Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 30, 1993 TAG: 9301300351
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JACK BOGACZYK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A SUPER DEBUT
As prominent football telecast analysts go, the one who will work Super Bowl XXVII isn't very prominent.He doesn't spend the season riding a bus to assignments. He doesn't do hardware store commercials. He never played or coached in a Super Bowl. He won't make the candidates list for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He doesn't do liquid diet ads.
His wife doesn't spend weekday mornings at Regis Philbin's side, either.
"Who am I?" Bob Trumpy repeated. "I guess who I am now is an established broadcaster."
That is not to say Trumpy is on the periphery of his profession. He is, however, on the edge.
"I like being a guy who's on the edge," he said.
Trumpy, elevated to the No. 1 NFL announcing duo by NBC Sports this season, calls his first Super Bowl telecast Sunday when the Buffalo Bills meet the Dallas Cowboys at the Rose Bowl (6 p.m., WSLS-Channel 10). Trumpy will be teamed with Dick Enberg in the booth after Bob Costas, in his swan song as NBC's NFL studio host after nine years, guides viewers through a 2 1/2-hour pregame show.
Networks hire game analysts because they know a sport, and because an executive producer figures they can be trained to translate their X-and-O knowledge into bite-sized morsels viewers will understand. Trumpy, in his 15th year at NBC, spent a decade in the NFL as a tight end with the Cincinnati Bengals.
Although he was a two-time Pro Bowl choice, Trumpy didn't come to the network with the profile of a John Madden, Frank Gifford or Bill Walsh. What Trumpy had wasn't star quality, but something more substantial.
For 12 years, Trumpy was host of a call-in show on WLW Radio, a 50,000-watt station in Cincinnati. Five nights a week, three hours a night, Trumpy was talking - and learning a new craft.
"That was my broadcast education," said Trumpy, 47, from his suburban Cincinnati home. "Every year when a player who had played in a Super Bowl retired or a coach who had been in the Super Bowl went into broadcasting, it was somebody else who was after the same job I had. I had to find something different, so I figured if I had complete training as a broadcaster, I'd have a leg up.
"Some of the people who do this only work on Sunday. I don't know that my work is any better than what those people do and I'm not saying it is, but I do know that no one with a `name' is going to replace me because he's a better broadcaster."
Trumpy got the No. 1 analyst's role when Bill Walsh, who had been Enberg's on-air partner for three years, returned to coaching at Stanford. Walsh, who coached San Francisco to three Super Bowl titles, certainly knew the game, but he still played too much coaching politics to be critical of players and coaches on the air.
Some assumed that another former Super Bowl coaching winner who had joined NBC, Bill Parcells, would replace Walsh on the top team.
Trumpy didn't. "I thought Parcells' chances dropped when Walsh didn't work," said Trumpy who, nevertheless, didn't campaign for the job. He made one phone call to NBC Sports president Dick Ebersol "and told him I was interested. I really thought they might go outside the company."
Finally, NBC realized that Trumpy was the best NFL analyst who never had called the glamour games. He'd worked with Costas, then on play-by-play, Marv Albert and, mostly, Don Criqui. His work had earned critical acclaim and for good reason.
Not only does he know the sport and understand the technical side of broadcasting. Not only does he have a great voice. Not only does he prepare with reams of information. He also has opinions, and isn't afraid to let millions of viewers hear them.
"There are about three things you can do on a radio show like that," said Trumpy, who left the show after 12 years, in 1989. "You can sit on the fence and have the audience debate, you can do trivia, or you can be opinionated and try to evoke a response.
"I was always one to give my opinion, and those opinions are not contrived. I never once went on just to say this. I didn't manufacture opinions, and I always tried to have facts to back them up. I didn't do it half-heartedly or say things just to p--- people off."
Those opinions, even if at times misconstrued, still rile folks. Before the AFC Championship game, a Trumpy opinion upset Buffalo quarterback Jim Kelly, who then wouldn't speak to the broadcaster. Although Trumpy explained on the AFC title game telecast that Kelly heard the remark out of context, he did not recant on his opinion that Kelly's ego was his biggest plus.
Trumpy's style works well with Enberg, although their approaches to a telecast are quite different. Enberg is a storytelling play-caller. Trumpy weaves the basics with the bold.
"The part people don't realize and that his style doesn't reveal is that Bob is very Midwestern," Enberg said. "He has that work ethic, that down-on-the-farm upbringing. He is so honest and so genuine, and his work ethic is unlike most athletes who choose our business after they're doing with theit playing careers.
"There are a few who work hard. Merlin Olsen [whom Enberg worked with for a decade] was one of those, too. The worst thing you can do with Bob is try to tell him he's not honest."
Trumpy points to Olsen as the football telecaster whose X-and-O approach "was one of the best jobs of paying attention to detail, to getting the viewers' eye and mind to the right spot." Trumpy has tried to built upon that, but otherwise is his own man in the booth.
"The best thing about this job is the independence, and I'm a very independent person," Trumpy said. "Working with Dick has been terrific. It's been wonderful. We had more in common than I'd imagine either of us thought we would.
"We're two guys who hated growing up on the farm as kids but now that we look back have a lot of good memories of those days. Dick's a wine connoisseur; I don't drink. He likes classical music; I like jazz, but they're close. I know we both have a great deal of respect for a lot of the same people."
An Illinois native, the 6-foot-6 Trumpy played college football at Illinois and Utah. From college, he joined the Navy and spent 18 months with a top-secret clearance while assigned to the admiral's office at Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay.
He was selected by the Bengals in the 12th round of the AFL draft in 196 after his Navy stint, and played with Cincinnati through 1977. The outspoken Trumpy hardly was that as a player.
"I didn't solict the media," he said. "I wasn't a holding-court kind of guy, although there were always a lot of media guys around my locker. That was because of superstition. Our quarterback, Ken Anderson, wanted his locker next to mine. They always wanted to talk to him.
"So, there was a lot of press around my locker, but they mostly just got in my way."
Trumpy and his wife of 26 years, Pat, have two sons in college. Matt is a graphic arts major at Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati; Jason, a 6-8, 235-pounder, is a freshman basketball player on scholarship at Robert Morris College in suburban Pittsburgh. He's being redshirted after having shoulder surgery.
The Trumpys "have two mutt dogs, lots of property and two antique cars," said Trumpy, an 11-handicap golfer whose work at NBC also includes golf telecasts and, at the last two Summer Olympics, volleyball and boxing.
He called the NBC Radio broadcasts of Super Bowls six and seven years ago with Criqui, but Sunday's Bills-Cowboys game easily will be Trumpy's largest audience.
"People say that never crosses your mind, but you grow used to that feeling and it's kind of nice, too, to realize that many people are interested," Trumpy said. "At the same time, although I'm not a big partier, I have been to my fair share of Super Bowl parties in people's homes.
"I know the game will be on, but there also are people talking about the flower arrangement on the table, or the food, or the color of the drapes or their tennis games. If this is a good Super Bowl game, then what I should hope to do is play a bit part in people's enjoyment of it.
"There have been and are broadcasters who go in and try to take over the game. That's not me."