Thom Brennaman will be calling college football games this fall. Is there a right way to feel about it?
The former Cincinnati Reds broadcaster is back on a mainstream network four years after he got fired for using a homophobic slur on air. His return raises questions of fairness and second chances
Last Sunday capped off an eight-day period that contained as much seismic news as an entire decade typically does.
In that time, Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt; a federal judge dismissed Trump’s classified documents case, in which he could have added to his current 34 felony convictions; Trump unveiled Ohio senator and bestselling author J.D. Vance as his running mate; cybersecurity technology company CrowdStrike launched a faulty software update that crippled airlines, hospitals and banks around the world; and, perhaps most consequentially, President Joe Biden announced he was ending his reelection campaign, making him the first incumbent to do so in 56 years.
(In an update to my story last month on Jon Rothstein merrily tweeting about college basketball in moments of great societal importance, Rothstein used Biden’s bombshell Sunday to break some pressing news of his own – Northwestern and Montana State had scheduled a non-conference matchup for Nov. 19.)
Biden’s decision largely hid another, admittedly far less significant bit of news.
Earlier that day, The Athletic reported that The CW had hired Thom Brennaman as the lead play-by-play announcer for its college football broadcasts, beginning this season with an Aug. 31 game between Oregon State and Idaho State. Over the course of the 2024-25 college athletics season, he’ll call 14 football and 15 basketball games on the network.
Brennaman, of course, was the former Fox Sports and Cincinnati Reds broadcaster who, during an Aug. 2020 game between the Reds and the Kansas City Royals, was caught on a hot mic calling Kansas City “one of the f** capitals of the world.” He was suspended indefinitely and immediately from his gig with the Reds before ultimately resigning. The day after the homophobic slur went out on live television, he was removed from Fox’s NFL coverage.
In the years that followed, Brennaman was both an outcast and a meme, someone who was far away from any kind of semi-prominent broadcast booth but always at the front of mind for many American sports fans, at least a strain of them who are terminally online.
As he issued an on-air apology four years ago for his disgraceful language, Brennaman interrupted his mea culpa to announce that Reds outfielder Nick Castellanos had just hit a home run to left field, a moment that the finest minds in comedy couldn’t have crafted any more hilariously. Any time a public figure has come out with an apology for a misdeed in the years since, online commenters are quick to respond with a “as there’s a drive into deep left field by Castellanos.”
(At the very least, we might get some unintentional comedy out of Brennaman’s return to the booth. The CW has a contract with the ACC to exclusively air 50 of the league’s football and men’s basketball games a season through 2026-27. That means we might get to see Brennaman call a game this season or next featuring Boston College, whose promising young quarterback is named Thomas Castellanos. Just something to monitor.)
It’s the second one of those states of being, the outcast, I want to focus on today.
For someone whose voice was once heard by millions most times he would put on a headset, Brennaman’s hateful words shoved him in the shadows. A man who was Fox’s No. 2 voice for football and baseball, and who once called college football’s national championship game and Derek Jeter’s famous flip relay to home plate in the 2001 MLB playoffs, was relegated to independent league baseball, Ohio high school football and sports talk for a start-up called “Chatterbox Sports.”
His career seemed destined to follow a frenzied-yet-familiar path, with one enormous and perhaps unforgivable mistake turning one of America’s more prominent sports broadcasters into someone with no road back into the profession.
Ultimately, after four years away, The CW offered the lifeline he so desperately craved.
“It became clear that he has taken full responsibility for his actions,” The CW president Dennis Miller said to The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand, who broke the news Sunday (and, no, to my knowledge, it’s not that Dennis Miller.)
He got his second chance. But did he deserve it? It’s a simple-yet-loaded question that doesn’t have a concise or straightforward answer.
There’s ample evidence Brennaman has changed
There are many who would argue on Brennaman’s behalf that he did. A quick scan of social media revealed that many of the worst people you can come across on those various platforms – with both large followings and small – were thrilled because, not surprisingly, they didn’t believe Brennaman did anything wrong in the first place.
His backers fall under a vast tent, though, from MAGAPatriot1776 who hides behind an avatar of Al Bundy to openly wonder on Twitter why Black people can say that word but he can’t to a figure as esteemed as Bob Costas.
“Neither Thom nor anyone else denies that he had a serious misstep,” Costas said to The Athletic. “A 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.”
While someone like Costas, as polished and universally respected as he is, could be dismissed as an industry friend vouching for his pal, what makes Brennaman’s redemption tour all the more interesting is that he appeared to not only acknowledge his mistake, but take tangible steps to change and try to make amends for it.
