To say that Greg Papa has experienced a lot during his Bay Area broadcasting career, is sort of like saying an otter has a lot of experiences involving water. In other words, Papa has done a ton. Outside of the San Jose Sharks, he’s the only guy in history to call games for the other five Bay Area teams.
Just look at his play-by-play resume as the voice of multiple teams in Northern California:
San Francisco 49ers – since 2019
San Francisco Giants – 7 years
Golden State Warriors – 11 years
Oakland A’s – 14 years
Oakland Raiders – 21 years
Somehow, Greg Papa managed to be the voice of the San Antonio Spurs for three years as well. And beyond play-by-play, Papa did a lot of studio work including pre and postgame shows for the Warriors and Giants. He’s also been a full-time sports radio host for the past 11 years. When does the man sleep?
His sports radio career began briefly during the NBA lockout in 1999 as a fill-in for Gary Radnich. Later in 2011, Jason Barrett approached Papa about joining 95.7 The Game. He initially hosted shows on a part-time basis, but later took on a full-time role, one he’s been in for over a decade now. Papa and John Lund currently host the 10a-2p midday show on KNBR.
As you’ll gather in our conversation, Greg Papa is a really interesting guy with truckloads of amazing experiences. From Al Davis wanting to hire him as Raiders GM, to accidental MF bombs and the story behind his signature “touchdown San-Fran-ciscooooo” call, Papa shares some awesome details. Enjoy!
Brian Noe: How would you describe what it was like to get fired but then immediately land on your feet?
Greg Papa: Oh, it’s traumatic. I got fired by the Warriors, the A’s, and the Raiders. I remember the first time when the Warriors let me go. That was because of my work with the Raiders. There was so much Raider talk in ‘97 and the Warriors got pissed.
I was literally fired by the Warriors and one day later Don Nelson calls me and says, ‘How do you feel about going to San Antonio? Gregg Popovich wants to hire you there.’ That was in October. The Spurs were already in training camp.
So I was fired for like a day, and then Pop called me and said, ‘Do you want to come to San Antonio?’ I said, ‘Sure’. That was an amazing experience. My family loves San Antonio.
Then when the A’s fired me, I remember my boss at NBC Sports Bay Area, Ted Griggs, called me. Literally, when they called to tell me I was done with the A’s, I got a call five minutes later saying sit by your phone, Larry Baer is going to call you. And the Giants hired me. That was like literally 10 minutes later.
Then when I lost the Raiders job, Bob Sargent called me and set up a coffee meeting for like a week later. We wound up going out for coffee for eight hours. He had this whole plan to bring me over to the Niners. It was pretty amazing. One was one day later, one was 10 minutes later, one was a week later. I was fortunate that the trauma of being told we don’t want you anymore was alleviated almost immediately by, ‘Do you want to come work for us?’ It was pretty amazing.
BN: What would you say has been your wildest experience? Is it what you just explained, or is it something else in your broadcasting career?
GP: Well, those were all amazing experiences, but I have to say it was the time that Al Davis reached out to me about working for him directly and being the general manager of the Raiders. We talked about that for a long time, for many, many years, ’06, ’07, ’08, ’09, all the way until he died. That was kind of a weird time in my life where I had to weigh getting out of broadcasting completely and going to work for him.
I was never going to be the GM because Al was the GM of the Raiders while he was alive, but he wanted to groom me to take over for him in that role and work next to him in the Raider front office after Bruce Allen and Mike Lombardi left. He had a falling out with Al. That was probably the wildest time in my life for those years, ’06 to the time he died in October 2011, where he wanted me to come work with him at the Raiders.
BN: What did you think about Al wanting you to do that?
GP: I thought long and hard about it for years, every day and night and actually backed off of broadcasting for a long time to make myself available. It would have been fascinating. It would have been challenging because he’s a challenging man, but I loved him. He was like a second father to me. We got along so well because I never did work for him. I think if I would’ve gone to work for him, I probably would have gotten fired in a week because we would have fought. But it would have been fascinating. I wish I had the opportunity.
It probably would’ve been a little bit of career suicide to take a job like that because Al wound up dying and Mark came in and he’s still changing things. Look at what he’s doing now. He fired a head coach and a general manager a year and a half into a six-year contract. So I don’t know what kind of contract I would’ve gotten. [Laughs] I dream about it all the time. Sometimes I think that really was my calling. I think the longevity of it would have been a real risk, but it was something I was willing to do because who gets the opportunity to have that chance?
