For four long years, Thom Brennaman has pondered the last words he spoke on Reds TV before being removed from a telecast mid-game for uttering a homophobic slur. He told Bally Sports Ohio viewers:
“I don’t know if I’ll be putting on this headset again.”
Finally he will on Saturday. Brennaman resumes his TV network career doing play-by-play for the CW network’s prime-time Oregon State-Idaho State football game at 6:30 p.m., Saturday (Channel 12.2, CW).
“I’m just so excited and so grateful that there’s somebody out there who’s willing to give me another chance,” Brennaman tells me in a far-ranging interview. “I can’t believe when I get up in the morning that I’m now starting to get ready for a football game. I just can’t believe it.”
Brennaman, who turns 61 Sept. 12, admits he was too negative and critical on Reds TV in his final year. He considered leaving broadcasting and getting a 9-to-5 job. He found it “very emotional” pulling out his headphones and football players’ notation “boards” as he began his game preparation. And he says he’ll return to the airwaves with “a more positive” attitude.
“I think I became a little too negative on the team there towards the end (on Reds TV). I’ll be a more positive broadcaster,” he says. “I think my perspective is different. Maybe I lost along the way how fortunate I was to be in the positions I was in. And so I think I will certainly cherish that much, much more than perhaps I did back in 2020.”
Brennaman left the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2007 to join the Reds broadcasting team and work with his father, Marty, the Hall of Fame Reds radio play-by-play announcer. He was hired by WLWT-TV directly from Ohio University in 1986 as a sports producer with sports executive producer Rob Reichley, now the head of Raycom Sports in North Carolina.
An OU connection led to his comeback. Brennaman read an OU alumni magazine article about Perry Sook, the founder, chairman and CEO of Nexstar Media Group, the nation’s biggest TV station ownership group. So he “sent a random email to basically the corporate suggestion box” offering his services.
“I figured that he was never going to get it. But the next day I got an email back from him,” Brennaman says.
Then he got a phone call from Sean Compton, who oversees Nexstar’s networks (CW, Antenna TV, NewsNation and Chicago’s WGN TV/radio). Compton, the son of the late Dale “The Truckin’ Bozo” Sommers WLW-AM overnight host, started in the business at WLW-AM and knew all about Brennaman. Compton told him the CW was expanding its college football schedule this fall with the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) and two PAC 12 teams, Oregon State and Washington State. The ACC games are produced for the CW by Raycom Sports, where Reichley is senior vice president and executive producer.
“Hiring Thom was purely our decision,” Compton tells me, calling Brennaman a “first class” broadcaster.
Brennaman says: “The next thing you know this opportunity came along and I just can’t believe it. It was an act of God. If you look at all the different people involved to make this happen, starting with me looking at a magazine, to sending him an email, to Sean Compton being involved, and to Rob Reichley, it’s like, thank God!”
Here are more comments by Brennaman on:
BEING SO NEGATIVE ON REDS TV: “I think that was a fair criticism of my work near the end with the Reds. I just used to get so frustrated because I was a Reds fan, and I really wanted them to do well. I felt like there were some years when they had the talent to do well, and they just didn’t do it. I’d get frustrated just like a normal fan. The difference between me and them was that I was paid to talk about it on television. And so it came out, I think, at times (as) being negative. Whereas when I went to do an NFL game, or a college basketball or football game, I didn’t have a rooting interest in the game. I just did the game."
A POSITIVE BROADCASTER: “I’ll be a more positive broadcaster, finding the good rather than picking at the bad. I think that I’ll be different in that regard. I think what I’ve been through — and look, I didn’t lose a family member, I didn’t have my world fall apart and have to sell my house, I don’t have cancer — there are people who have real problems out there, compared to what I’ve gone through the last four years. And I wouldn’t for a second begin to compare that to people who are going through things like that. But it was tough."
NEVER PERFECT: “I was never a perfect broadcaster. I was never a perfect man in any ways. But I really felt like that for 30-plus years, I was never an employee where any of the people I worked for had to wake up and open the morning paper and read about their announcer said this or did that. And one moment in time changed all of that.”
ROB REICHLEY: “He got me on the air. The first time I ever did anything — ever! — on the air at Channel 5. When I was hired there after I left OU, I wasn’t hired to be on the air. I was hired as a weekend sports producer for J.D. Hayworth. Bill Hemmer was our intern. Jerry Springer was the main (news) anchor, Steve Physioc was the sports anchor and Andy Furman was the sports director.
“We did a 30-minute local sports show after the 11 o’clock news on Sunday night, and I helped produce it. During Bengals camp of the following year, in 1987, General Manager Tony Kiernan wanted me to start doing some stuff on the air, some reporting along with producing. So Rob and I drove up to Wilmington, Ohio, for Bengals training camp and I did a story about a long-shot defensive lineman. Rob shot the whole thing, helped me write the whole thing, and basically told me what to say in the standup. That was the first time I got on the air.
“We’ve stayed in contact all these years. We speak like once a month. Every time I’d go into Charlotte for NFL games we’d always find time to get together for a cup of coffee or lunch. I remember I had called Rob when the (CW-Raycom Sports) deal was announced a year ago, just to say, ‘Hey do you have anything available there?’ And he said he didn’t know because they had less than a month to put this football games together last season.“
CHATTERBOX SPORTS: “I gave serious consideration to looking at a 9-to-5 job. I really pondered a lot of different things. But this was in my blood. This is what I felt like I could still do. I kept faith … Trace Fowler at Chatterbox Sports in Hamilton was really the first guy to ever give me a chance to do anything, to do high school football.
“For two years I did a podcast show for them, a sports talk show Monday through Friday. Then I decided that doing five days a week was keeping me from getting another job. So I started doing a sports podcast with my son, Luke, who is a sophomore at Indiana University. That drops every Monday and Friday. Brian Belichick (Thom’s former Fox Sports analyst) is a regular as our NFL expert…
“The content has really continued to spread at Chatterbox. It’s phenomenal for a young startup company. They do all the Miami of Ohio women’s softball games, and Miami baseball games — just the home games — and they started high school football games again last week. They’ve got talk shows. Since they gave me that chance, there was no way now that I was going to turn around and say, ‘Now that I have a job, see ya later!’ I want to stay there and help them build the company.”
LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY: After resigning from the Reds broadcast team four years ago, Brennaman reached out to various LGBTQ+ organizations locally and nationally. Some became “very close friends,” he says.
“I still stay in contact with all of them. I’m just so indebted to all of them forever, for their grace and their forgiveness,” Brennaman says.
VERY EMOTIONAL: “It’s been very emotional getting ready for this first game. The last football game I did was in 2019. I had my wife and son last week come with me down to the basement where my football things were. I’ve actually thought about when I'd put on that headset again, because I still have that same headset at my house that I travel with because of a hearing deficiency. It’s a specially made headset. I hope the damn thing still works with the technology today! We’ll find out.”
GOD’S PLAN: “I kept faith. I told my wife the night it happened, ‘God’s got a plan here. We might not like it. I might not like it. I may not like the timing of it. But sooner or later, something is going to happen.’ And it’s been a long four years, don’t get me wrong, I mean a lot of dark days.
"Then you throw in the fact of the embarrassment you’ve done to other people in your life. My kids were playing in games and people would be yelling stuff from the stands at them, especially our son. My daughter would hear it in college. And my wife. And (the impact on) my dad, and the Brennaman name …
“And here we now have a chance to hopefully just move forward.”
