Thom Brennaman is back, and he is starting in Corvallis

Sports

Aug 22

Updated 8/22/2024 4:35 PM

Nobody will be happier to be at Reser Stadium on Aug. 31 for Oregon State’s season opener against Idaho State than Thom Brennaman.

Brennaman — one of the truly great sports play-by-play men of this era — will be in the press box calling the game along with analyst Max Browne for the network CW, which will carry some Pac-12 games this season.

The CW Sports Division started in 2023 with its acquisition of LIV Golf. It currently airs NASCAR, WWE, an “Inside the NFL” studio show and ACC football and basketball. The network will televise 11 Oregon State and Washington State games that will be produced by the remaining staff of the Pac-12 Network. Plans are to also add a college football studio show.

This will be the first major assignment for Brennaman since Aug. 19, 2020, when a hot mic caught the veteran broadcaster using a gay slur during a Fox Sports Ohio broadcast of a game between the Cincinnati Reds and the Kansas City Royals. Brennaman was suspended by the Reds indefinitely and forced to resign, lost a national gig doing the NFL with Fox Sports and has basically been in exile since then. Until now. The veteran broadcaster has been signed to call Pac-12 and ACC football and basketball this season.

“I am so grateful,” Brennaman told me in a recent phone interview from his home in Cincinnati. “To some people, that might sound trivial. When you haven’t worked for four years and haven’t had a chance to do what you had done for 31 years … well, of course I feel that way.

“I am extremely grateful to the people in charge at the CW who are giving me this opportunity. It had to be checked out all the way down the road. The Pac-12 people had to sign off. Raycom (Media, which produces the games) and the ACC office, too. There is a part of me that can’t believe it’s happening. I can’t wait to get out to Corvallis and do this first game.”

Brennaman, who turns 61 on Sept. 12, knows only the first four weeks of his broadcast schedule. After the game in Corvallis, Brennaman has Marshall at Virginia Tech, Ole Miss at Wake Forest and TCU vs. SMU in Dallas.

“I am excited about that one because I have a daughter in school at TCU,” he says.

Brennaman has never been to the state of Oregon.

“I haven’t taken the time to figure out how many states I haven’t been to — it can’t be more than 10 — but Oregon is one of them,” he says. “ I was in the gym today getting some exercise and a guy was asking me about my first game. When I told him it was in Corvallis, he said, ‘Man, that’s some of the most beautiful country you’ve ever seen.’ I love the outdoors. Can’t wait to get out there and see it for myself.”

Brennaman has been trying to familiarize himself with the “Pac-2” and the programs at Oregon State and Washington State.

“I am trying to learn a lot,” he says. “Where I live, with schools like Ohio State, Kentucky, Louisville and Cincinnati nearby, it’s all Big Ten, SEC, ACC and the Big 12.

“The sports information guys at Oregon State have just been phenomenal. I can’t say enough nice things about them. I have asked them to go beyond what a normal guy would do because I want to make sure I know what I am talking about. I have tried to cram it in hard. We are getting closer to being ready, I hope.”

Brennaman has called Major League Baseball for 31 years with the Reds, Chicago Cubs and Arizona Diamondbacks. CW Sports will carry some Oregon State baseball games next spring. Is it possible Brennaman will do some of those games for the network?

“I will do whatever they ask me to do,” he says. “These guys are giving me this opportunity. I would like to be with them for a long time. I hope it is the last company I ever work for.”

The management team at CW is happy to have him.

“It has become clear that Thom has taken full responsibility for his actions,” CW president Dennis Miller says.

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Brennaman is the son of Marty Brennaman, who worked 45 years calling games on the Reds network. The senior Brennaman, who retired in 2019, was inducted into the broadcasters wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2000. He is also a member of the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame, the National Radio Hall of Fame and the Reds Hall Of Fame.

“It was pretty cool,” Thom Brennaman says. “Most kids dream about doing a lot of the things I got to do. When Dad first got the Reds job, we went to spring training in Tampa, where the Reds trained at the time. The first four people I got to meet were Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Joe Morgan and Tony Perez.

“As fate would have it, many years later, I was announcing the Reds games on television with Johnny, and Pete was the manager. We (Thom and younger sister Dawn) were very fortunate, very blessed.”

Thom stresses that his childhood wasn’t perfect. His parents divorced when he was 13 and Dawn was 12.

