Had Bob Trumpy been content to rest his laurels on a football career alone, his legacy as a celebrated Cincinnati athlete and an iconic Cincinnati Bengals player would still be secure.  

Of course, we know now that Trumpy wasn’t content with that. A decorated, decade-long NFL career in Cincinnati gave way to a curiosity in sports talk radio, which was an industry still in its embryonic stages of growth when Trumpy was winding down his playing career in the 1970s. 

Trumpy leant his deep, rich voice and firm, unwavering opinions to that industry where he also became an icon. 

Trumpy’s life story was two-fold. He offered a dual legacies, and he pioneered in his roles both on the field and off of it.

Trumpy died at age 80, the Bengals announced Nov. 2, and he left behind a historic, distinguished story as a player, and a local and national broadcaster. 

His success as a player and original member of the Bengals franchise was underscored by his four Pro Bowls and an All-Pro honor recognition. Long and lanky in his playing days, Trumpy remains the Bengals all-time tight end leader in touchdowns (35) and yards per catch (15.4).

“I think Bob Trumpy would like to be remembered first and foremost for his playing career,” said Dan Hoard, the Bengals play-by-play voice since 2011 who frequently crossed paths with Trumpy. “I asked him ‘what made you more nervous, playing in a big game for the Bengals or broadcasting the Super Bowl?’ And he said, ‘it’s not even close. Playing in a game.’ There was nothing that could replicate the high, to him, of playing in an NFL game.” 

“He helped revolutionize the tight end position. Before Bob Trumpy, tight ends typically didn’t average more than 15 yards a catch. They didn’t run 40 yards down the seam and catch deep balls. He was a guy who changed the game as a tight end.”

In the broadcast realm, Trumpy was prolific locally and nationally. Prominent voices in local broadcast circles consider Trumpy the inventor of sports talk radio. Lance McAlister, who later took over the famous “Sports Talk” show that Trumpy made famous locally, still refers to his broadcast forebear as “the godfather.”

Trumpy also served as NFL color analyst with NBC Sports. He called four Super Bowls but branched out into other sports as he would also call three Olympic Games and three Ryder Cups. In 2014, Trumpy received the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award, which is given by the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a lifetime achievement honor. 

“He was the best,” said Bill “Seg” Dennison of 700-WLW, a one-time producer for Trumpy. “What I learned from that man comes out on a daily basis.”

The beginnings of a Cincinnati broadcast revolution

The sports talk radio landscape was barren at the outset of the industry, and Trumpy got his first proper taste for the discipline while driving around in the Los Angeles area. The car radio was on, and Trumpy became intrigued when he heard Boston Celtics legend and National Basketball Hall of Fame inductee Bill Russell hosting a sports talk show. 

“I got slightly hooked, not on what (Russell) was doing or what he was saying, but he was having a good time,” Trumpy told McCalister during a 2018 episode of “Sports Talk.” “I talked to my wife and we’re driving somewhere, and I said to her, ‘you know, I could do that.’ That was the moment where I thought I would at least explore the opportunity of doing it in Cincinnati.” 

During a 2018 episode of “Sports Talk” hosted by McAlister, Trumpy discussed the beginnings of his radio career. McAlister provided audio files of that episode to The Enquirer for this story.

Trumpy told McAlister he did a snap assessment of the sports and business landscape inside the geographic pocket that included not only Cincinnati but Lexington, Louisville, Bloomington, Indiana, Indianapolis and Columbus. That assessment would become part of the basis for a 1974 proposal to bring sports talk radio to 700-WLW, but the concept was rejected by the station.

WCKY-AM was the only other nearby station with the 50,000-watt strength needed to cover the show’s geographic footprint. Trumpy took his concept there, and the “Sports Talk” show he hosted became a mainstay in Cincinnati sports. It remains so today.

Trumpy was eventually hired away to 700-WLW in 1980. “Sports Talk” continues there, and McAlister hosts the show.

