‘When you’re done, you’re done’: Gary Radnich opens up about retirement and why he won’t return to TV or radio

“I have not listened to KNBR once since my last show,” Gary Radnich says, less than five minutes after I step into his family home in the St. Francis Wood neighborhood of San Francisco. “Not one time, and it’s the same when I left TV. It’s like, when you’re in love with something, you got to make a clean break.”

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This was no accident. Nothing Radnich says is a verbal slip, despite a well-practiced cadence that comes across as spontaneous and ad-libbed — as if something could pop out at any moment that would’ve cratered his long, highly successful Bay Area media career. The fact that he lasted 34 years as a sports anchor at KRON and 27 years as a sports talk show host at KNBR proved that behind a performance style that may have sounded wild or unruly, Radnich was always in control.

That lengthy period also means Radnich has seen how things have changed in his profession, and while he seems happy in retirement, there’s a palpable disdain with the current state of sports media as well.

Radnich mentioned those two numbers — 34 and 27 — multiple times during my own personal version of “Sit Down with Gary Radnich,” only this time with the tables turned. I didn’t know what would come out of my visit, which came about unexpectedly since we’d never met face to face, Radnich’s preferred method of communicating.

It was actually an email that started it all, coming from Radnich after I wrote about his last day at KRON in 2018, a piece that began with a note on how much my mother enjoyed watching his highlight segments and interviews.

“Steve, thank you very much for the coverage but did you have to say ‘my mom’ it’s really bad for the demographic,” he wrote. 

It wasn’t until over a year later that another email arrived from Radnich, this time asking for my mailing address. I soon received a package including a DVD commemorating his first 20 years on KRON and a 1996 copy of San Jose Mercury News West Magazine featuring a Radnich profile by David E. Early as the cover story. The DVD included many moments from his interviews with players like Ronnie Lott and Dave Stewart, but while the profile painted Radnich as the king of local media, it also described his life as a single man living in a sparsely furnished Pacific Heights penthouse.

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His living situation has changed quite a bit in the 23-plus years since that piece was published. His daily schedule, too.

I emailed to thank him for the package, which led to an invitation to his house for lunch. No details were provided, so I wondered if he was ready to announce his return to TV and/or radio.

When I arrived, Radnich met me at the door with his wife, Alicia, and daughter, Jolie, home on winter break from NYU. On the large dining room table was an impressive spread — sandwiches, a bowl containing assorted berries, and a plate loaded with cookies. The four of us sat down, surrounded by portraits of he and Alicia’s three children (Radnich also has three other children from his first marriage).

“It’s gonna sound weird, but sometimes if you’re an old guy with a young family, it’s, ‘Jesus criminy, what’s he doing?'” Radnich said. “I recommend it to anybody, because when you retire, you still got something you care about. If you can pull it off.”

Radnich has never been shy about including his family in his work. He did a weekly segment on KRON with Alicia, and frequently mentioned having to work at two outlets simultaneously because of his substantial “overhead,” which included the famous Bentley he used to drive across San Francisco several times a day, to the KNBR studio, back home, then back and forth between his nightly segments on KRON.

Money is a frequent subject when Radnich pontificates, about sport or life. While he doesn’t subscribe to The Athletic, someone passed along my story summarizing his final show on KNBR, during which he frequently mentioned how no one should feel sorry for him as he said goodbye to the listening audience, due to his positive financial situation. Letting the world know that he isn’t a “battered media performer” (one of Radnich’s many pet phrases) is what led him to buy a luxury vehicle that became a prop during his later years on KNBR, even though radio isn’t a visual medium.

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“I got it right after Damon left and Larry was joining. And you just want, like you were saying before (in the story), you want to make it look like, ‘Hey, I’m still doing all right. They gave me a partner, but that doesn’t mean I’m jumping off a cliff,'” Radnich explained. “So I got the Bentley. That’s exactly what (it was). I even told Alicia. Because a couple guys said geez, Gary’s not as good as he used to be. They had to bring in the guy who said … this ‘Caribbean slop’ guy.

“As soon as you got the Bentley. As soon as you got the Bentley. ‘Oh, this guy’s doing great!’ It’s the same thing with the money. You never want somebody to feel like …” as Radnich groaned in mock sympathy.

