Fitzy is one of the loudest sports fans in New England, and he doesn’t technically exist. Nick Stevens built the character on stage in New York; YouTube took it from 300 views a video to 50,000, the Patriots hired him to host their rallies, and WEEI kept him on the air for seven years. Then, this spring, the radio job ended.

I wanted to know what it takes to build a business on a character, and what’s left when the job goes away. We get into his ESPN Dream Job run, riding a duck boat in the Super Bowl LIII parade, the on-air blowup with Ted Johnson he still won’t apologize for, and the night Tom Brady’s dad looked at him and said, “We’re not worthy.”

I asked for Nick. Fitzy showed up anyway.

Red Auerbach wouldn’t let her into the Celtics locker room. Shaquille O'Neal patted her on the head in front of a room full of reporters. A puck hit her in the shoulder the night she worked the Bruins PA mic. She’s still here, and she’s still not impressed with herself.

Jayme Parker has covered the Celtics, Red Sox, Bruins, and BC since the ’90s, from NESN’s Sports Desk to the sidelines, and became the first woman on the Bruins PA mic. Eight years ago she left NESN to create, produce, and host Outside the Fame, where athletes show her the parts of their lives nobody sees. This year she’s also teaching a grad class at Boston College.

I ask her about fighting her way into her first locker room, her friendship with Tim Wakefield, finding a sponsor for every single episode, and why she still does her research with a notebook and a pen.

Stay Wicked, Boston.

Anna Johannes won a Paralympic bronze medal for Team USA in 2012. Then she spent eight years in corporate marketing being told not to bring up her disability.

She was born without her left hand and forearm in Kyrgyzstan and adopted at two. She went on to win five golds at the 2011 Parapan American Games and a bronze at the 2012 London Paralympics. After swimming she worked in marketing at Speedo, Boston Children's Hospital, Porter Novelli and Interbrand. In 2025 she left to start On the One Hand, a disability storytelling consultancy, and she's now part of Culxtured, a media collective run by Paralympians.

The part I keep coming back to is how she sees media coverage of disabled athletes. She says it's usually about inspiration and charity, and she'd rather it be about the training and the competitiveness. In other words, cover them like athletes.

We also get into losing by hundredths of a second, why corporate inclusion work went quiet, and how a blind swimmer knows where the wall is.

Follow Anna on Instagram: @anna_f_johannes

Todd Angilly was pouring beers inside the Garden when eight Boston cops pulled him off the bar, threw a Bruins jacket over his uniform, and sent him out on the ice to sing the anthem with 15 minutes' notice.

Todd has been the Bruins' national anthem singer since 2019, following Rene Rancourt's 42-year run. Before that, he was an opera student who kept getting rejected, then a line cook at Fenway, then a probation officer. His day job is still helping people coming out of prison find work. We talk about the call-up, singing the first Red Sox game after 9/11, his dad's post-game phone calls, and why he insists it's never about him.

Stay Wicked Boston!

This week I sit down with Doug Smith, a guy from the South Shore who started out as a boxer, could barely skate, and still talked his way into a decade of minor league hockey as an enforcer. His job was simple and not at all easy: protect his teammates and drop the gloves when it counted.

Doug co-wrote Goon with Adam Frattasio, and that book became the 2011 cult-classic film, followed by a sequel. Since 1999 he's been a police officer in Hanson, which might be the only second career that makes more sense for him than the first.

We get into what it actually takes to fight for a living, what the movie got right and what it didn't, the physical toll nobody sees on the highlight reel, and why a guy known for his fists turns out to be one of the more thoughtful people I've had in the chair.

Doug also tells the story of donating a kidney to his co-author's brother, which says more about him than any fight ever could.

Stay Wicked Boston!

If you've watched the news in this city at any point in the last 20 years, you know the face and the voice. Mark Ockerbloom anchored at Boston 25 for 22 years and signed off this past May. That's 40 years in the business. He's still not sure "retired" is the right word for it.

I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did. Mark is a treasure to the City of Boston.

Kerry Kavanaugh anchors at Boston 25 News and leads their investigative unit. She's from Medford, went to BC, and got exactly one callback out of the 80-odd VHS resume tapes she mailed around the country — from a one-person bureau in Montana. She took it sight unseen.

We talk about the road back to Boston through Des Moines, Tampa and Atlanta, and about covering Sandy Hook and the Marathon bombing, which she says stay with you. She explains why she keeps pulling threads on stories most reporters file and forget, including a domestic violence job-protection loophole that still hasn't been closed. She also talks about going public with IVF in 2018 and a hysterectomy this past spring, and why she thinks women's health is still under-discussed. We finish on the shrinking of local news and what's lost when nobody's covering the town hall meeting.

Stay wicked, Boston.

What do you get when a hockey referee gets fired by the NHL after just one week and channels it into a 26-year stand-up comedy career? You get Mark Riley.

Mark is one of New England's most booked comedians, a former professional referee, screenwriter, and co-host of the podcast Chirping Zebras — hockey from a ref's perspective. In this episode we cover it all: his path from Curry College hockey to the NHL (briefly), why he thinks being American cost him the job, how a bad night at Nick's Comedy Stop — the night before his daughter was born — became a turning point, and why he believes youth sports specialization has become an epidemic.

We also get into Chirping Zebras, his unfinished book, his screenplay Penalty Box, and his rapid-fire takes on instant replay, hecklers, and showering with Zdeno Chara.

🎤 http://markrileycomedy.com | 🏒 http://chirpingzebras.com

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