“I lived with my mom, but my dad never lived more than two miles away,” Thom says. “Divorces can be rough on kids, especially at the ages my sister and I were. But Dad was always there if we needed him, that’s for sure, and still is to this day.”

Thom didn’t have designs on following in his father’s footsteps into broadcasting.

“Not at all,” he says. “After my freshman year in college at Ohio University, I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do.”

Listening to a sports radio broadcast while driving his car that summer, “I thought, ‘Maybe I ought to look into doing something with sportscasting,’ ” he says.

Brennaman quickly got a job with a radio station in Athens, Ohio, the home of Ohio U and also a Reds radio affiliate.

“I actually got paid, which was great,” he says. “I wasn’t on the air for a while. Then I did some DJing for a couple of years.”

In 1985, the station began to carry Ohio U women’s basketball. Brennaman got the job calling those games. After one season, he took a position as a sports reporter/anchor for a television station in Cincinnati. Within two years, Brennaman had worked his way onto the Reds TV broadcast crew alongside Bench as analyst.

Marty Brennaman was already a fixture of the radio side with the Reds by then. Was it a dream for Thom to one day work on the same broadcast crew as his father?

“It never entered my mind when I first started,” he says. “Once I got a chance to start doing games for the Reds (in 1988), I thought, ‘Maybe we will get a chance to do something one day.’ ”

But Brennaman got hired to call TV games for the Chicago Cubs on SuperStation WGN in 1990.

“Then I thought, ‘No chance it’s going to happen now,’ ” Thom says.

But a strike stopped baseball in its tracks in 1994. When play ensued later that season, MLB had joined with ABC and NBC to start “The Baseball Network,” which aired games in prime time for the rest of the season and all of 1995.

“The Reds were playing the Cubs one night in ’95, and the people running ‘The Baseball Network’ thought it would be cool if these two guys (the Brennamans) did a game together,” Thom says. “So we did.”

Thom worked six seasons with the Cubs, alternating with the great Harry Caray calling play-by-play on TV and radio. What was that like?

“It was the most extraordinary six years of my broadcasting and personal life,” Brennaman says.

Soon after he was hired by the Cubs, Thom’s grandfather died.

“I was really close to him,” Thom says. “Somehow over the course of spring training in 1990, I must have shared that with Harry, and that I was sad about it. And it was like Harry took it upon himself to take me under his wing.

“His grandson Chip was (calling Mariner games) in Seattle at the time and son Skip was (calling Braves games) in Atlanta. Harry had no family around in Chicago except his wife. I basically became his sidekick for six years on the road.”

Caray had friends who owned restaurants and bars in nearly every National League city. Many of them would keep their businesses open for him after games.

“One time we were in San Diego, and Harry says, ‘All right, Thommy, after the game we are going out to La Jolla,’ ” Brennaman says. “That was a night to remember, but it would be like that on half the nights of a road trip. We would sit there and eat and drink until 2:30 in the morning. I was single, in my late 20s. It was unbelievable how much fun we had.”

By the time Brennaman got to Chicago in 1990, Caray was Cubs royalty.

“On the road, they gave Harry 24/7 access to a limo,” Brennaman says. “After a game ended, I would do the radio post-game show for about 20 minutes. Harry would go downstairs, sit in the limo and have a cocktail or two waiting on me. By the time I got down there, he was really ready to roll.

“I am so grateful that I worked at that time with him. Boy, we had a ball.”

Caray was unafraid to criticize the home team when called for. So were many of his contemporaries around the league. Today’s broadcasters are de facto cheerleaders to the point where it can be embarrassing.

“The shame of it is, (executives for) professional sports teams don’t want anybody on their local broadcasts who is going to ruffle some feathers,” Thom says. “There is no way Marty Brennaman or Harry Caray — I could go right down the line with some of the greatest announcers of all-time — would ever be hired today.

“Think about the Cubs fan experience when Harry was alive. He was a great broadcaster for the Cardinals, too. My dad had 47 years with the Reds. They weren’t afraid to tell it like it is. There were other guys, too, but no more, and it’s a shame.”

After the 1995 season, Brennaman was hired as director of broadcasting for the expansion Arizona Diamondbacks, who were to begin play in 1998.

“I spent the first two years there putting together a broadcast network and learning the business side of sports television,” he says. “I was one of the first 25 people hired by the franchise. One of those other 25 is the woman to whom I am married to this day (wife Polly). We got married in Arizona; we had two kids in Arizona. It was fantastic. I never thought I was going to leave.”

