Barry Tompkins
Barry David Tompkins (born May 2, 1940) is an American sportscaster best known for boxing, though he has covered football and many other sports. He grew up in San Francisco and began his broadcasting career on KCBS radio in 1965. He moved to television as the sports director at KPIX, then worked at WNBC-TV and NBC Sports before returning to the West Coast with KRON-TV. In 1980 he joined HBO Boxing, where he worked with Larry Merchant and Sugar Ray Leonard and delivered several famous calls. He left HBO in 1988 after ten years.
Tompkins won the Sam Taub Award for excellence in boxing broadcasting in 1992. He did University of Washington Huskies football on radio from 1986 to 1988, had a brief acting stint in Rocky IV, and spent eight years at ESPN doing boxing, college basketball, tennis, and other sports, while also serving as the Pac-10 football voice for various syndicators. In 1995 he joined Fox Sports as the lead play-by-play voice for Sunday Night Fights and continued with Pac-12 football and basketball on FSN for many years, plus coverage of poker. In 2011 he moved to the WAC Sports Network, then in 2012 became the lead play-by-play for the Mountain West on Time Warner Cable SportsNet.
He joined Showtime Sports in 2012 to call ShoBox and ShoExtreme. In 2013 he began teaching in the Communications Department at Dominican University of California and has continued doing college sports work for Time-Warner and Comcast. He is married to Joan Ryan, a sports writer, and has a son named Ryan. He also drew attention for voting for Colt McCoy over Andrew Luck in Heisman Trophy balloting, a move that sparked controversy.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 23:23 (CET).