Ronald Allen "Ron" Flatter (born April 9, 1959 in San Rafael, Calif.) is an American and Australian radio broadcaster based in New York. He is currently a national news anchor for Fox News Radio in New York, and a sportscaster for Sport 927 in Melbourne, Australia. He was until September 2010 a radio sportscaster for WEPN, ESPN New York.
SI.com's Richard Deitsch listed Flatter as No. 8 on his Media Power Rankings for June/July 2010 in the Media Circus column.[1]
Recent assignments include the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, the 2002 Winter Olympics, and horse racing’s Triple Crown in the USA. ABC’s Brent Musburger has used Flatter as a radio writer, producer and on-air reporter.
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Growing up in Chico, California, Flatter became a part-time TV sports reporter at Chico’s KHSL shortly after his first assignment was calling and producing an NASL exhibition soccer match in March 1976 between the San Jose Earthquakes and Dallas Tornado when he was 16 years old.
He studied at Butte College and moved from KHSL to small-market radio and newspaper jobs in Utah, Arizona, and California. Most of these were sports assignments, but Flatter occasionally handled news stories as well.
In 1989, he got his first major-market job, working for the Pasadena Star-News, covering LA college, pro, and prep sports. He was then hired by KMPC radio in Los Angeles, which in those days broadcast the games of the Angels, the Los Angeles (now St. Louis) Rams, and UCLA.
In 1992 Flatter moved to Bristol, Connecticut to start work as a producer, production manager, and creative director in two separate stints with ESPN Radio Network (1992–95 and 1998–2004).
Flatter became an air personality at sports stations in Miami (1995–96) and Austin, Texas (1996–98).
Following a visit to Australia, he moved from the US to Melbourne to become Sport 927’s Editor of International Sport from 2004-07. He still contributes radio and Web features for Sport 927 from the States and his current travels.[2]
With his Australian work visa set to expire, Flatter returned to the States in early 2007 to began a career as a free-lance broadcaster and sportswriter in Manhattan.
In the same year, 1050 ESPN Radio, now WEPN (1050 AM, "ESPN New York") made Flatter its lead weekend anchor. In October 2009, he became the station’s weekday morning anchor, delivering local SportsCenter updates during the network’s Mike and Mike in the Morning program. In March 2010, Flatter was assigned to anchor updates within The Seth Everett Show, The Herd and McDonald & Tierney, an assignment that carried to the expiration of his contract in September 2010. In November 2010, Flatter was named one of the permanent anchors of Fox News Radio's national newscasts. His role at Fox will include reporting from the field for certain sports events that are considered worthy of attention within the network's regular newscasts. Flatter had served as a substitute anchor for the network since January 2008.
He has covered the Kentucky Derby since 2007 as a paddock reporter for ESPN Radio, which won an Eclipse Award for its 2009 broadcast.[3]
Flatter covered the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, both for ESPN Sports Radio in the US and Sport 927 in Australia.[4]
Additional Flatter assignments have included the Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles (1984), and Winter Olympics both in Salt Lake City (2002) and Vancouver (2010). In 2000, Flatter produced a baseball feature for ESPN Radio that went on to earn the network an RTNDA Edward R. Murrow Award for Use of Sound.
In 2011, he continues to get noticed in the media both in Australia and the United States, as an item in the Jan. 2, 2011 Melbourne Age mentioned Flatter's adventures getting to work through the Manhattan blizzard that week, writing: "Ron Flatter, a news anchor at [Fox News Radio] and sports correspondent for [Sport 927], found himself fighting Antarctic-like conditions on the way to work in Manhattan the last week."
Flatter has also been a contestant on the TV shows Scrabble, Wheel of Fortune, and The Weakest Link. Flatter won $80,500 on the latter, when his opponent failed to answer this question from host Anne Robinson: “What word for a machine that performs human tasks literally translates to the Czech term for `compulsory labor’?” The man answered “automaton,” but the correct response is robot.
Here's a Facebook clip of Flatter winning $80,500 on The Weakest Link (US).[5]
Flatter broke a story involving the examination of how one controversial cricket star delivers what would be the equivalent of a baseball pitch. This particular cricket story made headlines worldwide in November 2004, following a phone interview Flatter conducted with the Sri Lankan bowler Muttiah Muralitharan, who argued that three Australian players (Jason Gillespie, Brett Lee, and Glenn McGrath) most likely were regularly breaking soon-to-be updated rules against throwing. Cricket bowlers are not allowed to flex their elbows. If they do they are called for throwing - something Muralitharan has a reputation for doing. His point about the Aussies was that the speed of the game had advanced to such a point that the umpires’ naked eyes could no longer be trusted to accurately judge the rule, and that the electronic eye should be the game’s final arbiter in these cases.
The Australian Football Association of North America wrote about Flatter and the Muralitharan story, and mentions a story from the Herald Sun newspaper in Australia about Flatter's work.[6]