Greg Papa reveals new health setback

Greg Papa’s health battle has taken another difficult turn.

The longtime Bay Area broadcaster told The Standard in a text Tuesday that his genetic heart condition, cardiomyopathy, has worsened significantly as a result of his bone marrow transplant. Papa has been hospitalized since Sept. 7 with advanced heart failure, and UCSF’s Advanced Heart Failure team performed a diagnostic procedure Tuesday morning to get a clearer picture of his condition.

“All of your love and support has greatly helped us get past the many health obstacles we have faced,” Papa wrote. “Together we will get past the next challenge.”

Papa, the 49ers’ radio voice since 2019 and a Bay Area broadcasting fixture since the 1980s, announced his acute lymphoblastic leukemia diagnosis in August 2025 and spent 23 days hospitalized at UCSF that summer. He returned to hosting his KNBR show remotely by September while continuing chemotherapy, and by mid-December, doctors had cleared him to call the 49ers’ final two home games of the season.

That comeback proved to be the calm before a much harder stretch. Papa signed a new multiyear deal with KNBR in April to remain the voice of the 49ers, after undergoing a bone marrow transplant in February using a match from his sister, Judy. The transplant cleared his cancer, but it triggered a second, more dangerous crisis of its own. Complications that summer collapsed both of his lungs, put him on a ventilator for nearly a week, and led to a 78-day stay in the ICU before he was finally discharged on July 11. His doctors told him 95% of people who’d gone through what he had wouldn’t have survived it. He’s since needed pulmonary rehabilitation to rebuild his lung capacity and now relies on supplemental oxygen, with separate systems for home and travel.

Papa was still deep in that recovery in August when KNBR laid him off from Papa & Silver, his midday show, even though his hematologist had already cleared him to return to work. He’d been bracing for a call about his comeback plan when the station phoned instead to tell him the show was over.

Cumulus Media, KNBR’s parent company, initially declined to detail the specifics of his departure, saying only that it wished him “strength, healing, and a full recovery,” but the backlash was swift enough that the company reversed course within a month. Papa signed a new agreement bringing him back for a midday show called Lunch With Papa, alongside John Lund, the same host KNBR had laid off in its own round of cuts back in 2024. He was also lined up for an expanded role at NBC Sports Bay Area, including regular appearances on the network’s pregame and postgame shows, and had been tracking toward an earlier-than-expected return to the 49ers’ radio booth this season, after previously indicating the long flight to Australia for the team’s season opener would likely be too much for his lungs to handle.

It’s not yet known whether this setback affects Papa’s timeline to return to the booth.