After a five-year absence, Thom Brennaman will return to a full-time broadcasting job on WLW-AM, the station that helped earn his father Marty a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Mike McConnell announced Thursday that Brennaman, who resigned his Cincinnati Reds TV job after making a homophobic slur five years ago, will take over the 5-9 a.m. weekday morning show Monday, April 7. McConnell retires Friday.
“I am so grateful. This station has been a part of my life for 51 years. This is a really, really good thing [for me],” Brennaman said Thursday on WLW after the announcement. The Brennaman family moved to Cincinnati from Virginia in 1974 when Marty was hired to be the Reds’ radio play-by-play announcer.
Starting Monday, Brennanan said he will “try a few things” on WLW-AM, but he “won’t re-invent the wheel” following in the footsteps of Jim Scott and McConnell.
Acknowledging that it “sounds corny,” Brennaman says he hopes his “personal journey” of the past five years to resume his broadcasting career will inspire “people who have screwed up really bad with the wife, their kids, or some way.”
Brennaman, 61, has been a frequent fill-in this year while McConnell used up his vacation time. But he pointed out that he worked at WLW-AM in the 1980s, doing morning sports for Jim Scott, after he was hired by WLWT-TV as a sports producer and reporter. His desk was near WEBN-FM sports reporter Dennis “Wildman” Walker.
“The first person I saw every morning was Wildman Walker,” he says.
Brennaman’s broadcasting comeback began last fall, when the CW network hired him as the main college football and basketball announcer for Atlantic Coast Conference games. He had reached out to fellow Ohio University alum Perry Sook, founder, chairman and CEO of Nexstar Media Group, the nation’s biggest TV station ownership group, which also owns a majority stake in the CW. That led to a phone call from Sean Compton, who oversees Nexstar’s networks. He’s the son of the late Dale “The Truckin’ Bozo” Sommers, the former WLW-AM overnight host, who started in the business at WLW-AM and knew all about Brennaman.
“The next thing you know,” Brennaman told me last August, “this [CW] 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 . . . It’s like, thank God!”
Until last fall, Brennaman hadn’t been seen on Cincinnati television regularly since uttering a homophobic slur at a Reds-Royals doubleheader Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2020. Coming out of a commercial break during the first game, Brennaman was heard telling someone about "the [deleted] capitols of the world" while broadcasting from Fox Sports (now FanDuel) studio in downtown Cincinnati. The remark was heard on the MLB.TV feed, but not by Reds' TV network viewers. He was removed from the second game during the fifth inning after apologizing to viewers for the gay slur in the first one. He was terminated by Fox Sports the next day.
“I’m just so excited and so grateful that there’s somebody out there who’s willing to give me another chance,” Brennaman said in August.
Before resuming his sportscasting career, he told me that he was too negative and critical on Reds TV in his final year. Here’s a link to my story, “Thom Brennaman returning to TV as a ‘more positive' broadcaster.”
The Anderson High School graduate will become only the sixth morning host on the 50,000-watt station in 50 years. He follows local radio legends “Morning Mayor” James Francis Patrick O’Neill (1967-81); Gary Burbank (1981-1984); Jim Scott (1984-96, 1997-2015); Bill Wills (1996-97); and McConnell (2015-2025).
Brennaman started his career on WLW-TV’s sports staff in the late 1980s as a sports producer, reporter and weekend sports anchor. He soon transitioned into the Reds TV booth, calling games with Johnny Bench, when Channel 5 held the Reds TV rights. He joined the Chicago Cubs broadcast team in 1990, and left in 1995 to help the expansion Arizona Diamondbacks build a radio/TV infrastructure. He came home in 2007 to work with his father on the Reds broadcast team.
Brennaman was among the first broadcasters hired when Fox Sports was created in 1994. He did Major League Baseball, NFL and college football and basketball games for Fox until his Reds “open mic” comment in 2020.
The 14-time Emmy Award winner has been named Ohio Sportscaster of the Year twice, and Arizona Sportscaster of the Year three times.
