DATE: Wednesday, April 30, 1997             TAG: 9704300736

SECTION: SPORTS                  PAGE: C6   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY ED MILLER, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   43 lines

DISMISSED PROGRAM DIRECTOR MISSES WGH MEDHURST DISPUTES PHILOSOPHICAL-DIFFERENCE CLAIM.

Pete Medhurst, a jack-of-all-trades if there ever was one, is spending a lot of time at the track lately. He owns shares of four racehorses.

He's also umpiring softball games, looking for work and renewing old acquaintances in his hometown of Shadyside, Md., 15 miles south of Annapolis.

Pleasant as that is, Medhurst would rather be doing what he had been doing for nearly two years, until he was fired two weeks ago: working in Hampton Roads as program director for all-sports radio station WGH-AM. ``I loved working there,'' he said. ``I liked what I was doing. I'd come back in a heartbeat.''

Medhurst, 27, was fired because of ``philosophical'' differences with management, according to station general manager Bill Whitlow.

Medhurst disputes that characterization. ``When it comes to the term `philosophical differences,' that's absolute crap,'' he said. ``We never had any problems in my two years there.''

Sources at the station and close to the station, however, said management had several problems with Medhurst:

Hired as a full-time program director, an administrative job, Medhurst almost immediately put himself on the air. Soon he was co-hosting a talk show and doing play-by-play on local sports events.

Some of the station's paperwork allegedly lagged. Advertisers were not sent affidavits certifying that their ads had run. Bills were unpaid. An ESPN contract was never signed and returned.

``Nobody ever told me I wasn't supposed to be on the air, and there was no displeasure with my paperwork,'' he said.

Medhurst said he did get criticism for some of his programming moves, particularly to carry Virginia Wesleyan basketball and Hampton University football.

For Medhurst, the final straw may have come when he knocked a microphone from its clip during a morning show and damaged some equipment on the production board. Medhurst conceded that he was angry and pushed the microphone aside, but said it slipped off the clip and that ``what happened to the board needed to be fixed anyway.''

He said Whitlow ``brought that up as an incident'' when he fired Medhurst.

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