Beloved Bay Area sports broadcaster Greg Papa was laid off by network KNBR amid major ongoing health issues, including his leukemia diagnosis last year.
The news was confirmed by Papa, 63, on Wednesday, August 5. Papa and John Silver, who was also let go by the network, hosted the midday talk show Papa & Silver.
Papa’s termination comes less than a month after he returned home after spending 78 days in the hospital, most of them in intensive care. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, both of Papa’s lungs collapsed due to post-surgery complications from a bone marrow transplant earlier this year.
The broadcaster developed four blood clots, suffered a hernia from coughing, needed two chest tubes and spent a week on a ventilator.
“For many weeks, the situation was life-threatening,” Papa told the Chronicle in a story published Sunday, August 2. “Now it’s life-altering.”
Papa, who is now cancer-free, explained how the dramatic ordeal changed his outlook on life.
“It’s like someone broke into your house with a gun and threatened to shoot you,” Papa said. “After staring at him long enough, you say: ‘Are you going to do it or not?’ I’m not afraid of you anymore, Boogeyman. You charge at it. I may be surrounded — cancer, lungs, heart — but I’m still going to fight.”
He added, “My doctors told me that 95 percent of people would have died from what I went through. They looked me in the eye and said, ‘We don’t know whether you will ever get out of here.’ My recovery was remarkable
Still, Papa acknowledged that he wouldn’t be able to do his job forever.
“I don’t have to prove anything — to anyone or to myself,” Papa said. “This is not what motivates me. Part of the motivation is that I want to decide when I stop. I want to plot the course of my own life.”
Papa has a separate contract with the 49ers as the team’s play-by-play voice.
When contacted by SFGATE on Wednesday about his firing, Papa admitted he was “surprised.”
“I know that people are going to feel a certain way about the station, and they absolutely can,” he said.
Silver, meanwhile, called his former cohost a “fighter” in a post after the news broke.
“This is so much deeper than sports talk,” Silver wrote via X. “I don’t know why we had to share our fate today, but keep going, mofo.”
