Announcer Bob Trumpy circa 1981.
Sporting News via Getty Images.
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Sporting News via Getty Images.
Bob Trumpy, who died this week at the age of 80, was an All-Pro tight end for the Cincinnati Bengals, then took his booming voice and blunt opinions into broadcasting.
He had a show called “Sportstalk” on Cincinnati’s WLW Radio. Sports radio can be loud and raucous, blaring with bluster and bellowing. “Can you believe that? What were they thinking?”
But one night in 1983, the first person to call in said her name was Sugar. She said she had been drinking, and was married to a man who beat her. She said that she hadn’t worked for more than a decade and could not support her 19-year-old son. And, Sugar said, she wanted to end her life.
“I don’t know why she called a sports talk show,” Trumpy told the Los Angeles Times, years later. “It was probably just the first number she heard on the radio and decided to call it.”
And he kept Sugar talking, and safe — live, on the air — for two and a half hours.
“It would be a shame for you to check out by yourself when you like people so much,” Bob Trumpy told her, according to an Associated Press story about the call. “This is a cry for help, and I’m not going to let that go unheard.”
Sugar’s son finally came on the line and revealed where they lived. Emergency workers were able to reach her before she harmed herself.
Trumpy received praise for how he handled Sugar’s call, but the experience jarred him. “I sure didn’t feel like a hero after that,” he told the Los Angeles Times years later. “She wasn’t the only one who had to go to a crisis center for therapy. So did I.”
Trumpys’ grandfather had taken his own life when Trumpy was six years old. After his conversation with Sugar, he told the Cincinnati Post, “I kept seeing my grandfather in his coffin.”
He would go on to announce NFL games, Super Bowls, and the Olympics for NBC Sports. But the broadcast of Trumpy’s life was the night he stayed on the line for hours with a stranger who needed help. He helped save Sugar’s life, and in speaking so bluntly about his own struggles, he may have moved others to ask for help, too.