CINDY WOLFF, The Commercial Appeal
MEMPHIS – When Rock 103 morning radio personality John “Bad Dog” McCormack found out he had leukemia, he treated it like any other news.
He talked about it on the radio.
Amid the chatter with co-host Ric Chetter about topics not suitable for a family newspaper, listeners learned about his chemotherapy, how his hair fell out quickly, like the pine needles on the Charlie Brown Christmas tree.
“I argued that he should wait and tell people after he and his family had time to process it,” said his former on-air partner Bev Hart. “He literally plunged into it and didn’t hold anything back from the listeners.”
McCormack has worked that time slot for 22 years and is one of the most well-known DJs locally. Nineteen of those were with the Wake-Up Crew, which included Tim Spencer, who is now McCormack’s boss, and Hart.
Friends noticed in October that he didn’t look good. They hounded him to go to the doctor, said childhood friend Rocky Kasaftes, owner of Alex’s Tavern.
“You could just tell that something wasn’t right with him,” Kasaftes said. “I was worried.”
Chetter thought it was one of McCormack’s infamous Twilight Phone pranks, when McCormack called to tell his on-air partner he had cancer.
“We went back and forth until he finally told me to call our boss,” Chetter said. “I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach.
Friends’ descriptions of McCormack are nothing like the “Bad Dog” persona he’s created on the morning radio, where the conversation often is tawdry, profane and incendiary. He and Chetter are featured on a billboard dressed in vestments with the word “Irreverend.”
While he’s acerbic and irreverent on the air, friends say he’s gentle, kind and religious off the air.
“We often had philosophical discussions about balancing our work on a rock station with being a good person of good character,” Hart said. “The ‘Bad Dog’ persona is part of John, that’s not the sum of John.”
McCormack explains it: “God has a sense of humor.”
He was off the air for more than a month in October and November while he was hospitalized at Methodist Le Bonheur Germantown.
He worked remotely from his Germantown home in December, until doctors found a tumor on his kidney. He went back to the hospital for surgery, where they were able to completely remove the tumor from his kidney. His leukemia is in remission, but in early January he was back in the hospital for a second round of chemo, an insurance dose, he said.
McCormack took his broadcast equipment with him and participated in the show from there.
The 54-year-old held his hand over the headset microphone when he coughed. His IV pole alarm blended into the show’s off-the-cuff banter.
One morning, he fell asleep.
Chetter did the only thing a comedy team could do in a situation like that, McCormack said.
“He kept coming back to me snoring. He recorded it, too, so he can use it down the road. I was asleep for like 15 minutes,” he said.
He also hosts the annual Ronald McDonald House Radiothon, which he doesn’t plan to miss this year.
McCormack used to interview the children with bald heads and frightened eyes, and listen to their stories.
Now he understands.
He knows what it’s like to have chemotherapy make you too weak to get out of bed, to have your stomach constantly upset.
“When I see what they are going through, I have no reason to complain,” McCormack said. “They are so young and have so much pain. I’ve lived a blessed life. If I died tomorrow, I’d go with a smile on my face.”