FORD
By CHRIS HOBBS
HobbsDailyReport.com
LINCOLNTON – Former star football player Lanny Ford — who has worked in local sports since the early 2000s — has purchased WLON 1050 AM.
He is returning the weekly sports show SportsTalk to the airways on Saturday morning from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Over the previous three years, the show has aired on sportstalkguys.com, Facebook and the Tune-In app.
The show is hosted by David Keever, Mike Powell and Brett Keever and will broadcast on Saturdays on WLON as well as on 107.5 FM andon the TuneIn app and can be viewed live on YouTube at STG-Sports Talk Guys.
The crew for Sports Talk, an 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. broadcast on WLON (and other contact points) that returns to the airways on Saturday after the station was bought by Sports Talk Guys owner Lanny Ford. Background, Brett Keever; left to right: Mike Powell, David Keever.
Mike Powell, a former sports editor at The Lincoln Times News, has worked more than 40 years in sports journalism, David Keever has at least 30 years of doing the same and Keever’s son, Brett, has been working local sports for more than a decade.
SportsTalk has aired for nearly 20 years.
WLON will continue other sports talk shows, including The Bottom Line with Ford and co-hosts JuJu Phillips, Fore Rembert and Powell (online Monday through Friday with a recorded version on WLON at 6 p.m). Archived shows are also available on YouTube.
Phillips, a former wide receiver at Lenoir-Rhyne University, has been a part of local sports media for more than 40 years and perhaps is best known in his roles of broadcasting LRU football.
Ford was one of the state’s top prep football players while at West Lincoln (1977 was his final season). He played for the West in the annual East-West All-Star game and was the Rebels’ first Shrine Bowl player.
He signed to play at Clemson but his career was cut short by an injury.
Ford owns Sports Talk Guys, LLC and his own t-shirt company, Tiger Man Tees.
Before those ventures, he was a high school teacher and coach. He worked as a football assistant coach at West Lincoln (twice) and Bunker Hill – 10 of those years at his alma mater – and spent two years as head coach at Highland Tech, starting its football program in 2000.
Ford left coaching before the 2002 season and has been a broadcaster, reporter and had other media roles since then.
