Hopes for Minority-Owned Sports Radio Station Fizzle

Bailey could be intimidating when he wanted to be. In August, Lori-Lynn Baker, who had just hired on as a sales manager at the station, says she called a staff meeting with Bailey after several employees were ready to walk out because they hadn't been paid. She told him that he needed to address his employees' complaints in a fair and composed manner. Don't come down here, she told him, if you're going to be in a bad mood.

"I knew it was bad when he walked in with his hockey stick," she says.

Baker says that an animated Bailey ridiculed just about everyone in the room, pointing the stick at various staffers and lecturing them about why they needed to work harder if they wanted to get paid. After seeing one dejected employee slump in his chair, Baker decided she had enough, grabbed her laptop and walked out the door.

"I told him, 'I'm not doing this anymore. You're an ass. You are going to take this station down. You have no respect for anyone but yourself,'" she says. "I just went off. I couldn't watch it anymore."

Baker says that Bailey, still holding his hockey stick, stood in between her and the door and wouldn't move until another staff member told him to get out of her way. She promptly left the building.

Bailey denies the entire hockey stick incident, but several other employees corroborate Baker's account of a bizarre and charged meeting.

"Everyone was sitting in the conference room, he walks in with a hockey stick and basically says, 'I'll do what I'll do,'" Matthews says. "He got into one guy saying that he wasn't selling enough. When the guy said that his wife was uncomfortable with him selling to some businesses—it might have been a strip club or something—Bailey said, 'You're gutless and ball-less, and your wife is running the show here.'"

Bailey's former staff members don't understand how he was able to lease air time at a major-market station in the first place. But even though Bailey largely did freelance radio and writing before launching the sports radio station, he managed to attract several investors. One of those was Gene Jacobson, who loaned Bailey $40,000.

"I don't blame him; I'm over 21, I made the decision to do it," he says. "I felt the idea of having a minority-owned sports talk station in Dallas, Texas, was a good idea, and if I could help perpetuate it, I wanted to."

Bailey says that he plans to take out a loan to pay some staffers back. He's as disappointed as anyone, he says, but seemed alarmed at the anger directed toward him.

"I mean shit. I mean hell. I mean God. I mean wow," he says, after being read a series of complaints about his leadership style. "I wish I could have changed everything from day one, but you don't know the outcome until you get involved in the situation."