During the 1976 NFL season, Trumpy acted as a permanent guest on an hour-long call-in show leading into Monday Night Football radio broadcasts featuring Jack Buck and Hank Strahm, the former Super Bowl-winning Kansas City Chiefs coach. 

“That’s where it all started. That was the whole thing, right there,” Trumpy told McAlister in 2018. “I did it for the season, as a player, and several of my teammates said ‘hey, you know, can I be a guest?’ And I said, ‘wait a minute, I’m not sure you want to get involved… I didn’t really ask permission to do this (from Paul Brown). I’m just doing it.’ But we had plenty of callers, which surprised the heck out of me, and I think surprised the station. And then after the callers came sponsors, and all of the sudden, wait a minute, we’ve got a radio show here.”

Trumpy’s successful side gig spilled into the football season, and Trumpy in 2018 said he didn’t seek the Bengals’ approval for that (the Bengals also didn’t object at that point). The franchise eventually sent letters to Trumpy, ordering him to stop participating in-season, but Trumpy argued the point and eventually won out.

“Fine,” Trumpy told McAlister of that decision. “Good. So, my broadcast career is underway.” 

A gentle giant and a true professional: The core of Bob Trumpy

It’s said that a defining moment in Trumpy’s broadcast career resulted from his launching a scathing, on-air criticism in 1978 of his former employer and Bengals patriarch, the great Paul Brown.

Brown had just fired Bengals head coach Bill “Tiger” Johnson, and an impassioned Trumpy launched a criticism that led a spectacle of an argument between he and Brown at Spinney Field, the Bengals’ former practice facility in Lower Price Hill.

Trumpy in 2018 said he didn’t think he was ever fully forgiven by Brown. His criticisms and argumentative nature sometimes caused that kind of reaction.

“Howard Cosell was known for telling it like it is, and he did, but that’s Trumpy in a nutshell,” Hoard said. “Completely unfiltered. One-hundred percent honest. Totally confident in his opinions. That’s what made him such a great sports talk show host, and really he invented it in the Cincinnati market.”

Trumpy had fiery conviction in his opinions, but behind his love of on-air rhetoric was a warm, generous member of the Cincinnati community. 

That was evident in encounters with strangers and colleagues alike, including on Nov. 11, 1983, when he spoke to a suicidal caller on-air for two hours, which gave police time to locate the caller and intervene.

Dennison arrived at 700-WLW in 1979, and didn’t always enjoy the work he faced early in his career there. When he decided to pivot to the sports world, “Trump” was there to guide him when he arrived to the station in 1980. 

“I was producing helicopter traffic reports and this and that. They sent me out on my first news assignment, and they’d plucked someone out of the river by (Roebling) suspension bridge,” Dennison said. “I said, ‘this ain’t for me. I’m going to go into sports.’ ‘Trump’ put me under his wing, and he was one of the ones today who is why I am where I’m at… He was a gentle giant and a true professional in every sense of the word.”

McAlister, who co-hosted Bengals-centric radio shows with Trumpy and is widely known today as the host of “Sports Talk,” said the defining moment of his friendship with Trumpy came in the face of his son Casey’s leukemia diagnosis. 

“I think for people who listened to him on the radio, that voice and at times he could be dismissive of other opinions he didn’t agree with. He could be loud, and he could be gruff and rough,” McAlister said. “And yet at the core of him was a kindness and a friendship that I had with him… In the darkest moment in our life where we wondered if Casey was going to survive, and within a day of hearing that news, Bob Trumpy was the first person that called me other than family. He said, ‘whatever you need, whenever you need it. If you need a bone marrow donor, count me in.’

“It’s hard to tell that story without getting emotional, but I think, to me, for all the times we wanted to strangle each other, or I got mad at him, or he got mad at me because we were arguing about sports, that’s the core of who he is to me because he was willing to do whatever to help me. That’s what I’ll remember most about him.”Â