WLW-AM personalities like to call Bob Trumpy the “father of Cincinnati sports talk,” but they forget to mention their station turned down Trumpy’s pitch to do a nightly sports talk show, forcing him to start his career at then-rival station WCKY-AM.
Trumpy, who died at age 80 Sunday, was drafted by the Bengals in the team’s first season and played 10 years in Cincinnati (1968-77). After that, he enjoyed a broadcasting career in Cincinnati radio and NBC Sports that ended with him receiving the Pete Rozelle Award for lifetime achievement in NFL broadcasting.
The Bengals announced Sunday morning that
Known for his strong opinions on radio and TV, Trumpy launched his broadcasting career by stubbornly believing in his idea for a Cincinnati local call-in sports talk show after WLW-AM general manager Charles Murdock turned him down.
“One off-season, I was driving in California and heard a radio sports talk show on the air with (NBA Hall of Famer) Bill Russell. Cincinnati had the Bengals, Reds, and (hockey) Stingers, and I thought: Wait a minute, this might work here,” Trumpy told me in 2014 when the Pro Football Hall of Fame announced the Rozelle Award.
“WLW-AM turned it down. Charlie Murdock said it wouldn’t work. I was crushed,” he said. “I never listened to WCKY-AM. But it was a 50,000-watt signal, and I needed a powerful station.”
Four years later, WLW-AM stole him from WCKY-AM, then the local CBS News affiliate. And people in 38 states at night could hear "Trump," as he was called decades before Donald Trump ran for president.
Trumpy's influence in Cincinnati radio can't be understated.
He created the blueprint still used today by Lance McAlister, Mo Egger, Tony Pike, Austin Elmore, Ken Broo, and all the others in between on WLW-AM or local airwaves: Cris Collinsworth, Andy MacWilliams, Bill Dennison, Andy Furman, Tom Gamble, Richard Skinner, Wayne Box Miller, Donn Burrows, Ken Anderson, Tim Lewis, and Jim LaBarbara, to name a few.
Trumpy — who started doing NFL games for NBC Sports in 1978, the year after he retired as a player — also was the pioneer who led the way from Cincinnati to network football TV gigs for Collinsworth, Dave Lapham, Anthony Munoz, Sam Wyche, Boomer Esiason, Solomon Wilcots, and others.
“Bob was very kind to recommend me to audition with NBC,” Lapham told me when we chatted before he was inducted into the Bengals Ring of Honor Oct. 26. “He reached out to his bosses and gave them a glowing recommendation.”
McAlister, the current host of WLW-AM’s Sports Talk, grew up listening to Trump.
“If you wanted to know what was going on, what he thought about it, and what you should think about it, you tuned into Sports Talk with Bob Trumpy at 6 p.m. As a former athlete, he had a voice and presence on the radio like no one before or since,” said McAlister, who once got Trumpy’s autograph during Bengals training camp at Wilmington College.
Born March 6, 1945, in Springfield, Illinois, Trumpy was drafted by the Bengals in the 12th round from the University of Utah. He was a four-time selection for the Pro Bowl and played in the 1970 All-Star team.
In 1976, while still playing for the Bengals, Trumpy started with a one-hour weekly show before WCKY-AM’s Monday Night Football broadcasts. It expanded to three nights a week in 1977, before he retired from the Bengals that year. In 1980, WLW-AM hired him away and his three-hour Sports Talk show on the Reds flagship station became the dominant sports show on the local airwaves.
By his own description, Trumpy made the conversion from former player to bona fide broadcaster when he criticized Bengals owner Paul Brown for firing head coach Bill “Tiger” Johnson after a 0-5 start in 1978. When Brown retired, he had promoted Johnson to head coach in 1976 over fellow Bengals assistant Bill Walsh.
Trumpy was so incensed that he broke a glass. He wrote his thoughts down, “pointing the finger at Paul Brown,” and went to talk to WCKY-AM manager Phil McDonald.
“I said, ‘I really don’t know what to do here. I’m an ex-player (for the Bengals).' And he said, ‘Well, we’ll find out if you’re an ex-Cincinnati Bengal or a true broadcaster.”
Trumpy broadcast his criticism of Brown. The next day he went to practice “and Paul Brown confronted me. His lecturing and finger-pointing lasted as long as practice did — 90 minutes,” he said.
For the rest of his career, Trumpy was known for his brutally candid comments on his talk shows and at NBC Sports. What I loved about Trumpy’s Sports Talk radio shows was that he always was a straight shooter. You always knew where he stood — and he didn’t change his opinion night by night, just to light up the phones, flip-flopping about Bengals and Reds players, coaches or owners — as other local sports talk hosts have done since then.
