In May of last year, Oakland A’s television announcer Glen Kuiper was terminated by NBC Sports California following his use of a racial slur during a live game broadcast. Kuiper was describing a visit to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo. and used a derogatory term when describing the experience. He later apologized for his actions in the sixth inning of the game and was promptly suspended by the team pending an internal investigation which resulted in losing his job. Kuiper was a guest of former KNBR host Damon Bruce on his Damon Bruce Plus podcast and talked about what happened at length for the first time.
Within the first minute, Bruce got right into the subject people wanted to hear Kuiper address. “Take us back to the moment in Kansas City, where you realized that you had used a word that would undo a near two-decade long career,” Bruce said.
“It’s something that I think about every day,” Kuiper said. “I wish, obviously, with all my heart that it hadn’t happened, but I haven’t talked a lot about kind of the nuts and bolts of what actually did happen and how it came out the way it did.
“I made a mistake and I’ve worn it for a long time, and I’ll wear it the rest of my life. That’s just reality and I’m okay with that.”
“How do you think it all happened, because you clearly did not intend to say it,” Bruce said.
Kuiper explained they were doing a cut in with the pregame show as they had done for every game, something he said he has done 150 times per year for 20 years.
“When I got to answering the question of what we had done that day, that’s when I said we had an awesome day,” Kuiper recalled. “We went to the Negro League Museum, and I felt myself rushing. I did feel myself hurrying a little bit through that answer, but I didn’t realize that it had come out the way it did. Dallas [Braden] didn’t hear it. No one in the truck heard it.”
The whole thing happens and then you’re told to apologize very much after the fact. And that to me is the moment where social media now is chiming in, and it’s being shared, and people are investigating what’s going on here.
Kuiper explained the broadcast went on as normal until mid-way through, during one of their two-minute breaks, the producer told him they might need him to apologize. He asked what it was he did and was told, “It sounded like you may have said the N-word in the pregame show. And I was like, I have no idea what you’re talking about…
“My response back to the people in the studio, including the NBC higher ups who were on the phone with the producer and the director, I said, ‘Listen, you have got to show it to me. I’ll apologize, but I can’t do it unless I see the video of what I’m apologizing for. They said no. And then the tough one for me, Damon, was there was 20 seconds left in the break. That is when the bosses at NBC said, ‘you need to put him on camera.’
“…And within five seconds of that, I was on camera apologizing for something I hadn’t seen yet. I didn’t say I hadn’t done it because obviously something was wrong, and I had made a mistake. I just hadn’t seen it.”
Bruce then asked Kuiper about the immediate aftermath. Kuiper said he spoke with A’s president Dave Kaval. “He was not happy,” Kuiper said. “He told me that he was very disappointed in me.”
Kuiper said the next morning he asked the A’s media relations team if he could speak to a few of the Black coaches but was told they were “not quite ready to talk to him yet.” He said he did track down A’s player Tony Kemp in the hotel lobby. “I was scuffling,” Kuiper said. “I’m not going to lie. This was a bad morning. And I was emotional, and I told him what happened, and I said it was accidental. I said I’m sorry. And he was understanding, and we talked for maybe three to four minutes.
“And that’s when NBC started the investigation, which went on for a couple weeks. I was part of that. I did an interview. But outside of that, I really was sort of left out, not really knowing what was going on. Nobody really contacted me.”
Bruce responded, “Victory has a thousand fathers. Defeat is an orphan.”
“The one thing I want to say, too, about, what happened with me, and this is something that I’ve always, it’s always disappointing. It’s my own thing to deal with, but this bothered me a lot, and it still does, is that from the night that I made the mistake in Kansas City, from that night to right now as I sit here and speak with you, not one of my bosses at the A’s has ever contacted me.
“And I had good relationships with these people, and I did what they wanted me to do, and I really loved working there, and I really did have good relationships with these people. That will always bother me a little bit because I made a mistake and, you know, just a phone call and say, ‘hey, you know what? I’m sorry what happened. We needed to make this move.'”
Bruce asked Kuiper, “Do you think you’re going to call another Major League Baseball game in your life?”
Kuiper replied, “I tell you what, Damon, I really hope so because I miss calling games…I hope somebody is willing to partner up with me and do this, that an organization is open to it. I think I’m a good announcer, but I don’t know. It’s a tough world right now. It’s not always a forgiving world, and I understand all that, but I’ve been in sports for over 30 years, and I very much would like to broadcast again. If not, I’ll do something else in sports.”
Bruce went on to tell Kuiper he was disappointed the A’s did not have him involved in the final season in Oakland and seemed to try and edit him out as much as possible from highlight montages that have been playing.
“Glenn, your voice is part of the tapestry of the Oakland A’s for the better part of 20 years,” Bruce said. “Certainly, the last great part of the A’s as a great baseball team were stories that you were able to tell as the lead play-by-play broadcaster on TV for all those years…To tell the full story, we look at the good and the bad [in baseball]. And I think that your good should have been considered in this long, slow goodbye. And it’s a shame that it wasn’t because you’re a huge part of the story.”
Kuiper replied, “I know in my heart I was part of some pretty cool stuff.”
