(This story has been updated with additional information)
Bob Trumpy, a 1963 Springfield High graduate who went on to a 10-year career as a tight end with the Cincinnati Bengals and later an NFL broadcaster, has died, the Bengals announced on Sunday, Nov. 2. He was 80.
“I’ve known Bob since we started here and he had an extraordinary career as both a player and a broadcaster,” Bengals president Mike Brown said in a statement released by the team. “He did it all very well and I regret his passing.”
The statement included that Trumpy died peacefully at his home, surrounded by his family.
Trumpy was selected by the expansion Bengals in the 12th round of the 1968 NFL Draft. He played in 128 games for Cincinnati and revolutionized the tight end position, with the help of Bengals wide receivers coach Bill Walsh. He caught 298 passes for 4,600 yards — still 13th on the Bengals’ all-time receiving list — and had 39 touchdowns. He was selected to the Pro Bowl four times. According to bengals.com, Trumpy is still the team’s all-time tight end leader for touchdowns and yards per catch (15.4).
In 2020, Trumpy said his mom’s growing frustration with Trumpy being underfoot might’ve ultimately been the difference maker.
“I was only going to play basketball (at Springfield High) and then apparently I drove my mother nuts when we first moved down there to Springfield, just hanging around the house,” Trumpy said in a phone interview with The State Journal-Register. “And she said, ‘You need to go play some sport. Go play football.’ And that’s what started it.”
In high school, Trumpy became well-known as an all-around athlete. As a sophomore and junior, he helped the Springfield High basketball team reach the state tournament in 1961 and ’62. At the 1963 state track and field meet, Trumpy won gold in long jump and tied for fifth in high jump.
Former teammate Larry Bauer, a 1961 graduate, remembers Trumpy’s improvement on the basketball court through that 1960-61 season. The Senators finished 28-4 and lost 54-52 in the Elite Eight to Harvey Thornton.
“He was on the JV most of the year and then gradually started playing more on the varsity,” Bauer, who now lives in Idaho, said Sunday evening. “We were ranked in the top-five all year, in one class back then. Bob started that game (against Thornton). We had six seniors who played most of the time (but Trumpy) started playing more and more.”
After high school, Bauer, now 82, went to Illinois, but returned to town occasionally to see the Senators play. And of course the 6-foot-6-inch Trumpy stood tall.
“The crowd would always yell, let the center jump and start the game, ‘Jump, Trump, jump!'”
In 1968, the NFL and American Football League held a combined draft. With the 301st overall pick, Cincinnati took Trumpy out of the University of Utah, where he played the 1966 season before serving 180 days with the Navy during the Vietnam War. After his discharge, he moved to California and worked as a bill collector before the Bengals selected him with the first pick of the 12th round.
Trumpy was born March 6, 1945, in Tremont and moved to Springfield before his sophomore year of high school when his dad, Robert Trumpy Sr., got a job transfer to the state capital in the fall of 1960.
“My dad was transferred from being just a salesman for Investor’s Diversified Service to a regional manager for the same company,” Trumpy said after being inducted into the Springfield High Hall of Fame in 1991. “Unbeknownst to me … I guess when the basketball season started, they reported that I was recruited by Ray Page (Springfield High basketball coach from 1955-62) and that my dad was given a job. I didn’t want to come here. I was from a town of 1,500 people. We had a good basketball team.
“I had just finished my freshman year, and my parents told me we were coming to Springfield. I said, `No, I’m staying here. I’ll live with somebody up here.’ They had to drag me down here.
“I was a story, and I didn’t even know about it. I was just a sophomore in high school.”
What would’ve happened if his dad hadn’t moved from Tremont?
“And if my dad hadn’t taken a job with Investors Diversified Services, I’d probably still be a farm hick around Tremont, Illinois,” Trumpy said. “Who knows?”
Riverton’s Paul Nonneman, who graduated from Griffin High School, remembers seeing Trumpy and SHS beat the Cyclones.
“I watched this play and specifically remembered it: (Trumpy) went out on the pattern, fell down, got up and still caught the pass,” Nonneman said. “He was really good. He was so doggone big, too.”
Bauer laughed when he remembered his first impression of Trumpy.
“A geeky kid with glasses; he wore glasses when he played. You didn’t see that very often,” Bauer said with a chuckle. “But he was a good leaper. He could really jump.”
After high school, he played football one year at the University of Illinois in 1964 — freshmen weren’t allowed to play at the time. In 1964, his teammate with the Fighting Illini was future NFL Hall of Famer Dick Butkus. Trumpy led the Illini with 28 passes, 428 yards and two touchdowns. Illinois finished 6-3 that season. Trumpy was injured for the final two games that season, needed surgery on his left hand and missed taking the final exams.
