Ken Broo
Ken Broo has been up and down the dial of radio and television stations in Cincinnati and across the country for nearly 50 years. But, no matter where he landed, the lure of the Queen City always brought him back to the shores of the Ohio River.
The Belleville, New Jersey, native (think “Jersey Boys”) was a hockey player in high school and first visited Ohio University in the summer of 1969. That’s where he learned he might be able to “skate-on” the Bobcats club team as a freshman.
However, when he got to Athens in the fall of 1970, Broo found out the coach had signed several Canadian hockey players and quickly realized he needed a backup plan.
So, he wrote for the campus newspaper, The Post, did radio and television news, play-by-play for OU Bobcats Hockey and Athens High School sports along with color for The Bobcat Football network.
A WCPO-TV summer internship in promotions introduced him to Cincinnati in 1973. Little did he know those three months foreshadowed what was to come in later years,.
His first stop after graduating in 1974 was reporting sports for WKFI-AM (We Keep Farmers Informed) radio in Wilmington, Ohio. It was daytime only, meaning high school football games were taped on Friday nights and broadcast on Saturdays. That lasted a year.
After two years doing radio sports at WKST-AM in New Castle, Pennsylvania, it was back to the Queen City to work for WSAI-AM radio. He did morning sports with the legendary Jim Scott and covered the Cincinnati Reds during the Big Red Machine World Series title repeat in 1976.
As luck would have it, he got a call to fill in for a weekend sportscast on WKRC-TV. A tape from that newscast found its way to Oklahoma City where he was hired as weekend sports anchor on KWTV-TV. That was followed by sports stints at stations in Tulsa (1977 – 1981) and Tampa (1981 – 1987), but Cincinnati came calling again.
WLWT-TV hired Broo as Sports Director in 1987 where he worked with the anchor team of Jerry Springer and Norma Rashid. Three years later, he was back again at WKRC-TV helping the station cover the Reds wire-to-wire 1990 season and doing Cincinnati Bengals Radio Network play-by-play.
WSUA-TV in Washington, D.C. lured him from Cincinnati to the nation’s capital in 1996, but by 2000 he was back in the Queen City with WLWT-TV. When sports anchor Denny Janson retired from WCPO-TV in 2013, Broo moved into that slot and followed John Popovich as host of Sports of All Sorts on Sunday nights.
He retired from WCPO-TV at the end of 2018, but he wasn’t done with broadcasting.
Broo’s love of and expertise in pop music has made him a fixture at WLW Radio. His interviews with the legends of rock-and-roll are extremely popular. He hosts Sunday Morning Sports Talk, produces music features and fills in for various personalities.