Broadcaster Tompkins still going strong at age 80
Barry Tompkins is a Bay Area treasure and one of the great constants of American sportscasting. You could say he’s been around forever, but that wouldn’t be truthful: He’s been around longer than that.
He turned 80 on May 2, and you’d do well to ignore that number. Cut it in half and you’re closer to the actual man, still armed with his energy, wit, professionalism and health.
“I’ve really been lucky. I’m still out there running,” Tompkins said from his home in Sausalito, where he has lived seven years with his wife, author/media consultant Joan Ryan. “Although maybe that’s overstating it. I’m trying to move fast enough to not fall over.”
This story could be easily filled with a list of Tompkins’ accomplishments, but that’s no fun at all — not when he has so many stories to tell. Suffice it to say that Tompkins broke into the business with KCBS radio in 1965, joined KPIX television in ’68, spent five years with NBC in New York, returned to the Bay Area for a job at KRON television, and eventually forged longterm relationships with HBO, ESPN, Fox Sports and Showtime over the years, becoming a fixture on Pac10/12
sports, the Super Bowl, Wimbledon, the Olympics and especially boxing, in which he called some of history’s greatest fights and was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2016.
“Several years ago, Sports Illustrated did a calendar that highlighted a different sport for every week of the year, and I’d done 48 of them at one time or another,” said Tompkins, a fourtime Emmy Award winner who has done shows, live broadcasts or features in all 50 states. And he’s still working, knowing the secret to longevity is to stay current.
“On the air, I’ll never make a reference to anything that happened before the turn of the century. This century,” he said. “You can’t get into, ‘Boy, when I started’ or ‘Those were the days.’ Nobody knows what or who you’re talking about. News is what you get on your phone. History is 24 hours ago. So I’m reluctant to talk about those things.”
That’s a fine and noble stance, a lesson to all. Except I insisted. Let’s talk about those things, anyway.
It’s somewhat shocking to learn that Tompkins, a smart kid from San Francisco’s Richmond District, didn’t go to college. “My dad was kind of a professional nice guy, never owned a house, never owned a car, probably never made more than $30,000 a year,” he said. “Whatever I am, it probably came from my wonderful Jewish mother. But I never remember a conversation about politics, business, current events or education in my house. When I was a senior, my mother asked me what I was gonna do now, and I honestly said I’d never thought about it.
“I did attend City College of San Francisco for about two months in 1958, where I amassed a 1.8 GPA. Which I thought was pretty good, considering I never went to class.”
Writing came easily to Tompkins, and it turned out he had some musical chops. After track practice at Washington High, he and some friends took to singing in the shower, and they weren’t too bad. They formed a mixedrace group including Johnny Mathis’ brother, Ralph, and called themselves The Embers, named after a bar next door to Mel’s DriveIn on Geary Boulevard. They made a record, did some traveling, and wound up playing the Apollo Theater — yes, Apollo, in New York’s Harlem neighborhood — in the summer of 1959.
“The road beckoned, and that was it for college,” he said. “If we’d been able to bring the showers with us, we might have had a long career (laughs). But in 1960, Johnny Mathis convinced Ralph that this might not be the life for him. Which meant we weren’t very good.”
In the end, though, “that was kind of my education, getting out on the streets. The experience made me comfortable in any social setting, and it’s come in handy my whole life.”
After wandering the landscape of odd jobs and committing six months to the U.S. Army, Tompkins hooked up with an advertising agency that had KCBS radio as a client. “Don Klein (then broadcasting Stanford football and basketball) was a childhood hero of mine, and I pestered him into letting me write some commentaries for him. He taught me all sorts of things, including how to do an interview, and eventually he let me handle a weekend college football scoreboard show. I literally read scores for an hour. ‘Slippery Rock beat Kutztown State, 3524.’ ”
Never aspiring to be on TV, he got into the business completely by accident.
“I was having lunch with (former Warriors owner) Franklin Mieuli and Hank Greenwald, who hated television and had just turned down an offer from KPIX to replace Frank Dill, who was moving over to KRON. Hank told me, ‘You might want to give this guy a call.’ So I went over there, the program director asked me to read something, and I got hired right on the spot. To be on camera! My first night on the air was the first time I’d ever been in a television studio.”
That became a trademark of Tompkins’ career. The first time he ever called a boxing match was at the 1976 Olympics, working all of Sugar Ray Leonard’s bouts, among others. First live playbyplay of a football game: the 1978 Rose Bowl. First tennis match: Wimbledon. “My mantra to this day,” he said, “is if anybody ever asks you if you’ve done it before, there is only one answer: Yes! And then you figure it out.”
“The thing about Barry is that nothing rattles him,” Steve Farhood, a boxing broadcast partner at Showtime, told ringtv.com. “He’s called almost every sport known to man. He’s seen everything. Boxing throws curveballs, but a nuclear blast could go off and Barry wouldn’t miss a beat.”
When Tompkins joined HBO in 1979, one of his first assignments was the National Intercollegiate Boxing Championships at the Air Force Academy, hosting the show with Leonard while Don Dunphy, at that time a broadcasting icon with 40 years of experience, called the fights with Larry Merchant. Dunphy was accustomed to working alone, Merchant liked to offer forceful opinions, and they got into a heated argument in which they ripped off their headsets and began jawing with each other — on the air, in the middle of a fight.
By the time HBO moved to its next assignment in Boston, Tompkins had replaced Dunphy on playbyplay — and he remembered some crucial advice he got from Klein. “Don used to say, ‘Your job is to call the event and get out of the way. You’re like the referee — if you’re good, nobody notices.’
And I always took that with me. I’m not there for people to tell me how good — or bad — I was. The event is the story. Let the fans live the moment.”
Tompkins wound up calling some of the most significant fights in history, including LeonardMarvin Hagler (1987), HaglerThomas Hearns (1985) HaglerRoberto Duran (1983) Larry HolmesGerry Cooney (1982), Mike TysonTrevor Berbick (1986) and the first Aaron PryorAlexis Arguello fight (1982), a classic 14round brawl in Miami (Pryor by TKO) that makes every historian’s list of the most brutal, compelling spectacles in history.
“The most exciting fight I ever covered,” he said. “Huge crowd at the Orange Bowl, totally volatile scene, to the point where you start wondering how you’re gonna get out of there. Just an indescribably charged atmosphere.”
Things are a bit too quiet for Tompkins these days. He’s in his 16th year writing humor columns for the Marin Independent Journal, and he plans to call some college basketball and Showtime boxing whenever the sporting life resumes, but “I have to say I’m getting a fairly good taste of what retirement might be like,” he said. “This is the longest period I’ve been home in 30 years. But I’ll work until somebody declares me senile. I like it. Keeps my mind active.”
Might there be a book in store? “I’ve been writing some stuff down,” he said. “I’m hoping I can write an anecdotal book that only indirectly involves me. If I did ‘this is my life’ or anything that resembles an autobiography, I don’t think anyone would care.”
Just a guess: He would be pleasantly surprised.