Cyd Zeigler – a journalist whose website, Outsports, focused on LGBTQ+ issues through the lens of sports – commended the move to The Athletic.
“I pumped my fist in the air and said, ‘Finally!’” Zeigler said. “Somebody gave this guy a chance that he deserved. I’m so proud of The CW.”
On his own website, Zeigler wrote this of Brennaman’s return:
Over those years, he and I have spoken dozens of times. A few things became clear to me.
First. No, he doesn’t hate gay people. He never has. In fact, he’d known gay people since he was a teenager in the late 1970s and early ’80s, even defending one of his high school friends who happened to be gay — former GLAAD executive Scott Seomin — from bullies.
“High school in the 80s in Cincinnati, gay stereotypes were used all over the place,” Seomin told me a couple years ago. “But I never heard it from Thom.”
Second, Brennaman actually didn’t understand the power of the word he used in the minds of gay people. Of course, he didn’t think it was a compliment. Yet as he listened to dozens of LGBTQ people in the Cincinnati community and across sports, he realized — like so many straight men — that a word he thought was just another dumb insult was so, so much more.
Third, and maybe most importantly, he really wanted to help. This wasn’t “hey, let me make a couple public donations and get my job back” performative charity. This was quiet, behind-the-scenes working with local non-profits and advocacy groups to actually make a difference.
Yet of all of the conversations I’ve had with Brennaman and the people around him, there was one comment he made to me that sticks out as particularly representative of the man I’ve gotten to know.
He’d lost his income. He had a family to provide for. He’d been attacked mercilessly by people across the media and social media. The memes were relentless.
Yet with all of that, he said something shocking to me one afternoon on the phone about a year ago.
“I’m OK with what’s happened,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. I hate how much I hurt some people. I’ve lost so many nights of sleep over that, I can’t even count that many sheep.
“But if it hadn’t happened, I would have never learned about what the LGBTQ community goes through. Some of my neighbors. I would have stayed pretty blind to it. And I never would have gotten the chance to help.”
In a column in The Athletic, Boston-based sports writer Steve Buckley, a gay man himself, argued that Brennaman should have never been fired in the first place, but rather suspended and given a chance to reflect on what he had done wrong.
It’s possible I travel in a forgiving crowd, but in 2020, practically all the people with whom I spoke on this topic, gay and straight, told me A. Brennaman really stepped in it that night, and B. he should have been given some time to save his job.
Now it’s 2024, and Brennaman is finally getting a fresh start with The CW. According to Marchand, his first game is an Aug. 31 Oregon State-Idaho State matchup but most of his workload will be in the ACC.
Let’s watch. Let’s listen to Thom Brennaman. And to each other.
Among those who reached out to offer support to Brennaman was Billy Bean, an MLB vice president (not the subject of Moneyball) and a gay man, who got in contact with Brennaman the night of his hot mic moment and said “People make mistakes. I’m here to help in any way I can.’’
Perhaps the most relevant data point is that he did work with advocacy groups to see the kinds of people his words damage the most.
Rick Wurth, the CEO of the Children’s Home of Northern Kentucky just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, got Brennaman in touch with therapists who worked with kids who had been isolated and emotionally scarred because of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Brennaman listened to their stories and, upon finishing, insisted that he wanted to learn more.
He underwent what Wurth said to the Cincinnati Enquirer were “hundreds of hours” of learning, listening and interaction. Wurth went so far as to describe Brennaman as a “subject-matter expert.”
“Here we are in April 2022, and he’s still coming to Children’s Home on a regular basis,” Wurth said to the Enquirer. “Not because he has to. He’s actively engaged.”
He attended local PFLAG meetings to hear directly from members of the LGBTQ+ community about the struggles and despair they’ve endured throughout their lives, including one gay man who told a story of how he was intentionally hit by a truck, whose driver got out of the car, stood over the man lying on the asphalt and called him a “f**got.”
“Let me tell you, when you use the word flippantly like I did, and then you hear that story of that same word, and what that word means to somebody,” Brennaman said to Outsports in 2022, “if that doesn’t open your eyes and your mind to things you say, nothing will.”
Is Brennaman’s redemption tour merited?
For as compelling as those testimonials are, there are reasons to be skeptical.
