First of two parts
Veteran broadcaster Cindy Brunson is taking her first summer off from calling WNBA games since 2022, but it was not in her original plans. The Phoenix Mercury, after interviewing her several weeks ago, decided not to hire her for their regular broadcast team.
Almost immediately after the team announcement, Brunson wanted to head off any rumors that too often spread whenever changes in broadcasting are made.
“I don’t want people to think that I was fired, because that did not happen,” Brunson told me last week during an hour-long phone interview. She texted me with the sad news and agreed to speak with us after she returns from a previously scheduled trip overseas.
Brunson was looking forward to being the Mercury voice for the fourth consecutive season, one of the few Black females who does W games. She felt the interviews with team officials went well.
“The person who hired me three years ago is no longer in that role,” explained Brunson. “They hired a woman to be in charge of broadcast, and she hired a guy from TNT Sports. He’s a good dude, and he told me, ‘I cannot believe I’ve been charged with replacing a Black female.’
“Now looking back on it, the decision to pivot away from me probably had already been decided, and they just didn’t tell me,” she continued. “I wish they would have told me that day [during her interviews] that we’re going in a different direction… They had already signed the person to replace me, and they waited a week after she had signed to do the job to tell me.”
As a result, the timing of the decision hurt her in several ways, including the opportunity to seek openings with other teams still filling out their broadcast teams, said Brunson, who was coming off her third season as the top voice of Athletes Unlimited basketball games played in the winter. She has been in that role for the past three seasons.
“They wasted the most precious commodity that I had, which was time,” Brunson stressed. “For me to be undone by a woman, and not treated well, I literally [felt] disrespected. I went into the process thinking I had a really good shot at the job because I had performed well [for the past three seasons].
“I’ve just been trying to go back over every call, every game, like what did I do? What could I have done better?” said Brunson of her introspection.
She also is disappointed to not be working Mercury games this season because of plans made with others: “The hardest phone calls I made, and the thing that has been so gutting, was to call the young Black and brown women who wanted to shadow me at games this season, and had already made arrangements to do so.”
Brunson is on the very short list of Black female play-by-play announcers along with Tiffany Greene, Meghan McPeak, Monica McNutt and Zora Stephanson. All have experienced calling women’s and men’s pro and college basketball games in recent years.
Brunson this season, instead of working W games, will use her first summer off “using all of my frequent flyer miles, and I’m doing it not as a quote-unquote member of the media,” she said. Along with being a longtime Phoenix Mercury season ticket holder, “I am buying tickets everywhere I go. It is my goal to get in every [WNBA] venue this season just to see how the game is growing.”
Next week: Brunson talks about her journey becoming a broadcaster.
Charles Hallman welcomes reader comments to challman@spokesman-recorder.com.