“For any major city in the country, they have the lowest amount of people who watch television,” Radnich said of the Bay Area audience he spent more than three decades entertaining.

Radnich remembered riding with KRON’s news director to the airport in 1984, when his goal was to move back to the Bay Area — Radnich grew up in San Jose — after turning heads as an irreverent sports anchor and play-by-play announcer for Ohio State football games with Woody Hayes.

“Only 10 percent of the audience here cares about sports,” Radnich was told. “It’s all about personality and do you come through the screen. Ten percent is all that cares about who won the game. It’s all who you are. When you come out here, if we hire you, just remember, that’s what it is.”

Radnich never forgot, and his commitment to putting personality front and center — whether that meant lively interviews on Sunday nights during “Sit Down,” verbally “tickling” the other KRON anchors, or asking callers what cars they drove on KNBR — made him arguably the region’s top media star over an unprecedented run with both stations.

He ascended at KRON quickly, given a boost by the network’s affiliation with NBC and, for a time, the station’s status as the A’s TV flagship. The NBC connection allowed Radnich to cover the nation’s biggest sporting events, including Super Bowls when the 49ers were involved and three World Series featuring the Bash Brothers, but KRON lost their NBC affiliation at the turn of the millennium. KRON lost NBC but kept Radnich, at a very lucrative rate, as long as he promised to be a ubiquitous presence who appeared on-air several times a day.

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In the 1990s he joined KNBR, initially as a hype man of sorts for Pete Franklin. “I’d build him up for 10 minutes and then he’d come in,” Radnich said. “And that’s why I always laugh. I gave him that nickname, ‘the King.’ And what made me laugh is one night I hear someone saying, ‘Pete where’d you get that nickname?’ He goes, ‘It’s been bestowed on me.'”

Soon Radnich staked his own claim to the throne, getting his own show that followed Rush Limbaugh (yes, Limbaugh was once a staple of KNBR’s daily programming), soon after Ralph Barbieri, who started at KNBR as a sports anchor giving updates, was given his own show. Radnich’s shtick caught on with audiences, ratings were huge, and he was in his element conducting free-flowing interviews in between taking calls. Midway through his tenure, after a stint as the morning show host that left him sleep-deprived since he was still doing 11 p.m. newscasts every weeknight, Tony Bruno joined him for daily segments where the two would riff about sports and pop culture during what they described as “the best half-hour in radio.”

Radnich’s TV appearances would branch out from KRON, as his radio show was simulcast in the 1990s on now-defunct BayTV, and a few years back on NBC Sports California.

Radnich was a part of that regional cable network’s launch back when it was Comcast SportsNet, appearing on a weekly 49ers talk show with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown. Back when Ted Griggs had visions of building CSN into the Bay Area’s version of ESPN, Radnich asked former GM of CSN California, Larry Eldridge, what it would be like to work there full-time.

“He goes, ‘It’s a factory,’” Radnich recalled. “He said, ‘You wouldn’t like it here. It’s just gonna be a factory now. The design is, if one guy doesn’t want it, we’ll put another guy in there. It doesn’t matter who’s on.'”

And even in Radnich’s part-time role with CSN, he could sense that things were shifting toward a team-friendly approach when he and Brown would joke about the team’s lack of on-field success in 2009 and 2010.

“It’s funny, because they have the little 49er guy (who) would walk around,” Radnich said.

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I pressed him for a name. Was he referring to Bob Sargent, the 49ers’ director of broadcast partnerships?

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice enough guy, but he would always say, ‘We don’t have to bring up the record,'” he said of the same person he noticed as a more frequent presence at KNBR during Radnich’s final months there.

The end of Radnich’s sports anchoring career at KRON came as a bit of a surprise in 2018, since there was no forewarning before he announced he’d be leaving after one last month of appearances, but the decreased emphasis on sports on local newscasts probably made him lucky to last as long as he did, considering the airtime he received.

“You’re on two to three minutes now,” Radnich said. “And it’s not that they’re doing anything wrong. It’s just that they say, ‘Why should we beef up the sports staff if no one’s watching?'”

