Thom Brennaman quits Reds booth after using anti-gay slur on air
Thom Brennaman won’t be back next year with the Reds, as the longtime play-by-play announcer said Friday he was quitting. He was suspended for booming “one of the f-- capitals of the world” into a hot mic during a Reds-Royals doubleheader last month.
Brennaman never really copped to being the type of person who throws around anti-gay slurs casually, and he never said what city he was referring to. He didn’t sound particularly chastened in his resignation statement Friday.
“I have been in this profession that I love for 33 years,” he said in a statement. “It is my hope and intention to return. And if I’m given that opportunity, I will be a better broadcaster and a much better person.”
Brennaman was also a mainstay on Fox’s NFL broadcasts and was pulled from them for the 2020 season. “I am grateful for the forgiveness so many have extended to me, especially those in the LGBTQ community who I have met, spoken with and listened to almost daily over the last five week(s),” he said Friday.
Ryan Messer, a local Cincinnati activist, politician and gay man, has said that Brennaman shouldn’t lose his job with the Reds. But Brennaman’s apology tour has stopped curiously short, with the announcer insisting that he’s never said the word before it slipped out in August. “If he used it then, he used it before,” Messer has said.
Brennaman had been the Reds’ TV play-by-play man since 2006, and intermittently on Fox NFL broadcasts since 1994.
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