Those who have clumsily defended Brennaman in print extend beyond anonymous online trolls. A series of columns from the hometown Enquirer on Brennaman during his exile made references to phrases like “cancel culture” and the “PC police,” which succinctly offered up a peek inside the author’s true feelings on the matter.
Even Zeigler, who has a prominent and necessary voice on the matter given his platform and his life experiences as a gay man, isn’t necessarily the most reliable devil’s advocate. Last year, he announced that he had switched his political registration and become a Republican while loudly expressing his support for Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who a three-second Google search will reveal is a cartoonishly villainous obstacle in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights in one of the largest states in the country.
Most of all, while The CW can be praised for helping out what some believe to be a deeply reformed man, Brennaman wasn’t owed anything.
He said one of only a handful of things that can get a broadcaster fired without much of a second thought, words that came out of his mouth so effortlessly and casually that it’s impossible to believe he either doesn’t utter them frequently or deeply believe in what he was saying (despite Brennaman’s assertion it’s the first time he had ever used the word.)
He came into the broadcasting world not entirely through his own talent. His father, Marty, was the longtime play-by-play voice of the Reds and a legend in the Cincinnati community, giving his son an all-too-critical leg up once he decided he, too, wanted to enter that line of work.
Instead of Brennaman, the job could have gone to a talented young broadcaster ravenously hungry for such an opportunity. Perhaps the hire could have been a woman or a person of color in a field that, even in 2024, is still overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white.
“Cancel culture” is a term often used derisively to discredit valid criticisms of powerful figures who have erred in a way that’s hurtful to a large group of often vulnerable, marginalized people. Those who immediately turn to that label aren’t asking for forgiveness or understanding, but rather a perverse freedom to say whatever disgusting things they want as frequently as they desire.
In truth, shame and public pressure are two of the most effective tools in holding famous, powerful people accountable, even in an age when a depressingly large segment of the population will happily defend things that are so obviously indefensible. It’s not something that should be mocked, but used responsibly.
At a certain point, though, a door back has to be opened for those who genuinely seek it and work hard to reach it. The cherished American ideal of the second chance shouldn’t be afforded to anyone because, frankly, there are too many who view it only as hollow rhetoric to shield themselves from consequences rather than an ideal to honestly uphold. But there are plenty of decent, good-faith individuals who look back on their past bigotry with embarrassment and do what they can to make up for it.
Like those close to him and some of the people he has gotten to know over the past several years, Brennaman believes he’s a changed man.
“I’d like to think I am,” he said to the Enquirer. “I’ve grown quite a bit. I’ll go to my grave saying there’s not a homophobic bone in my body. For the people in the LGBTQ community who’ve shown forgiveness and grace, they have become good friends. You try to listen and learn to do better.”
Whenever a story of someone like Brennaman arises and the merits of a return to public life are debated, I can’t help but think of Tim Hardaway.
During a 2007 appearance on The Dan Le Batard Show shortly after retired NBA center John Amaechi came out, the former all-NBA guard said he wouldn’t want a gay teammate and if he happened to have one, he’d distance himself from that person. When Le Batard followed up by noting that what Hardaway said was flatly homophobic, Hardaway responded by saying that “I hate gay people, so I let it be known.”
Even during a time in which the United States wasn’t nearly as evolved on gay rights as it is now, Hardaway was met with swift blowback. He was banned by NBA commissioner David Stern from attending that month’s all-star weekend. He lost his job in the Continental Basketball Association and struggled in the ensuing years to find steady work.
Rather than build up resentment and lash out at those he felt wronged him, Hardaway instead looked inward.
He started attending counseling and reached out to work with the local gay community near his Florida home. In 2011, four years after his disastrous radio interview, Hardaway traveled to El Paso – where he starred in college at UTEP – to support the city’s mayor with efforts to offer domestic partnership benefits to gay couples. He signed a petition calling on Florida to legalize same-sex marriage. He attended sessions at the YES Institute program, where he sat and listened to stories from gay and transgender people. He helped with fundraising efforts for several groups, including the Trevor Project, a national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services for LGBTQ+ youth. When Jason Collins became the first active openly gay player in 2013, one of the first phone calls of support he received was from Hardaway.
“I’ll tell you this: it was so wrong of me, and people have suffered,” Hardaway said in 2022 to the San Francisco Chronicle. “I had to grow up and really do some soul searching. What I said was just hurtful.”
Brennaman got his long-awaited second chance. While we can’t get a direct window into his soul, it’s on him, like Hardaway, to continue to prove he deserved it.
(Photos: Chatterbox Sports, Shutterstock)