If you’ve listened to Angelo Cataldi’s show recently, you’ll note that former Eagle Hollis Thomas has returned as a guest.

That seems cool on the surface. Hollis spent a long time at WIP, anchoring weekends with Angry Bob and doing a variety of weekday shifts and appearances as well. He had previously served as P.M. drive co-host during that short-lived Josh Innes + Spike Eskin + Tank era, which was about seven or eight years ago.

Problem is, Hollis and WIP had a really messy 2019 breakup. The story was convoluted and clunky but it centered around a conflict of interest based on Hollis’ involvement with The Green Legion, which is the Eagles fan and travel group run by Craig “Quimby” Chenosky. Hollis was doing appearances for Green Legion while also a part-time WIP employee, and then that devolved into a mess of scheduling issues and related discord. One of the key breaking points was when Hollis went on competitor radio station 93.3 WMMR to promote Green Legion.

When the split happened, Hollis went on the the Josh Innes podcast to tell his side of story, explaining that he doesn’t “give a fuck” about possible fallout because “I don’t work there no more.” He revealed that he was given an ultimatum to focus only on WIP or The Green Legion, and so he went with Green Legion. Hollis always defended his appearances on other shows because he was part-time with WIP, and not full-time, and therefore should be allowed to work side gigs, undeterred. The extra messy part is that there were threats of getting the labor union involved, while a racial discrimination lawsuit was also brought up. On background, WIP employees told us that Hollis had violated company internet policy and broken other station rules, though the company did not issue a statement about the breakup and co-workers decided to stay mum instead of respond in the public forum.

Long story short, the relationship between Hollis and the station looked to be damaged beyond repair. You fast forward a few years and Spike is now running WFAN in New York while Rod Lakin handles programming for WIP. I think it’s pretty safe to assume here that Angelo just brought back Hollis without running it by Lakin or Market Manager David Yadgaroff, perhaps believing that since Spike was out of the picture, everything was fine. But Lakin and Yadgaroff would never have approved this, right? They never would have green lighted a Hollis return considering how fucked up the split was back in 2019. It trended into personal and borderline-litigious territory.

The funny thing is that Angelo is retiring at the end of this year. He does whatever he wants, and management has historically backed off and let him do his thing. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, because Angelo’s show is a cash cow and it would be dumb to interfere. It’s plausible that Lakin wasn’t even aware of the Hollis vs. Spike saga, since he’s still relatively new to Audacy. But in this case, Angelo invites on a former employee who left on acrimonious terms, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this iteration of management steps in to shut it down. I’m pretty sure Hollis won’t be on the morning show again, but if he is, then that would be very interesting.

If you want to go back and listen to Tank tell his side of the story, the Innes podcast is still posted at this link.

disclaimer: I’ve done the Green Legion radio show and Hollis came on my CBS show several times back in the day

edit – a previous version of this story had two gross typos, but Russ found them for me