Brennaman worked in Phoenix through the 2006 season, when he accepted an offer to call TV games for the Reds.

“It was a chance to come back to my hometown and work with my dad the last few years of his career,” he says. “I have always felt there was something unique about living in the Midwest. Everything is a little slower, a little more quiet. It was important to us for our kids to grow up here. That couldn’t have worked out better.”

From 2007-19, the Brennamans were a dynastic duo in Reds broadcasting. Marty called play-by-play on radio and Thom was on TV.

“But for about 10 years, we scheduled 20 to 25 games a year where I did the whole game with him on radio,” Thom says. “I was there for his last radio broadcast. That was cool stuff.”

But as with Thom’s childhood, things weren’t perfect.

“To be completely frank, when I first moved back to Cincinnati, my dad had been in a second marriage for 24 years,” he says. “Things were not going well. He was not a very happy guy and he was hard to be around.

“But they got divorced, and a couple of years later he fell in love with another woman, whom he is with to this day. Since then, I have never seen Dad happier. It has been really cool in that I am seeing the happiest days of his life being here now.”

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Things were going smoothly in Brennaman’s career. Besides the Reds, he had been working for Fox Sports since 1994, calling NFL and national MLB games along with some college football and basketball.

Then came Aug. 19, 2020.

Before the start of the seventh inning of the first game of a double-header in Kansas City, Brennaman uttered the gay slur. It was not heard over the cable and satellite feed, but was caught on MLB’s out-of-market streaming service.

Brennaman was pulled off the air before the fifth inning of the second game. He issued an apology before he left the air, but during the middle of it, the Reds’ Nick Castellanos hit a home run, leaving Brennaman stuck between a rock and a hard place as he told viewers:

“I made a comment earlier tonight that I guess went out over the air that I am deeply ashamed of. If I have hurt anyone out there, I can’t tell you how much I say from the bottom of my heart I’m so very sorry. I pride myself and think of myself as a man of faith — as there’s a drive into deep left field by Castellanos, it will be a home run. And so that will make it a 4-0 ballgame.”

Brennaman continued his apology. It was criticized in some circles afterward as weak and insincere. The timing of the home run and interruption of the apology caused it to become an internet meme. Brenneman’s call became easy prey for trolls to make fun of him on social media.

I asked Brennaman how he feels about the entire episode.

“What bothers me about it. … the hardest part of the whole thing. … I don’t get worked up about what people think about me,” he begins. “But all of us in the bottom of our hearts, we care what people think about us.

“I don’t have a homophobic bone in my body. There is evidence to the contrary. I cannot dispute or deny that. I used a word that would lead you to believe that I am a homophobe. But I can put my head on the pillow every single night and God above knows that I don’t have anything against anybody who is gay or in the LGBTQ community. I don’t care. So that part bothered me.

“It bothered me how I embarrassed my wife and kids. It embarrassed me when my career came down to a meme — Castellano’s home run call — which has taken on a life of its own.”

Being the target of a punch line would bother anyone, I suggested.

“I have two choices,” Brennaman said. “I can either get pissed about it every time I see it, or I can just live with it. I am probably somewhere in the middle.”

Brennaman thinks back to the moment when he decided to interrupt his apology to describe Castellano’s round-tripper.

“I flipped back into a mode,” he says. “My boss at Fox Sports, David Hill, used to say all the time, ‘Nothing is more important than the next pitch.’

“So there you are, with eight million things running through your mind. You know there is a good chance — a really good chance — you are going to get fired. And yet you want to try to apologize. In the middle of that apology, the guy hit a home run, and I felt like I owed it to whoever was watching the broadcast to call it.

“I did it, and then I got ridiculed for it. People insinuated that by me calling a home run, it took away from the sincerity of my apology, which is absolute and total BS.”

Brennaman looks at the silver lining of four years away from broadcasting sports at the highest level. He leaned on his Christian faith to survive.

“I wouldn’t have made it without it,” he says. “That was the primary focal point of my life. When (the incident) happened, you are devastated. But I told my wife, ‘God has a plan.’ We may not like it, but for all the negatives in all this stuff, there are going to be some positive things.

“I got more time with my wife and my kids, who were both really good athletes in high school and now have moved on to college. I got to go to every game, to every practice. I got to see my family on weekends and holidays, which I had never done before. At the end of the day, I would not have traded that time to have those jobs I used to have.”

