of my wife and children.
Even with this many words, I am leaving out so many stories and anecdotes that I could have used. It was another one of his lessons about broadcasting, in that you can over-prepare and only use 10% of your prep in a call. Telling the story of his impact on my career is telling the story of my career. It doesn’t exist without Sully.
It’s fitting that he said the same thing he’d used on his broadcasters for years each time they set out to do a game as the message he ended our last phone call with two months ago. I was on my way to my son’s basketball game that morning. It wasn’t a broadcast assignment. But it didn’t stop Mike from leaving me with a slightly-modified take on his familiar catchphrase.
“It’s the most important game you’ll ever watch.”
Imagine what could happen in the world if we could all approach everything we do with the mindset that it’s the most important game we’ve ever done.
Mike Sullivan’s family has started a GoFundMe to help pay for medical costs. You can contribute by going to this link.
WQOW: Broadcasting community remembers Mike Sullivan
WEAU: Mike Sullivan passes away at 75
Thank you, Mike.
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