LaSalle's Tony Marinaro is bridging the two solitudes with French radio show

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Please don’t tell François Legault.

This week, former TSN 690 personality Tony Marinaro — an English-speaking Montrealer of Italian origins — made his debut as host of the mid-morning show on francophone radio station BPM Sports and Tuesday he spent more than 20 minutes interviewing, in French, Canadiens general manager Kent Hughes, who’s an anglophone. That’s right, two blokes speaking in their second language on French radio.

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Quick, call the police!

At one point, Hughes was talking about how he was reconstructing the Habs and he said he was engaged in “asset accumulation” and he told Marinaro he wasn’t sure how to say that phrase in the language of Lafleur.

Marinaro started laughing and told Hughes he also had no idea how to say it en français. It was just a classic Montreal moment circa 2024. It’s simply impossible to imagine in the ’70s or ’80s here that you’d have an anglo radio host interviewing an anglo guest on a French radio station. Very cool.

Marinaro accepted the offer to host on BPM Sports, which can be found at 91.9 FM in Montreal, because he felt maybe he was getting too comfortable.

“I’ve done radio in English, I’ve done collaborations on other people’s shows in French, and I’ve done podcasts in English,” Marinaro said in an interview this week in his podcast studio in the basement of his home in LaSalle. “And I thought, ‘I’ve never done my own French radio show’ and I started thinking, ‘how many people have crossed over in Quebec?’ … In sports, I don’t think it’s ever happened (that an anglo hosted a francophone radio show). I started thinking, ‘hey this is going to be really hard, this is going to be the biggest challenge of my professional career’ and that’s another reason why I wanted to do it. I just thought, if I tackle something so hard, something some people think I can’t do, I thought it would be a great message to my kids. If something is hard, don’t run away from it.”

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His French isn’t perfect, but then again neither is Hughes’s. But they both communicate perfectly well and Marinaro likes to speak in the slangy French of the streets, with more than a few English words thrown in. He even used his signature catchphrase “Is this a joke?” on Monday when he learned that the electricity had been cut to the station and that his first show began only on the web.

Marinaro grew up in a very English environment in LaSalle and he says that before he began doing radio hits in French, he spoke more Italian than French.

“Some people told me the francophones are not going to like you because you’re going to butcher their language and they take that seriously,” Marinaro said. “But history has shown me that every time I speak French, francophones tell me they appreciate the effort and they like me the way I am.”

That is the Marinaro style. Just do it and worry about the consequences later. He’s not afraid to make a fool of himself on air, like sing the American national anthem in its entirety in his off-key voice, which is exactly what he did this week on his new show.

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“I want to put on a show,” Marinaro said. “Lafleur was my first sports idol. He had that IT factor. And my next idol was Stéphane Richer. Lafleur and Richer inspired me to do things the way I do them. I like offence. I do my show on the offence. I don’t do my show on the defence.”

He’s a guy who first became known as “Tony from LaSalle” when he called in to Team 990 (the forerunner of TSN 690) and those calls eventually led to him hosting a post-game show after Habs games beginning in 2002. He was at first paid only with gift certificates, not money.

As he mentioned in his introduction to his first show on BPM this week, his idol growing up was legendary Montreal sports radio call-in host Ted Tevan and as a teenager he called Tevan’s show incessantly.

Marinaro said the executives from BPM Sports first approached him seven years ago to host a show on the station. But at the time he turned them down because “I was too attached to my listeners at TSN 690.” Marinaro was hosting the 10 a.m. show The Montreal Forum and he didn’t want to desert his loyal audience.

But then BPM came calling again in the spring of 2022 and this time, Marinaro was more open to the idea. He declined again, but the left the door open.

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By then, Marinaro’s independent podcast The Sick Podcast with Tony Marinaro was generating growing numbers, something that by all accounts the bosses at Bell Media, which owns TSN 690, didn’t like. By May of the same year, the conflict came to a head and Marinaro quit his job.

Chris Bury — director of news and information programming at CTV, CJAD and TSN 690 — did not return a request for comment by press time.

“I woke up that day not feeling well and I tapped my wife on the shoulder and said — ‘That’s it, I’m quitting the radio station,’ ” Marinaro said. “And she said — ‘What? The podcast is just getting set up.’ And I said — ‘I just think this is the right thing to do.’ ”

Within days, both BPM and TV network TVA Sports came calling with offers and by that fall, he was doing a segment every morning on Jean-Charles Lajoie’s BPM show and doing a hit each evening with Lajoie on his TVA Sports show.

Marinaro loves the idea of bridging the two solitudes.

“I think sports brings people together,” Marinaro said. “There are some francos and anglos that are divided so if I can bring people together …”

bkelly@postmedia.com

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