Before the internet, the age of cell phone apps, and instant access, the world was a very different place. And if you were a sports fan, oh boy, let me tell you, keeping track of your favorite teams, players and bets was almost a herculean task. Outside of the daily newspapers how would you get the information you so craved?

Well, from 1972 (really 1975) until 2000, you had Sports Phone; a telephone service that you could call to receive scores and information. The phone number, 976-1313, was so ingrained in people’s heads that, 24 years after it shut down, it’s still easily recitable for fans of a certain age. It was the lifeblood of an American sports fan.

But why am I telling you this? Well, two noted sports writers, Howie Karpin and Scott Orgera have written a book entitled, “976-1313 – How Sports Phone Launched Careers And Broke New Ground.” Karpin and Orgera did a lot of research and interviews to get this book from concept to publication, so we turned the tables on them and interviewed them about the project. 

So, first up, why did they choose to write this book now? It’s not like it’s the anniversary of anything, plus Sports Phone has been defunct for over two decades. So what gives? 

“Scott was the push behind it,” Karpin said when reached via phone call. “As we got into it with the interviews and stuff, it just seemed right. It really wasn’t a timing thing. People have been talking about doing a book for a long time. There’s been talk of a reunion and stuff like that. So, since I have authored other books and Scott has worked on books as well and we’re a good team, we just felt the time was right to try and do something with it.”

“I’ve worked with Howie for 30 years,” Orgera told me over the phone. “And I’ve worked with a bunch of other folks who also started out at Sports Phone. Over the years, I kept hearing all these great stories and the thing that really blew my mind was that most of the people who started there went on to become household names in broadcasting, writing or whatever it may be. So, over the years, I was just fascinated by the story in general, and as time went on, I just kept telling myself, ‘I think there’s enough for a book here.’ I started to put an outline together a few years back and once it was ready and I felt that it was solid enough, I approached Howie, because, other than being a good friend of mine, Howie had been at Sports Phone.”

“He was there for 12 years,” Orgera continued, “and we’d worked together on some other stuff in the past. I told him, ‘Look, I have this concept here. I have this outline in place, but I don’t wanna do it without you.’ I said, ‘So if you’re not interested, I get it.’ He’s written plenty of books. He’s a busy guy. I said, ‘If you’re not interested, I probably won’t go down this path.’ But he thankfully wanted to join forces and get this going. As far as the timeline and why now, it’s just something that I wanted to do for a very long time and it just kind of came together over the last couple of years. Last February, I was laid off from my other job, which was outside of sports — in tech — and I had some more time on my hands. Howie and I had already begun the book and we really just hit the ground running.”

Obviously, with a book of this caliber, there was a lot of work that went into it. Between interviews and research, it was no easy task to get it completed. But, along the way, Karpin and Orgera also uncovered some fun stories and facts that had perhaps been lost to time.

“As we went along, we found that a number of famous people were relying on it,” Karpin explained. “Obviously, we only saw call volume numbers when they would come in. We didn’t know who was calling. We knew gamblers called, but there were a lot of people out there who were not gamblers who were calling it just for information.”

“I’ll give you a little side story,” Karpin added. “Don La Greca applied for a job when I was still there. It was nothing personal and obviously, if I knew what I know now, I would’ve hired him. But I didn’t really have the room. When I’m a boss, I’m loyal to my guys. You work for me, I work for you. So if I brought Donnie in at that time, I would’ve had to cut back shifts for guys who were already working there, who needed the work and the money. Even though the money wasn’t great, it was still steady work. So I never hired Donnie at that time. Then, after I was gone, they hired Don La Greca and he took it over from ’92 or ’93 to the end in 2000.”

It all turned out okay for La Greca, who has since gone on to become a Co-Host on the popular sports talk radio show, “The Michael Kay Show,” and is also the backup play-by-play radio broadcaster for the New York Rangers. 

Now, as it turns out, Sports Phone was more than just a launching point for people’s careers. It was also a piece of evidence in a federal trial. But before we get into the story, don’t worry, it wasn’t a bad thing for the telephone service.

“One day I came across, it may have been the Brooklyn Eagle,” Orgera began. “I don’t recall, but it was an old Brooklyn newspaper. At the time, the Boston College Point Shaving Scandal had broken and those guys were on trial in New York since it was a federal case. There was kind of a throwaway paragraph at the end of a court dispatch from one of the days in 1981. Basically, all it said was the prosecution entered phone records into evidence today. Then the court reporter had a paragraph where it just listed a bunch of numbers and didn’t explain what they were. And there it was, 976-1313. I was like, ‘What does Sports Phone have to do with the Boston College Point Shaving Scandal? This doesn’t make any sense to me.’”

“So I started digging deeper and I couldn’t find anything,” Orgera continued. “I reached out to the prosecutor of the case who actually played himself in Goodfellas. He was in the movie and his name was Ed McDonald. I spoke to him for a couple of hours and he broke down the ties to Sports Phone and why Sports Phone was in the evidence. Those guys obviously were fixing games, so they were calling Sports Phone all the time to get game scores, but they were also a bunch of degenerate gamblers, so they were calling anyway. So a lot of the phone records that they used as evidence, there were a bunch of Sports Phone references in there and I thought that was cool. I wound up pursuing it further and we wound up getting an entire chapter out of it. Just the fact that they were calling Sports Phone was a pretty wild story.”

A wild story indeed. And just one of many in Karpin and Orgera’s new book. Of course, the book is more than just a collection of eyebrow-raising stories. It’s mainly a tome about how a telephone service launched the careers of many well-known sports media people. Television, radio, writing, it doesn’t matter. Sports Phone gave people a chance to get some entry-level experience in the sports world and many of today’s top talents are grateful for the opportunities they were given decades ago. 

Karpin and Orgera did an excellent job weaving stories and careers together into this long talked-about book and now you all can enjoy their hard work. We’d give you more of their stories but there’s no reason to spoil the book; so go check it out at 

. It’s also available via several other book carriers.