But we were given a clue that Radnich’s days at KNBR might be numbered several years before he left. Back in 2011, KNBR decided that Radnich, who had been hosting solo for the entirety of his career with the station, needed a partner. So they assigned Damon Bruce, who had been hosting a solo show on KNBR 1050, to Radnich’s midday show.

“New owners came in, and they didn’t want to pay Bruno. And that was it. That’s when the guy said, ‘Oh, hey, why don’t we try Damon? But we can’t have Bruno,'” Radnich said. “I said, ‘You’re crazy.'”

But the days of KNBR being run by Tony Salvatore, who’d allow Radnich and Bruno to sail way past normally scheduled commercial breaks each morning, were over. Radnich’s bosses didn’t want Bruno’s segment to loom over the new pairing of two headstrong hosts in Radnich and Bruce, who were a poor match from the start. That version of the show lasted about a week before Radnich took an extended vacation. When Radnich returned, Bruce was back on KNBR 1050, and Radnich was given a new partner in Larry Krueger, who was fired in 2005 for ranting about “brain-dead Caribbean hitters hacking at slop nightly” on the “Sportsphone 680” show he was hosting.

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“Larry was all right,” Radnich said. “No, Larry’s good because Larry’s still hungry. He’d been out five years. And so I would let Larry go, where 10 years ago I’d — I wouldn’t get mad, but I’d say Larry, you just can’t keep saying the offensive line has to get better. But I was pretty tired, and I liked him too. Had a nice mother and father, they wrote me a couple of nice letters, all that stuff. So it all was lucky. And even Damon, if Damon would have caught me two years ago, three years ago, I don’t know. Maybe (partnering with him) would have been a little bit better. But I was still you know, still felt like doing it (in 2011).”

Radnich maintains it was his choice to leave KNBR, where he had been working under one-year contracts since 2016. But he also admitted that extenuating circumstances accelerated his departure. Specifically, KNBR’s partnership with the 49ers, which helped lead the way to KNBR signing Greg Papa in June.

“If I wanted to keep going, hell, I would have,” Radnich said. “When I signed the last deal at KNBR, last October (2018), I said let’s do one more year. And then when Papa comes around … it made sense (to leave).”

KNBR came to Radnich this summer with several different options to maintain a connection to the station, which included filming “vignettes” for the station’s website (“If nobody’s gonna see it, I just don’t want to do it.”), and doing voiceovers for commercial spots — a laughable idea, seeing as he only did sponsored reads for one company at the end his KNBR tenure after refusing to do ads for two decades.

Radnich found each alternative to be unsatisfactory and decided he wasn’t interested in any sort of reduced role.

“They had this pretty good sized little folder with all these ideas,” Radnich said. “That (I) could just work part-time and they’d (have me) do that. That’s another thing I’d never do. I guess Greg does it from his house, and that’s his business. That’s fine, but man, you’re not there. Whenever I got tired, they’d say, over the years, ‘Hey, do it at your house.’ Alicia said, ‘You’re not gonna do that, are you?’ I said, ‘No, no, (when you do that) you’re done.'”

So, is Radnich done, done? It would appear so, at least as a sports anchor or talk show host.

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“When I quit, I was like, I’ll never do any radio again. To be honest, that’s for younger guys wearing T-shirts (with team logos),” Radnich said. “I probably should have, even on the TV, (stopped) a few years ago.”

What about if 95.7 came calling? Radnich said he isn’t interested, partly because he’s so proud of lasting so long at one sports talk station throughout his career.

“It’s just not worth it to (95.7), either. You want somebody who hasn’t done it for too long. They appreciate it more and, ‘Hey, here, read this commercial about Joe’s Flophouse. And read it again,'” Radnich joked while describing what he considers to be a key willingness media corporations require from today’s sports talk hosts.

In a perfect world, Radnich would get a chance to go back to doing something that was his specialty, longer interviews. But he’s skeptical that his demands — a guaranteed audience and the ability to challenge high-profile figures who aren’t compensated for their time — can be met in today’s climate.

