Black-owned Sports Rap Radio in Detroit pulls plug less than 3 months after launching

Less than 90 days after its launch, Detroit-based Sports Rap Radio , touted as the nation’s first sports-talk radio station completely owned by and featuring African American talent, has come to an end — for now.

Rob Parker, a well-known sports radio host with roots in Detroit, launched Sports Rap Radio in early June, with the goal of adding Black voices at a time when local sports radio is dominated by white hosts.

But the station, which was leased for two years from Audacy, ran out of funding just before the college and professional football seasons started, Parker tells Metro Times .

“I’m very disappointed, and I really believed in the idea and concept and wanted this to work and be the blueprint starting in Detroit,” Parker says. “And we just didn’t get our second round of funding, which put us in peril. And it wasn’t a lack of support or advertising. It wasn’t any of that. We had advertising, and we had support. But funding is so huge, and it just didn’t happen for us.”

Sports Rap Radio went off the air earlier this week.

But Parker isn’t giving up on his vision.

“While this didn’t fully work the first time around, this format will be viable and will be a part of the radio landscape sooner rather than later,” Parker says. “I still believe in it, and I know that it’s doable.”

Parker says he’s proud of what they started.

“The one thing that can’t be taken away from Sports Rap Radio is, we were the first all Black-owned, all-Black sports talk radio station in the country, and I will always be proud of that,” he says. “They can’t take that from us. We did it.”

Parker co-owned the station with his longtime friend Dave Kenney and two notable names familiar to Detroit sports fans: B.J. Armstrong, a Brother Rice alum and three-time NBA champion who hosted the station’s midday shift, and Maurice “Moe” Ways, a former Detroit Country Day standout and University of Michigan wide receiver who credits Parker as a mentor since high school.

Sports Rap Radio featured such shows as The Pitbulls , What Up Doe Morning Show , and The Bad Boys .

Despite Parker’s New York roots and prominent national media presence as co-host of The Odd Couple on Fox Sports Radio and work for ESPN, FS1, and other outlets, he has strong ties to the Motor City. Parker made history as the first Black sports columnist at The Detroit Free Press , worked at The Detroit News , Channels 4 and 7, and in 1994 became the first on-air voice for then-sports WDFN-AM. Parker also founded the Sporty Cutz barber shop on West Seven Mile Road.

In May, Parker told Metro Times that Sports Rap Radio was his new passion .

“I’ve had this idea for a while,” he said at the time. “It’s important to the city and the culture. Four years ago, the sports station in town had NO Black hosts in a city that’s 80% Black. That had to change.” (And it has, with the addition of Rico Beard on 97.1 FM, The Ticket.)

The station ended about a year after 910AM Superstation, a predominately Black talk radio station , pulled the plug on its format. The white millionaire owner switched the format to conservative talk radio .

In one of the biggest Black-majority cities in the U.S., radio continues to be dominated by white voices.