I reached out to Bruce Allen. Bruce was an agent before Al hired him. He gave me the background on a lot of people whether it was Scotty Stirling or Ron Wolf. They didn’t come from the background as a player or a coach to be in a front office. Other people have done it and have had success, so I wish I’d had the chance. It may not have given me the career longevity, but at that time I wasn’t after that. I was after a challenge. As far as the most interesting career path that I did not take, or was not afforded to me, that was certainly the time. Those five years that Al was talking to me about coming to work for him directly.
BN: What’s it like to manage your time between play-by-play and sports radio?
GP: Yeah, it’s challenging. It’s just doing all the different things I do around it. It was really hard, I did all three sports overlapping. I did the Warriors games for a while, then I added the Raiders, then the A’s, and then did the Spurs. I was doing the three sports simultaneously and in different cities. I was living in San Antonio and doing the A’s and the Raiders. What I didn’t factor in was the overlap. Three times a year, for two months, the teams play simultaneously. That’s really the hard part. I only could do that for three years and then I couldn’t do it anymore. It was just difficult.
Now, I would do sports talk radio all day long whether it was 10-2 or noon-3, then at night I’d be on TV doing Warriors and Giants pre and postgame shows until midnight. That was hard. That was wearing me down, but I was younger then. Now, I don’t know how I did it. Now, it’s just sports talk radio 10-2 and then the 49ers on the weekend, which is hard enough because I work Monday through Friday. Then when Friday night comes, at two o’clock I’ve got to get ready for a football game. So I’m thinking, “Wow, what am I doing?”
It helps that I don’t sleep, I literally sleep four or five hours a night. I wake up all hours of the night and I can multitask. But sometimes I wonder what the hell am I doing? [Laughs] Why am I doing this? To pay the bills and get my kids through school. I have twins. My son is a sophomore at Santa Clara law school. So I’m just trying to get him through that.
Believe it or not, the schedule I have now is the easiest that I’ve had. Now I’m not doing TV at night for Warriors and Giants which makes it easier. But it doesn’t seem like the schedule is lighter at all. I kind of wonder “How the hell did I do all that?” I was younger, in better shape to get through it. Now that I’m old and tired, I can barely get through the day and crawl into bed at eight o’clock at night.
BN: I just think about all those hours and running low on sleep, can you think of a time when you made a big mistake on the air?
GP: Well, I mean, I’ve said motherf—er on the air a couple of times.
BN: [Laughs] Have you really? Oh, man.
GP: Some have been when I didn’t know my mic was hot. I think there’s a lot of times when I critique myself and I think, “Wow, that was a sloppy mistake. I shouldn’t have said that or shouldn’t have done that”. I could blame it on being tired and doing too much, but I’ve made a lot of errors on the air.
Not the egregious one where you say something and get fired over it. I’m hopefully never going to do that. But that’s the fear you have is that you say something just out of the realm and inappropriate that it’s over. I don’t think I’m going to do that, but you never know.
I’m hard on myself. I go back and listen to every 49er game that I broadcast. I try to listen to everything just to see how it came off. There are times where you think “Why did he say that?” Sometimes it’s just there aren’t enough hours in the day to get ready to do all of this. Maybe I was tired and traveling, but you can’t use that as an excuse.
Vin Scully was 83 years old and that guy hardly ever made a mistake to the end. Marv Albert went right to the end. The guys that I grew up idolizing did it at the highest level all the way till they were done. But there are times where you think to yourself, “Well, I hope nobody heard that”. [Laughs] Whatever the reason, you wear yourself too thin and you make a sloppy mental mistake because you’re just tired, or because of travel, or I didn’t get to bed until four in the morning and I’ve got to get back on the radio in a few hours. That does happen. But if I can’t do the job there are hundreds of people looking to take the job. So I can’t use that as an excuse.
BN: How did your signature call “touchdown San Francisco” come about?
GP: Well, I didn’t even know what the call was going to be. I never really had a signature home run call in baseball. I never had a basketball call. The Raider call evolved over time as a homage to the great Bill King. Bill’s call was touchdown Raiders. Then I stretched it out on some big ones. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the 49ers for so long.
