His name is Connor Onion, but he won’t make you cry.
If you’ve heard him broadcast games for Fox Sports, you already know that. What you might not know is that he could’ve been Connor O’Onion — pronounced O’Own-yun.
“It was O’Onion when my family was in Ireland,” Onion told the Sun-Times. “They came to the United States and dropped the ‘O’ to try to assimilate and naturally became farmers.
“An agriculture family with the last name Onion, I was told it was good for business. And they were also growing onions.”
Decades later, Onion was courtside with the man who turned the vegetable into a catchword. In 2023, Onion called a game with renowned college basketball analyst Bill Raftery — “Onions!” — and gifted him onions from his family on the air.
The story is so sweet, it actually might make you cry.
But enough onion jokes. The point is, Onion, a La Grange native and Lyons graduate, has made a name for himself in broadcasting. This summer, after Jason Benetti left for NBC, Fox promoted Onion, 31, to its No. 2 college football crew alongside analyst Robert Griffin III and reporter Alexa Landestoy. They’ll call the Northwestern-Indiana game Friday (7 p.m., Fox 32, 720-AM).
But in high school, Onion was focused more on becoming an athlete than a broadcaster. When he visited Ball State, he hoped to walk on to the football team. Then-coach Pete Lembo sized up the 5-11 Onion — wearing six pairs of socks to look taller — and probably thought, “Are you serious?”
“I think Coach Lembo had seen that trick before,” Onion said. “He was nice about it, but he was like, ‘I’ve seen the few highlights you have from high school. I think it’s probably time you consider a different profession.’ So that put me on the path to start pursuing broadcasting.”
During his senior year, Onion applied for 50 jobs broadcasting minor-league baseball. Five teams responded, two granted him interviews and one gave him an offer for the 2017 season — the Quad Cities River Bandits, then the Astros’ Single-A affiliate.
That job put him on the air every day, giving him the repetition to improve. His job that fall, calling sports at Southern Illinois, gave him the chance to sharpen his skills, thanks in large part to Mike Reis, who retired in 2023 after 44 seasons calling SIU sports.
“We had a lot of conversations in his office in Carbondale where he told me, ‘Connor, I think you’ve got potential, but you’ve got a lot of getting better to do,’ ” Onion said. “I was crushed when he would sit me down and tell me that I wasn’t very good. I have a lot of where this thing has taken me because of the guidance that Mike Reis has given me.”
“You don’t ask for criticism if you think you’re really good,” Reis said. “It starts with ego and being a good person, believing you’re not the star. Those are character things that are in Connor’s favor that led to the success that he’s having at an early age.”
At SIU, Onion called women’s volleyball. That helped him get a job in 2021 at Big Ten Network, which was starting to air more volleyball. He added Big Ten basketball and football to his resume, and that helped him get a job in 2024 with Fox, which co-owns BTN with the conference.
Bulls fans should remember Onion from his time subbing for TV voice Adam Amin last year. The Bulls had three consecutive remarkable games out West, a double-overtime loss to the Jazz and thrilling wins over the Nuggets and Trail Blazers. Onion called them as if he had been doing the job for years. As a lifelong Bulls fan, it was a special experience.
“I was born right in the middle of the two three-peats,” he said. “The joke in my family is that my birth certificate says, ‘Time of birth: End of Bulls game,’ because everybody’s eyes were glued to the Bulls instead of delivering me into the world.”
Now all eyes are on him as he calls college football, college basketball, volleyball and baseball for Fox. In fact, after calling Northwestern-Indiana, he’ll drive to Indianapolis, get a few hours of sleep and fly out Saturday morning to call Orioles-Yankees at night. Next Friday, he, Griffin and Landestoy will call Penn State-Northwestern, the first game at the new Ryan Field.
They’re plum assignments for Onion, who has an excellent voice, command of his broadcasts and a minimalist style. He also has an endearing humility, as shown in another onion story.
When schools shut down during the pandemic, one of Onion’s odd jobs was selling onions at a farmer’s market in La Grange. The farmers he worked for, from Michigan, thought he was just a neighborhood kid who needed some extra cash. Eventually, his broadcasting came up.
“There’s some Michigan State fans that are part of that farm that have seen the games that I’ve done since then,” Onion said. “That’s been funny to revisit.”
Enough to make you cry.