Champions do not become champions when they win the event but in the hours, weeks, months and years they spend preparing for it. In fact a victorious performance is really only the demonstration of championship character. Why then have we devolved into a performance business that puts so little emphasis on performance? It's the proverbial enigma wrapped in a riddle.

If it's happened once it's happened a thousand times while working in a cluster. Touching all the bases of music architecture, imaging, clock-management and marketing then on to talent coaching, the wall comes up. Fear, avoidance and pushback are to be expected in at least 50% of the talent we engage. George Johns once posited, "Screen and theater actors ask for coaching and readily accept it. Radio people almost never do. Which group holds the most impressive W-2's?"

Recently while trying to work with a marginal morning show producing marginal results, I ran into yet another case of someone who isn't funny off the air trying to be funny on his show. Hardly a fatal condition assuming a talent can hear his or her shortcoming and resolve to improve it. Instead this talent folded his arms, returned a menacing stare and went on the attack.

File it under "the best offense is a good pretense." Needless to say the dialog tailed off and another morning show entered the second act of a one-act play.

When radio's glory days were populated by a legion of greats like Bill Gardner, Ron Chapman, Dick Purtan, Bruce Bradley or Rick Dees there was a culture much like professional baseball. Larger-than-life icons at iconic stations set the standard with tiers of radio talent in the next concentric circles away. Mid-majors and smaller markets were the farm teams feeding talent toward the up-escalator. Not so today. The burning question asks why? After all it's really not crowded at the top because so few are willing to extract the time and pain to get there.

Consolidation, changing outlook, a decline in talent emphasis and inside the walls of cluster consolidation, an emerging notion that "we just don't have time," all lead us to a talent development crisis. Those who remain committed to staff coaching and station decorum widen the gap between themselves and tracked competitors or automaton jocks spewing killer clich�s.

In Madison for example, Pat O'Neill who for over 20 years has been out front as morning icon and PD for the venerable AC Magic 98 remains relentless with coaching nuances and the concept of doing the basics elegantly. At Saga, Steve Goldstein sustains the culture of personality emphasis across Saga's markets and formats. The Arch in St. Louis is brilliant musically, but Kevin Robinson works just as hard on non-music elements.

Sometime ago, George Johns and I were talking about today's talent coaching shortfall and the causations around it. "A station often sounds like its PD," said George. While too simplistic to singularly assign talent's current-state to PD's, it's also important to acknowledge PD's are at the vanguard of their station's atmospherics.

Talent development done-right is a never-ending commitment to being better today than yesterday, enveloped by a culture that establishes its value and never lets up.