“He had opinions. Oh, did he ever. He was right. You were always wrong,” McAlister says.
I witnessed Trumpy being the total team player in the NBC booth during a Bengals playoff game in 1988, as the team was heading to the Super Bowl. He stood in a Riverfront Stadium TV booth and silently passed notes throughout the game to NBC analyst Merlin Olsen, who was doing the game with Dick Enberg. Viewers were never told that Trumpy was in the booth for the game.
After jumping to WLW-AM in 1980, he did the weeknight show for 10 years while continuing to do NFL games for NBC Sports. His most famous conversation with a WLW-AM call had nothing to do with sports. A suicidal woman called Sports Talk on Nov. 11, 1983, and Trumpy kept her on the line for two hours until police located her safely in Forest Park. Suicide prevention counselors praised Trumpy for his efforts,
Another part of Trumpy’s WLW-AM lore: He participated in Gary Burbank’s popular daily Sports or Consequences trivia show with listeners. When Burbank’s studio experts correctly answered a question, Trumpy led them in a chant, “We don’t, we don’t, we don’t mess around!”
Trumpy left WLW-AM in 1990, handing off Sports Talk to Cris Collinsworth, to work full-time for NBC. In 1992, NBC promoted Trumpy to be the No. 1 NFL analyst, working with Enberg.
“This has always been my goal. I always wanted to be considered the best,” he told me in 1992. Yet when the NFL announced the Roselle Award in 2014, he told me that “it never crossed my mind. A lot of guys have done a lot more than me.”
But NBC kept him busy. He was an NBC TV analyst for more than 20 years, and a network radio game analyst for another 10. In one two-year span, Trumpy and partner Don Criqui did 94 games on Sunday afternoon television and Monday night radio. “We did the Hall of Fame game, the Super Bowl, the Pro Bowl, AFC Championship, Hula Bowl, and the Orange Bowl," he recalled.
And he wasn’t just “a football guy” for NBC. He did the Olympics, golf, volleyball, weightlifting, boxing, and even sumo wrestling, he told me.
When he turned 65 in 2010, Trumpy retired from broadcasting so he could spend more time with his family and watch his grandchildren play sports.
In 2014, Trumpy revealed that he was one of the 18,000 retired players who sued the NFL over concussion-related brain injuries. “I don’t know if I have any effects of any concussion or not. For about 14 to 15 years, I’ve been a volunteer for a Duke University study,” he told me in July 2014.
For a few years, Trumpy co-hosted a Friday afternoon Bengals Pep Rally Show and The Roundtable Show with McAlister. “He’d peer at me over his glasses, and through the cloud of his chain-smoking, and condescendingly declare, ‘You have clearly never played the game!’ Oh, I loved those moments!” McAlister said.
McAlister said the defining moment in his relationship with Trumpy came about 22 years ago, when Lance’s son, Casey, was diagnosed with leukemia. “Trumpy was the first person that called me. He offered whatever we needed, however he could help, even offering to be a bone marrow donor,” he says. McAlister paid tribute to Trumpy in December 2018 when he did a 90-minute show with Trumpy reflecting on his career.
The Sunday morning:
"The Cincinnati Bengals mourn the passing of former tight end/wide receiver Bob Trumpy, who played for the team from its inaugural season in 1968 through '77. He passed away peacefully at the age of 80, at his home surrounded by family.
" 'I've known Bob since we started here and he had an extraordinary career as both a player and a broadcaster,' said Bengals president Mike Brown. 'He was an exceptional and rare tight end who could get downfield and split zone coverages. Speed was his hallmark. He was as fast as any wide receiver and was a deep threat. That was rare for a tight end then and it's rare now.
" 'As a broadcaster, he made his mark both locally and nationally, and excelled at sports other than football in a career that was as successful as what he accomplished on the field. He did it all very well and I regret his passing."
"Trumpy, a 12th-round draft pick out of the University of Utah in 1968, became an instrumental piece of the Bengals' early history. He scored the franchise's first ever receiving touchdown on a 58-yard catch on Sept. 15, 1968 against the Denver Broncos at Nippert Stadium. His 4600 career receiving yards, 35 career receiving TDs and 15.4 yards per reception each are the most by a tight end in Bengals history. He was selected to four Pro Bowls (1968-70, '73), also the most by a tight end in team history.
"Following his Bengals tenure, Trumpy went on to have a distinguished broadcasting career, most notably serving as an NFL color analyst for NBC Sports. He called four Super Bowls, three Olympic Games and three Ryder Cups. In 2014, he was presented the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award by the Pro Football Hall of Fame."
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