“We had a YouTube guy, a nice guy that we knew. He wanted me and Alicia to sit there and do something (together),” Radnich said. “And we had another guy (who wanted me to) come on a local station and do something. But I don’t want to just do it to be doing it. I mean, if you’re going to do it, you gotta do it right. Does that make sense? I don’t want to just, ‘Hey, let’s try this.’ And then if it doesn’t work, it’s not so much you look bad, but I’d feel bad. I don’t care what it looks like, but I’d feel bad. Like, ‘Geez, should have stayed retired.'”

“He was so successful though, on both radio and TV,” Alicia interjected, before turning to her husband. “It should be something that you really are passionate about and would love to do. Maybe something you couldn’t really do in the confines of the few minutes that you had (on TV). Just the interviews, long-form.”

Then she turned to me and said. “One of his greatest, I mean ‘Sports Final,’ where he got to go a little bit longer with the athletes, was fantastic.”

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“I enjoy doing that,” Radnich said. “But you’re not gonna pay somebody (to appear). It’s just, you can’t do it. I would like to do something again, but I’m not hungry. It’s got nothing to do with money. It’s got to be exactly what you want to do.”

I suggested that Radnich could start his own podcast, where many have been successful doing the same kind of interviews he conducted on Sunday nights for so many years, but he demurred, questioning whether the world already has enough podcasts. He seems to now be at a stage where he’s self-aware enough to know that he’s set in his ways after enjoying a long, successful run that will probably never be duplicated, though he noted more than once that Tom Tolbert is probably the last true star on local sports talk radio.

“I worked for one station and Salvatore was there 18 or 19 years while I was there. At KRON, (former GM Amy) McCombs, who got me going there, she was there 18 years. So they ran the place. Now, you know, it’s just a different deal. The 49ers will run (things at KNBR) a little bit and you know, that’s just the way it goes. And the Giants, I don’t know how much Larry’s got, Baer, but he’s still sneaking in there,” Radnich said with a smile.

“It’s just a different deal. Before, it was us and them. Now it’s, you know, kids after games. Which hey, it’s the way it is. But they’re wearing uniforms of the team for criminy sakes. Doesn’t make them bad guys. That’s just the way it is.”

Throughout the few hours I spent with him, two themes were discussed repeatedly. First, Radnich is grateful for the long run he enjoyed. Second, after having it so good for so long, he’s in no mood to compromise and is in a position where he doesn’t need to.

“Back then, you could rip a guy. But you’re ripping him to his face. Not ripping, but, ‘Jesus what happened last night?’ You know, something like that,” he said, before making a comparison to the dynamic he experienced over his last few years on the radio, when guests appeared less often, and his show with Krueger sounded closer to the ESPN “First Take” model with two guys bantering and criticizing with impunity, which often left him feeling uncomfortable.

“It’s not just Larry, it’s anybody. Whoever you’re sitting with on the radio, I always would twist a little bit. Because it’s just much better if you’re dealing with the (subject of criticism), with his face. And (back in) those days, you could.”

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These days, Radnich spends his time helping Alicia shuttle their son to school and sporting events, and they are even planning a trip to Europe to see Jolie when she studies abroad. Longtime listeners might remember that Radnich often seemed just as proud of never traveling abroad as he was that he never sat through meetings with coworkers, or that he always stepped into the KRON and KNBR studios just before going on the air and exited immediately after signoff so he could hop back in his car and get home to spend every spare minute possible with his family.

Long after everyone stopped eating and we’d covered everything about retirement life, Radnich walked me out to my car to confirm that I hadn’t been ticketed for parking too long in a 2-hour zone without the requisite permit. He promised to pay the fine, but luckily I was spared by the meter maids.

On our way to the curb, he said hello to his neighbor across the street who was doing some gardening, pointing out the Patriots flag attached to her house that was waving with the light coastal breeze. She asked Radnich if he thought Tom Brady’s days in New England were over, and Radnich launched into the same kind of big picture analysis heard on KNBR for 27 years, noting that Patriots owner Bob Kraft’s love for Brady is probably as important as any other factor. Then Radnich snapped out of sports talk mode.

“Hey, thanks for those lemons you gave us. I have a note that Alicia wrote for you,” he said.

“Oh Gary, you don’t have to do that,” she responded.

Radnich doesn’t have to do anything these days, other than be a family man. For now, that seems just fine with him.

(2016 file photo: Jerry Lai / USA TODAY Sports)