Mike Francesa: My dating contest idea helped save ‘Mike and the Mad Dog’

Mike Francesa and Chris “Mad Dog” Russo were not initially a perfect match before sparking the sports radio industry, needing a little help from a search for love.

Francesa recalled the two needed a dating show gag to help save the “Mike and the Mad Dog” show in its early days on his podcast, “The Mike Francesa Podcast” on Thursday’s episode.

“We had a very rough start. It was exceedingly rough.” Francesa said. “I don’t think people understand how rough it was. It was really bad. It was not pretty. And we both fought it and we fought it tooth and nail. We did not want to be together. We did not want to work together. … It was a mess. It was being analyzed and criticized on a daily basis. It was getting enormous discussion in the morning and everywhere else in the media every day. It was a huge topic.

“But to me – and I give him credit for this because he had to allow this to happen – but I thought where the thing jelled for the first time and where I saw a light at the end of the tunnel was the contest that I created called ‘Dog Date Afternoon.’ It was my idea, and he went along with it,” he continued. “And it was a smash. It got a tremendous amount of attention. It got a tremendous amount of play. And he did a great job with it, he embraced it, which he didn’t have to do. And I thought that was the moment where it kind of went in the right direction.”

While Russo never found a soulmate through the segment, he eventually did on his own, marrying Jeanne Lavelle who he shares four children with.

At the time the buzz around the segment came mostly on WFAN’s morning show with Don Imus, who played into the silly segment as well.

Francesa and Russo went on to work 19 years together and dominate the afternoon drive ratings before the duo split in 2008. The pair recently reunited again on ESPN’s “First Take” show in February

Stephen A. Smith called the duo “two legends” and “pioneers in this business.”

Smith was a high school sports reporter for the New York Daily News in the early 1990s when he first heard the famous voices hit the radio.

Now, Smith has built a career on their style of sports talk debate.

Russo has his own channel on SiriusXM and is now a part of “First Take” weekly after recently signing a contract with ESPN while Francesa continues to put out his own podcast.