Bob Trumpy, an All-Pro tight end with the Cincinnati Bengals who was later a prominent sports talk radio host in the city and the lead National Football League analyst at NBC Sports, died on Sunday at his home in Glendale, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati. He was 80.
His death was confirmed by his son Jason, who did not specify the cause. His friend and television colleague Ken Fouts said that Trumpy recently had a heart attack.
Before reaching a national audience in the broadcast booth alongside announcers like Bob Costas and Dick Enberg, Trumpy was an original Bengal, drafted in 1968 by the American Football League before the team’s inaugural season as an expansion franchise.
A fast tight end who stood 6-foot-6, he was part of an evolution of the position into more of a receiver than a blocker, although he was adept at that as well.
“He was an exceptional and rare tight end who could get downfield and split zone coverages,” Mike Brown, the Bengals’ owner and president, said in a statement. “He was as fast as any wide receiver and was a deep threat.”
In Trumpy’s first game — the second of the 1968 season — he started in place of the injured flanker and caught a 58-yard touchdown pass from quarterback John Stofa to put Cincinnati ahead, 9-0, in a 24-10 victory over the Denver Broncos.
“I thought it was never going to happen,” Trumpy said after the game. He had been the team’s leading receiver in preseason games but hadn’t scored a touchdown.
Trumpy was a first-team All-Pro in 1969, when he caught 37 passes for 835 yards, or 22.6 yards per catch. He was also selected to play in four Pro Bowl games. In his 10-year career, he had 4,600 receiving yards for an average of 15.4 per catch, still team records for a tight end.
Trumpy benefited from playing for several seasons for Bill Walsh, who was then an innovative assistant coach in charge of quarterbacks and receivers for the Bengals. His system of three-step drops, which enabled quarterbacks to throw short, quick passes, became known as the West Coach offense. Walsh, who often designed plays for Trumpy, later won three Super Bowls as head coach of the San Francisco 49ers.
Trumpy retired in early 1978 to pursue a full-time career in sports talk radio, where he had already been working for two years. He possessed at least two traits that played well in the medium: He was highly opinionated and spoke in a deep, booming voice.
Robert Theodore Trumpy Jr. was born on March 6, 1945, in rural Mount Pulaski, Ill., and grew up in Tremont and Springfield. His father was a divisional sales manager at a financial services company, and his mother, Marion (Miller) Trumpy, was a home economics teacher. Bob was a three-sport athlete — football, basketball, and track and field — in high school.
His path to the Bengals was circuitous. He played college football for two seasons — at the University of Illinois in 1964, after which he flunked out, and another at the University of Utah in 1966, after which he left the school without graduating.
After briefly attending Glendale Junior College (now Glendale Community College) near Los Angeles — and then serving in the Naval Reserve and working as a bill collector — he learned from his wife, Pat, in 1968 that he had received a telegram from Paul Brown, the coach and owner of the Bengals (and Mike Brown’s father), saying he had been selected deep into the joint A.F.L.-N.F.L. draft, in the 12th round, with the Bengals taking a flyer on him. (He had led Illinois in receptions in 1964.)
“Jeez, you don’t think they’ve made a mistake, do you?” he recalled asking his wife in a memoir, “Trump: Ten Years With the Bengals” (1979, with Bill Mefford). “I haven’t touched a football in a year and a half.”
The Bengals became a consistently good team during Trumpy’s time but never won a playoff game.
As a sports talk host for about a dozen years in Cincinnati, Trumpy was known for his blunt criticism, most notably in 1978, when Paul Brown fired Phil Johnson, whom he had hired to replace him as the Bengals’ coach, after an 0-5 start.
The next day, Brown confronted Trumpy at practice.
“His lecturing and finger-pointing lasted as long as practice did — 90 minutes,” Trumpy told WVXU, a public radio station in Cincinnati, in 2014.
Cris Collinsworth, a former Bengals receiver who in 1989 succeeded Trumpy as the host of “Sports Talk,” a popular show on the Cincinnati radio station WLW, said in an interview that Trumpy “was part of the sports culture.” He added: “He was strongly opinionated, with a drill sergeant’s voice and an Ed McMahon laugh. People loved him, they were mad at him, they feared him.”
One of Trumpy’s critics, Mike Bass, a sports columnist for The Cincinnati Post, celebrated Trumpy’s retirement from sports talk radio in 1989. “Many have felt the wrath — and the ignorance — of Bobzilla,” he wrote.
Trumpy began calling N.F.L. games for NBC in 1978. He had been encouraged by Fouts, then a director at NBC Sports, to make an audition tape, which Fouts brought to Scotty Connal, an NBC Sports executive.
“Years later,” Fouts said in an interview, “Scotty told me, ‘I never watched the tape, I already knew who Bob Trumpy was.’”
Over nearly 20 years — until NBC lost its rights to N.F.L. games in 1997 — Trumpy worked with several announcers, including Don Criqui as well as Costas, Enberg and others. Enberg and Trumpy were the network’s top announcing team from 1993 to 1995, calling two Super Bowls together. At NBC, Trumpy also worked on Olympic and golf broadcasts.
“He had exceptional broadcasting skills,” Costas said in an interview. “He was able to get in and out between plays, and did it consistently well. He understood the pace and rhythm of a broadcast.”
Trumpy was replaced as NBC’s No. 1 football analyst in 1995 by two N.F.L. veterans, Phil Simms and Paul Maguire; he went on to work through the 1997 season with other partners, including Tom Hammond and Charlie Jones. He later called N.F.L. games on radio.
In 2014, Trumpy received the Pete Rozelle Radio and Television Award from the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
In addition to his son Jason, he is survived by his wife, Patricia (Feith) Trumpy; another son, Matthew; a sister, Rebecca Ethell; a brother, David; and six grandchildren.
In 1968, when Trumpy scored his first touchdown, his celebration prompted his coach to castigate him for showing such emotion.
“Act like you’ve been there before,” Paul Brown told him, as Trumpy recounted the moment to The Cincinnati Post.
He then got a phone call on the sideline from Bill Walsh, the assistant coach, who was in the press box.
“I got on the phone, and he asked what Paul had said,” Trumpy recalled. “I told him. He said it was OK, that I had run a good route and made a nice catch.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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