Radio station KTCK, the Ticket, celebrates its 25th anniversary this month in an all sports-talk format.
The station’s fans, known as P-1s, are some of the most loyal in the game.
Mike Rhyner, who was born and raised in Oak Cliff and graduated from Kimball High School, is a Ticket OG, starting with the station in 1994.
Rhyner co-hosts The Hardline afternoon drive-time show, and he’s been featured in the Advocate twice.
The first time, in 1999, he was on the cover of the Lakewood/East Dallas Advocate because he lived in that neighborhood at the time. See the cover and inside spread here. And read the interview here.
In that one, he admits to being an Aerosmith fan:
… not too long ago we were down at spring training with the Rangers and I picked up this biography of Aerosmith. I kind of thumbed through it and thought it would be pretty good. Well, I took it down there with me and was absolutely enthralled by it. It was them telling their own story. It was them, their wives, their crew, management, people around them. And it was no-holds barred. They really let it all hang out. It got me interested in them, and one day I mentioned on the air that I didn’t have any of their CDs. On that random mention, the next day a couple of Aerosmith CDs showed up in the mail. I started listening to them and I really, really like them.
And that it took him awhile to figure out his career path:
I was always kind of an underachiever when I was growing up. I didn’t have any clear-cut direction for a long time. I will say this, however, I was always very infatuated with radio. While my friends were watching, “My Mother, the Car,” I was listening to Russ Knight the “Weird Beard” on KLIF.
And that fellow Kimball Knight Stevie Ray Vaughan didn’t fit in with the high-school rock band they were in together:
Yep. He didn’t know any Beatles songs. We were a working band at the time. We had gigs coming up and we needed somebody fast. At the time, he must have been about 14 or so. We were starting to play in clubs and stuff. We had a tough enough time getting into clubs without dragging a 14 year-old in there!
Our second interview with Rhyner was for the Oak Cliff Advocate in 2012. In that one he talks about growing up in Polk Terrace:
It was about an idyllic a place to grow up as you can possibly imagine. It was all families. There wasn’t a whole lot that happened out there. It was like the Cleavers’ neighborhood, almost. It was really a great place to grow up, and that sounds kind of weird to some people nowadays.
And that on-air tensions and camaraderie are part of what keeps their show interesting:
We do this five days a week for all but three weeks out of the year. We’re around each other a lot, and it’s not impossible to make somebody a little bit crazy. Sometimes someone will catch onto something and keep going with it, and it can get under your skin. There’s not too much fake or staged going on in our show. Usually what you think you’re getting is what’s going on.