Initially, I thought it was going to be a homage to Don Klein, the great Niner announcer. When I got to the Bay Area in the mid-‘80s, his call was touchdown 49ers. That preseason, my dad died right when I was getting ready to do my first 49er game. And my dad’s name is Frank. The city is named after St. Francis of Assisi, which is Frank, my dad’s name. He died right in August of that year, late July. We were playing the Chiefs in the preseason. It was the third preseason game. In the preseason I do television, so I wasn’t going to do a long touchdown call on TV. It was strictly going to be a radio call.
I was listening to Mitch Holthus, the great voice of the Chiefs. His call is “Touchdown Kan-sas-City!”, and it dawned on me, “What if I didn’t say 49ers, but I made the call San Francisco?” It was easier to say after touchdown, like “touchdown Raiders”, “touchdown San Francisco”, and have it be a tribute to my dad, St. Francis and Frank Papa. So the touchdown call came for all those reasons and it just dawned on me. I thought about it a long time and how I was going to do it and that’s what I came up with. And I like it. Hopefully, people like it too.
BN: What would you say makes your show with John Lund on KNBR work the way that it does? What it is about your partnership that meshes well?
GP: Respect. Mutual respect. We like each other. I obviously work very hard to do what I do. I remember the first time I was working with John when we started together, I think it was August 1, 2011 when Jason Barrett put us together. I remember doing a show with him. We got done and I was doing Giants pre and post on TV.
We get off the air and then a half hour later I see him sitting on the Giants dugout bench next to Bochy. And I’m like, “What are you doing here?” He was getting audio for the next day’s show. John just works. He works hard and he knows how to set me up. He knows the things that I like to talk about. And then we have fun. We went out a lot then and partied together, drank, hung out.
John pretends like he’s much younger than me but he’s not. He is younger than me but not much younger. Our references and our likes, our music, hanging out and partying and drinking and acting a fool, we just kind of hit it off. He’s fun. We’ve gone through it in our lives with family stuff. It’s just real and I respect him.
The bottom line is he’s a friend of mine, so on the air, I think it comes across that way where we are friends, we are contemporaries. We have similar interests. We look at things the same, but then at the same time, we look at things differently. He’s had a different background than I have. We’re from different parts of the world.
We’ve been through it. I’ve lost my mom and dad. I was with him the day his dad died. He went on the air 10 minutes after his dad died. His family situation and raising kids, we’ve kind of grown up together. We’ve been together a long time. I think the bottom line is we like each other. We hang out together off the air when we can and we respect each other. I think that’s why it works and hopefully it comes across that way on the air.
BN: What still drives you? You could say, “Hey man, this grind is too much. I’m going to scale back.” What still drives you to grind the way that you do?
GP: Money? Bottom line, money. If I didn’t have to put my last kid through law school and pay the bills; if they could just send me the money, Brian, and I could stay at home and drink and party all day, I could do that. If you could go do the games and do the talk show, and they just send me the checks, I’m good. The bottom line is US currency. I’ve got a lot of creditors I have to deal with.
BN: So what would happen if you buy a scratch-off lottery ticket tonight and win big? Are you doing the next Niners game?
GP: [Laughs] No, I’m going to make an offer to the DeBartolos and the Yorks and buy the team. That’s what I want to do. No, you know where I am right now? I’m off, I just finished the radio show. I’m at a bar called the Canyon Inn, in Redwood City, which I’ve heard about. I’ve never been, and I’m going to go in there and have a beer and a burger and hang out with Niner fans and soak it up a little bit. That’s the first minute that I’m off on my mini vacation and I’m going to go there and watch some sports. I love sports, I would be watching somewhere.
It’s not pressure, but the responsibility of watching it and having to report on it, or call it, or talk about it gets a little bit tiresome sometimes. But what drives me is I love it. So here I am. The first minute I have time off, I could be doing something else, but right now I just want to have a beer and a burger and hang at the Canyon Inn.
Honestly, if they didn’t pay me to do this, I would be doing it anyway. So don’t tell them. I do need the money. It’s a labor of love, it’s what I love to do, and fortunately, they’ve been able to pay me all these years to do it.
*** This interview was conducted prior to KNBR announcing Adam Copeland as the station’s new program director.
Brian Noe is a columnist for BSM and an on-air host heard nationwide on FOX Sports Radio’s Countdown To Kickoff. Previous roles include stops in Portland, OR, Albany, NY and Fresno, CA. You can follow him on Twitter @TheNoeShow or email him at bnoe@premierenetworks.com.