“A year later, I enrolled at the University of Utah, and that’s when I became a tight end,” Trumpy said.
At the time, tight ends were an extension of the offensive line.
“I don’t know of anybody in high school or college that really had tight ends (at the time),” Trumpy said. “I mean, in the pros, the tight ends then were great big lumbering guys: Ron Kramer of the Packers, and (Mike) Ditka was certainly a receiver for the Bears, but most of them were just small guards or small tackles that they used for blocking. But I was drafted into the AFL as a tight end.”
Trumpy credited Walsh, who went on to win three Super Bowls as the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers in the 1980s, with much of his success.
“I had speed for a guy who was, at that time, 6 foot 6, maybe 215 (pounds); I could get down the field,” Trumpy told The State Journal-Register in 2020. “I give all the credit in the world to Bill Walsh for recognizing and realizing that I shouldn’t just line up next to a tackle on every down. I followed his orders; he moved me all over the place and it blew up defenses all over the American Football League.”
Like Trumpy, Bauer also went to Vietnam. While reading the Stars and Stripes military newspaper in 1969, Bauer read about a Bengals’ tight end named Trumpy. It couldn’t be the same skinny kid Bauer last saw while the two shared the U of I campus, Bauer thought.
“I kept reading about this tight end on the Bengals named Trumpy, scoring all these (touchdowns),” Bauer said. “You know, most tight ends would cut across the middle and get five yards and he was catching long passes, long TDs, 60, 70 yards.
“It took me about three Sundays to realize it was Springfield’s Bob Trumpy. I couldn’t believe it. I heard he’d gone to Utah eventually, but I’m like, I can’t believe it because when he was a sophomore, he was about, he was 6-6, probably not even 180 (pounds).”
Following Sacred Heart-Griffin graduate Albert Okwuegbunam’s draft by the Denver Broncos in the fourth round of the 2020 NFL draft, Trumpy reflected on how times have changed.
“I was going to try out as a free agent with the Rams since I was living in Southern California. And our director of player personnel was a guy named Al Locasale, who ended up being (former Raiders’ owner) Al Davis’ right-hand man for 40 years. (Locasale) and his wife rented a condo about five doors from us. I asked him one time, who knew me when the Bengals drafted me? And he said, I was the only one. And I said, well, what information did you have on me? And he said, well, back then it was just a spiral notebook and everybody had to watch film and all the rest of this.
“And as the draft was going on, (the Bengals’ executive and first coach) Paul Brown says, ‘We need somebody on offense, a receiver, somebody with some size and some speed. And Locasale said, ‘I hit T. and your name was the first one under T. And I said, Trumpy, tight end, University of Utah. Paul Brown said, Trumpy, tight end, University of Utah.’ I was drafted.
“Now they measure players’ hands and they go for his lineage and they want DNA samples and all the rest of that crap. I was just a name on a page.”
When his playing days were behind him, Trumpy hosted a Cincinnati radio sports call-in show on WLW and was named Ohio Sports Broadcaster of the Year four times. From the late 1970s through the 1990s, he gained national recognition as a color commentator on NBC NFL telecasts and worked NBC’s Olympics and golf coverage as well. Even well into the 2000s, he was part of CBS/Westwood One’s radio broadcasts of NFL Sunday night games.
He told The State Journal-Register in 2020 that he was on the broadcast for the first game of Denver Broncos’ future Hall of Fame quarterback John Elway’s career.
“He was 1-for-8 and his only completion was a jump pass,” Trumpy said with a laugh.
In 2014, he joined an exclusive club when the Pro Football Hall of Fame awarded Trumpy with the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award, a lifetime achievement honor given to names like Jack Buck, Curt Gowdy, Pat Summerall, Frank Gifford, John Madden, Al Michaels and, most recently, Brent Musburger.
He loved the path his life took, and cherished the people he met along the way, Trumpy said.
“The guys I played with, the 10 years I played, being around Paul Brown, having a lifelong relationship with Bill Walsh,” Trumpy said. “Yeah, absolutely.”
Contact Ryan Mahan: 788-1546, ryan.mahan@sj-r.com, Twitter.com/RyanMahanSJR.
This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Springfield grad Bob Trumpy, former Cincinnati tight end and NFL broadcaster, dead at 80
Reporting by Ryan Mahan, Springfield State Journal-Register / State Journal-Register
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
