Somewhere in Milwaukee County there is now a permanent, time-stamped record of Tony Romo, the highest-profile color analyst in football, asking a sheriff’s deputy for his lawyer eight separate times; CBS’s response to that record, as of this writing, has been to say absolutely nothing.
The facts, per TMJ4’s review of the search warrant, are unglamorous in the way these things usually are. A deputy pulled Romo over on I-43 southbound near the Marquette Interchange on the evening of Thursday, July 23, for passing unsafely on the right and cutting across the gore, the painted no-man’s-land between lanes that exists specifically so people don’t do that. Romo told the deputy he’d just come from the Wisconsin Amateur Championship in West Bend, where he’d finished tied for 73rd, and that he was on his way to see his grandparents. He said he hadn’t had anything to drink.
https://twitter.com/TMZ/status/2082257080501878974
The bodycam footage, also detailed by TMJ4, shows him struggling through the eye-tracking test and the walk-and-turn, at one point telling the deputy, “There’s too many. We got to go step by step,” and citing prior back surgeries as the reason the instructions weren’t landing. It is a strange thing to watch, a man whose entire second career is built on taking a chaotic sequence of events and narrating it back to twenty million people in real time, telling a deputy that a nine-step instruction is too much information at once. Nobody is suggesting the roadside test and the broadcast booth measure the same skill. But the optics of a professional explainer unable to process step-by-step instructions on camera are not optics CBS gets to spin; the footage exists, and it’s the footage people will watch, not a press release.
Romo refused the preliminary breathalyzer and the evidentiary breath test. “Like I said, I want my lawyer for the eighth time,” he told the deputy, according to the same TMJ4 report, before deputies filed a search warrant for a mandatory blood draw and issued him a citation for refusing the intoxication test. He was booked into jail around 9:45 p.m. and released roughly an hour later, charged with Operating While Intoxicated, first offense, according to Fox6Now. His court date is September 21, less than two weeks into the NFL season he’s supposed to be calling alongside Jim Nantz.
None of that is a verdict; the case is pending, the blood results aren’t public, and nothing here settles what actually happened on I-43 that Thursday. What’s already settled is the search-term problem. Type in Tony Romo DUI CBS and you’ll find people using the wrong acronym for a charge that is legally OWI, first offense, which is its own small illustration of how fast a story outruns its facts once bodycam video is loose in the world. The Tony Romo Milwaukee arrest didn’t need embellishment to become a headline; it had video.
CBS, for its part, has said nothing, which ESPN confirmed and which tracks with a network that has had a rough year making CBS hiring decisions look deliberate rather than reactive. CBS is not the only network having a bad year at the talent-management level, but it is the one whose top NFL voice just handed the internet his own arrest footage seven weeks before kickoff. The Tony Romo OWI arrest doesn’t need CBS to comment on it to keep circulating. Silence was never going to be the strategy that made the bodycam go away.