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In the months after the incident, Brennaman was shunned in the broadcast business. He says he reached out to six or seven agents, but none had interest in taking him on as a client. He contacted a couple of MLB clubs with no results.

In the meantime, Brennaman reached out to groups in the gay community, both in Cincinnati and nationally, for input and guidance. He did the same with Billy Bean, the former major leaguer player who served as MLB’s senior vice president/diversity, equity and inclusion from 2022 until his death on Aug. 6 of leukemia at age 60. Bean became a proponent of giving Brennaman an opportunity to get back to work.

“I am very saddened by his passing,” Thom says. “He was an incredible resource for me, putting me in touch with LGBTQ groups and helping me through the process.”

There were some small broadcasting assignments beginning with a season calling games for the Puerto Rican Winter League in 2021.

“We had to do it from my basement because of Covid,” Brennaman says. “I received a call from a fellow from New York who owned the TV rights. He said he was a fan of mine and asked if I would call the games. I told him, ‘Of course I’ll do the games. I have nothing else going on.’ ”

Former MLB shortstop Ivan DeJesus is a neighbor of Brenneman’s and a native of Puerto Rico.

“Ivan would come to my house and we would do the games,” Brennaman says. “We had a great time.”

For the next two years, Brennaman called high school football and basketball games for the Chatterbox Sports Network in Cincinnati.

“I am still involved with the company,” he says. “I have done a sports talk show five days a week for the last two years. Trace Fowler runs the place. I am forever indebted to him. Even now that I am getting a chance to broadcast games again, I will continue to do a podcast for them two days a week. I am not going to leave them high and dry just because I got another broadcast job.”

In early 2024, Brennaman noticed a story in an Ohio U alumni magazine about Perry Sook, the chairman and CEO of Nexstar Media Group, the parent company of CW. Thom sent a blind email to the company’s public relations director without much expectation. The next day he heard back from Sook. They struck up a relationship, and the next week Brennaman heard from the company’s president, Sean Compton.

“Sean grew up in Cincinnati and we had met as kids,” Brennaman says. “He was like, ‘I have always thought you did good work. I think there’s something that could happen.’ It played out. This ACC and Pac-12 opportunity came to be, and here we go.”

Among those Brennaman connected with during his exile is Cyd Ziegler, co-founder of Outsports, a website concerned with LGBTQ issues and personalities in sports.

When he heard about Brennaman’s hiring by CW Sports, “I pumped my fist in the air and said, ‘Finally!’ ” Ziegler told the New York Times. “Somebody gave this guy a chance that he deserved. I am so proud of The CW.”

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Our interview nearly over, I asked Brennaman for influences in his broadcasting career beyond his father and Harry Caray.

“I always admired Dick Enberg so very much,” Brennaman says. “He was such a classy, versatile announcer. Every single sport he worked, he was fantastic. I loved Brent Musburger. He brought such excitement to a college football game.

“And I have so much respect for Bob Costas. I would watch the Olympic Games and think, ‘Can you imagine the amount of work it takes for him to learn the pronunciations of names and learning all those sports?’

“It’s funny. Bob and I were acquaintances but never really friends. When I got fired, I don’t know why, but he became my biggest supporter in trying to help me get another job. When you have somebody like that in your corner … it has meant a lot. He has been a good friend through this whole thing.”

Indeed, Costas told the New York Times, “Neither Thom nor anyone else denies he had a serious misstep for which some consequence would have been appropriate. But the price he has paid is beyond disproportionate, especially when you consider that he had a fine reputation prior to the incident and took every proper step to make amends subsequent to it. His return to the booth is overdue, and I am sure the audience will be happy to hear his voice again.”

Much of Brenneman’s career has been centered on baseball. I asked if it is his favorite sport to work.

“Football is my favorite,” he says. “The nature of baseball, you are doing it almost every single day (for six to seven months), and that is a lot of games. I am not saying anything negative about baseball, but the older I’ve gotten, the more I have appreciated football, whether at the pro level or the collegiate level. I love the atmosphere. Every play seems important. I consider myself to be an emotional announcer. If the crowd is fired up, I am fired up. I feed off them.

“So I really enjoy football. The one sport I have done a ton of — and I will do some of it this year in the ACC — is basketball. Getting a chance to do the ACC again, I am really excited about that. I love all three sports, but you can’t do all three and have a wife with two kids.”

Brennaman has one more thought.

“If somebody were to ask me about doing (major league) baseball again, I would be honored to do it,” he says. “I owe much of my life to the sport.”

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