It was little more than an hour before show time, and Gary Tanguay, the co-host of Fox Sports Net’s New England Sports Tonight, was surveying the Boston sports media scene, notoriously one of the toughest in America.

“When it comes to sports talk, there is no common sense, because if you applied common sense, it would be no fun,” he said. “It’s all about passion.”

Tanguay could have been talking about his own roundabout journey to Boston and Fox Sports New England.

Finding his voice

Growing up in Frye, a tiny town north of Mexico, Tanguay knew he wanted to be a broadcaster, and he knew where he wanted to broadcast.

“I did a book report in the eighth grade for Mrs. Farrell on being a disc jockey at a radio station,” he said. “My goal was always to work in Boston.”

His junior and senior years at Mexico High School (Class of 1982), he worked Saturday nights deejaying for WRUM in Rumford.

“I can remember playing opera on Saturday nights,” he said. “I used to drive my snowmobile to the tower so I could get the meter readings.”

He went on to earn a journalism/speech degree at the University of Maine in 1986 and worked as a disc jockey at Bangor’s WABI radio and interned briefly at WABI television. Not many opportunities to do sports play-by-play popped up because the station already had the likes of George Hale and Gary Thorne manning the mike, but Tanguay says the experience was invaluable.

“I tell a lot of kids that are coming out of college and going into broadcasting to get a job in Bangor or in Vermont or in New Hampshire or Iowa because you have to do a lot of different things and you do need to be versatile,” he said. “I got on the air in Maine, and I don’t care who you are, when you first start, you stink. But I was able to get a lot of air time, and it takes a while to get comfortable in front of a microphone.”

Stints at WIDE in Biddeford and then a New Hampshire AM station offered more play-by-play opportunities, but they weren’t paying the bills.

“I was 25 and all of my friends were making a lot more money than me,” he said.

The toy department

He went into sales for a bank design firm and also did some theater. A year into that, Boston radio station WEEI, then an all-news station, offered him a part-time job broadcasting on weekends. He kept the sales job and worked the weekend radio gig, but after a couple of years decided he had to cut back on his hours, so he left WEEI.

A couple of years later, an old friend at another Boston news station, WBZ, offered another weekend job.

“This time I said you know what, I think I’m going to work in this business again,”‘ Tanguay said. “When you get away from this business, it really opens your eyes to how great it is.

“When you work in the business world Monday through Friday and you go through that experience, you realize that when you work in sports, you’re really working in the toy department,” he added. “It’s a competitive business, don’t get me wrong, but I’m really in the toy department.”

Tanguay spent six years doing sports shows and reports at WBZ and also hosting a talk show for a Worcester station. He broke into television broadcasting at WLVI Channel 56 and worked at a couple of other TV stations in Boston and Rhode Island working as an anchor, reporter and play-by-play man before accepting an offer from FSN to co-host a show called the New England Sports Tonight.

“We had a regional news format for a year and then they decided to go this route,” said Tanguay, who married his wife, Randi, the same year he joined Fox. “The talk format is doing well.”

The level-headed one

Tanguay and co-host Greg Dickerson do at least two shows a night, at 6:30 and 10 p.m., five nights a week, with assorted guests from the Boston sports media and former and current athletes. The topical show usually focuses on Boston’s four major pro sports teams, the Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics and Bruins.

Dickerson serves as Tanguay’s foil on the show, or vice versa. Dickerson, who grew up in Boston, is more likely to reflect a city that tends to live and die by every win or loss. Tanguay is more even-keeled, if not optimistic.

“If we were alike, it wouldn’t work,” Tanguay said.

While Tanguay doesn’t shy away from criticism of Boston’s athletes and teams, he sometimes takes some ribbing on the show for his more reserved style.

“Some people have said that I’m too nice for this business, that I should be more negative, but whenever I try to be, it doesn’t work,” he said. “There’s a big difference between somebody that grew up in Boston, Mass., and somebody that grew up in Rumford, Maine, but I get that from my parents. You never heard them say a bad word about anybody and always respected somebody else’s opinion.”

His mother Bertha, passed away four years ago. His father, Noah, still lives in Rumford, as does his sister Marie and her family.

He lists covering the Boston College/Michigan NCAA hockey championship at the FleetCenter, the 1999 All-Star Game at Fenway Park and the 2000 Ryder Cup among his greatest thrills in broadcasting, but says the real moments where he has to pinch himself are when he’s working with athletes he grew up watching such as Rico Petrocelli and Tom Heinsohn or when he talks with his boyhood hero, John Havlicek.

He also gets a charge out of hearing from the people in his home state.

“It’s really cool when I get e-mails from Maine,” he said. “I definitely appreciate that. That means a lot.”

Maine isn’t too far off in Tanguay’s rearview mirror. He was here during Christmas and in the spring and hopes to make the journey up this month.

The trips to Maine always remind him of his roots in broadcasting, which he says he should consider more to maintain his perspective.

“When you’re in this business, you always want more,” he said. “I should look back more and say yeah, I’ve had some really good breaks,’ but you get caught up in it.”

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