Last week's death of Bengals legend Bob Trumpy, a pioneering tight end on the field and a new breed of tell-like-it-is broadcaster off the field, stirred history.
He was the man who spawned the Bengals' long line of former players who have become local and national voices of the sport. None bigger than Cris Collinsworth, the Bengals' three-time Pro Bowl wide receiver and Sports Broadcasting Hall-of-Famer.
Reached in Los Angeles as he prepared to call Steelers-Chargers in another edition of NBC's Sunday Night Football, Collinsworth talked with Bengals.com senior writer Geoff Hobson about Trumpy's legacy.
The Conversation
GH: How did Bob influence you as an analyst?
CC: He was a true, true original. There was nobody like him. It was back in, as Howard Cosell used to say, the jockocracy days. Where the players kind of took care of the other players when they became broadcasters. Trumpy kind of set that on its ear.
And I think after trying to follow in his footsteps on the radio, there was a little bit of that in me, too. You have to learn how to fight. You have to learn how to take people arguing with you, and fighting with you, and calling you names, and beating you up long before there was social media to beat you up. I beat social media to frame how to fight, thanks to Bob Trumpy, decades before social media came around.
GH: You've talked about how your first days in the business with him doing talk radio at Cincinnati's WLW-AM were so crucial.
CC: He truly was the carrot in front of me for everything. Bob originally wanted to go from doing three hours a night to two hours, and then Andy Furman and I would come on at eight o'clock for an hour.
Then, eventually, Trumpy got to be the number one (analyst) at NBC. And he was doing the Olympics, and he was doing golf. And he said, 'All right, it's time,' for me to take his place.
I was probably the worst sports talk radio guy in the history of the genre. It's hard. Trumpy was tough, man. Challenged everything, and that was not generally
my personality. But you sit in that room long enough and look at empty phone lines, you learn how to stir the pot a little bit. When you think about it, closing the door, it's you and a microphone and an audience that Bob Trumpy built. It was a lot.
But it was also a great training ground, especially when you had to follow an original.
I knew more about him as a broadcaster than I did as a player. I think he was the first guy to interview me when I got drafted (1981). My heavy country accent that they love playing back for me and embarrassing the heck out of me. So that's always fun.
He created something. At least in Cincinnati. Maybe other people were doing talk radio, I don't know. But he created a whole phenomenon in Cincinnati that was really a big deal.
Former player talking about his old team, talking about the Bengals organization, the management, the players, all the way down the list. That was something I had never heard before, and he had this booming voice, this booming laugh, and this booming presence that was big, strong, intimidating. In so many ways he was telling people things they'd never heard before.
As a matter of fact, one of the biggest breaks that I got was Dick Enberg and Bob wanted to do an NFL playoff game instead of the national championship game, and that meant I got to do the national championship game. Nebraska and Miami in Miami, and that was probably the biggest thing I had done to date.
GH: Did he give you any advice as you were breaking in that you still think about or use?
CC: The biggest thing for him was you just had to learn how to be unafraid. There were a lot of people that thought I was crazy on the air. Not on talk radio. I never got to Trumpy's level of crazy. But it was combative. And then when Trumpy was on television, it was a little shocking, a little Howard Cosellish.
And then I think I went through that same thing because I thought that's what you did on television because I watched Bob so closely. He knew the game inside-out, but he was unafraid, and that's really what I admired.
You may not agree with him, and in fact, he might have even been wrong, and I might have been wrong. But you can't be afraid to express your opinion. And he never was. It was his greatest trait.
GH: Did you ever go back and watch film of him as a player? You missed him by four years here.
CC: I've seen his highlights, and Bruce Coslet was my coach forever, and they were best friends. Those guys will still tell you, or would still tell you, that they never heard a Paul Brown speech because they were both smoking at halftime in the team shower. The stories are all great. My guess is Paul Brown probably knew where they were. As long as they were playing well, he didn't care.
GH: What's the thing you'll miss about him the most?
CC: The common bond that we had. It wasn't like I saw him all the time afterwards. But whenever we did, how many other people in the world played receiver for the Bengals, did Sports Talk on WLW for a long time, became announcers for NBC, and called Super Bowls? The path that he laid was the path that I followed. And I'm not sure I got to follow if he didn't lay that path.
