This issue will look at female TV sportscasters. There have been so few female sportscasters that most of the pioneers are still in the business. According to a 1991 Sports Illustrated article, "Industry sources estimate there are fewer than 50 women working as sportscasters at the 630 network affiliate stations around the country." (1) Since there were so few women in sportscasting then, it's not surprising that the pool of female sportscasters considered experienced enough to land network level jobs is still relatively small.
According to Arthur Kaminsky, an agent who has represented a number of the top female sportscasters, "It's a generational thing. There are women who grew up watching sports now just getting into TV. As they move up, the opportunities will follow." (2)
In 1996 Mo Davenport, the coordinating producer for ESPN's women's NCAA basketball tournament, said, "If there were more women play-by-play options out there, we'd try to hire more of them. With the size and magnitude of the event, we go with the very best people available. We did extensive research in looking for talent. We wound up with eight women analysts and one woman play-by-play. We think that's in the right direction." (3) The other seven play-by-play slots for the tournament were filled by men.
Much of the credit for opening up opportunities for female sportscasters must go to ESPN. The first female talent the cable network hired was Gayle Gardner in 1983. Said John Walsh, ESPN's executive editor, "We try to get the best person for the job, and in our minds gender does not influence one's ability to get the interview or report the story." (4)
Talking about her own experience, ESPN reporter Andrea Kremer said, "ESPN has been the most progressive entity in hiring women to cover pro football. ESPN has not stereotyped me by assigning soft features. It has let me discuss game strategy. I'm encouraged to use the knowledge and contacts I've obtained in my 12 years of covering the NFL." (5)
Similarly, Robin Roberts, who works for ESPN and ABC, gave the cable network high marks. "I never had the idea or impression that women (at ESPN) were hired just based on (looks). You can't do that. Our audience is sports savvy, and you wouldn't dare hire anyone who didn't know about sports." (6)
Still, female sportscasters at ESPN and elsewhere are aware of a double standard. Said Roberts, "If Chris [Berman] were to slip and say 'innings' instead of 'quarters,' people would say, 'That old Boomer! Ha, ha, ha.' If I said 'innings' instead of 'quarters,' though, it would be 'Aha! She doesn't know what she's talking about. ...' But I'm very pleased to see the growth of women sportscasters. I don't just cover the Women's Final Four; I cover the Men's Final Four as well.'' (7)
Kremer agreed. ''It's tougher on women, no question about it. The margin for error is just not there. You cannot make a mistake.'' (8)
Said Walsh, "Women can't afford to make the same mistakes men can and recover from them. When a woman makes a mistake, the male audience says, 'Ah-hah, I told you.' When Chris Berman makes a mistake, the audience says 'Ah, he just missed that one.'" (9)
Another issue which seems to come up more for female sportscasters than their male counterparts (at least in the articles written about them) is their social life or lack thereof. Said Roberts in 1994, "Personal life? I remember what that was like. I think I had one in college." (10)
Noted Kremer, "I hate to put it this way, but a lot of my male colleagues have wives who can pay the bills and take care of all the things that I have to take care of in addition to doing my job." (11)
Some female sportscasters (e.g., Hannah Storm, Lesley Visser, Andrea Joyce) have found a way to blend professional and social life by marrying fellow sportscasters or broadcasters.
Here are profiles of three female sportscasters:
She majored in English at Boston College. In 1974 she received a Carnegie Foundation grant to work as a sports reporter covering high school football for the Boston Globe. When she graduated from college in 1975, she continued on at the paper.
In 1976 she was assigned to cover the New England Patriots. She was 21 and became the first female NFL beat writer. "I wasn't at the dawn of women covering sports. But I made the breakfast." (13) She wasn't always welcomed in the locker room, but she stuck it out. During her years at the Globe, Visser also covered the NCAA Final Four, the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the World Series, the Olympics, and college football. In 1983 she received the Outstanding Woman Sportswriter in America award.
In 1980 she did a few features for CBS. "In television, usually it's, 'Let's hire somebody who knows television and we'll teach them sports.' But CBS said, 'Let's hire somebody who knows sports and teach them television.'" (14) But it took time. "The first six months I looked like I had rigor mortis. It's a learned skill." (15)
By 1982 she was a feature reporter for the network while continuing to write for the Globe. In 1988 she became a regular sportscaster for CBS. She covered the NBA, college basketball, Major League Baseball, college football, the College World Series, U.S. Open Tennis, and several Olympic sports.
In 1990 she became a regular on "The NFL Today." She said that contacts she had made over the years while covering the sport allowed her to get interviews that others might not have been able to get. "I had gained respect with 10 years covering pro football and 14 (years) at the Globe. I understood what a box-and-one and a two-three zone defense was. Knowledge is the key." (16)
In 1992, she became the first woman to handle the televised Super Bowl postgame presentation ceremonies. Then in 1994 she moved to ABC/ESPN. "When CBS lost the NFL [in 1993], we all had to leave." (17) For ESPN she became a correspondent for "NFL GameDay" and "SportsCenter" and contributed to horse racing and college basketball programming. For ABC her work has included being a sideline reporter for college football bowl games, NFL playoff games, the Super Bowl, horse racing, and "Wide World of Sports."
This season she will be a sideline reporter for "Monday Night Football," making her the first woman to become a member of the Monday night football broadcast team. She feels she's earned it after covering the NFL for almost 25 years. "Credibility doesn't come from gender. It comes from the work you've done. ...
"When I started out in the '70s, people wrote to ask me why I was doing this. Now they write to ask me if I think the Dallas Cowboys are going to get to the playoffs." (18)
Visser is married to Dick Stockton, who has been a play-by-play announcer covering pro football, baseball, and college basketball for CBS and now works for Fox/TNT. "We're together maybe four days a week. That way we don't get tired of each other," she said. (19)
She earned a degree in communications and political science from the University of Notre Dame. While in school she worked for local stations. After graduation in 1983, she sent out 175 resumes for a sportscasting job. When that failed to produce any results, she took a job as a disc jockey at a radio station in Corpus Christi, Texas. She learned about the job through an ad. Six months later she got a job at a Houston rock station doing part-time sports work.
During her four years in Houston, she held radio jobs (including co-hosting a radio sports talk show with a Houston Rockets team member), freelanced for Home Sports Entertainment cable, and hosted the NBA Rockets' halftime and postgame shows for an independent TV station.
In 1988 she lost her radio job. She tried to land a full-time TV job but no Houston station would hire her. "... I interviewed for openings at all the TV stations there and couldn't get hired. I had a name and a lot of experience, and one news director there said he wouldn't hire a woman over his dead body. I was turned down for more jobs than I care to think about now, some simply because of my gender." (21)
Finally, when one news director told her she didn't have enough experience, "... I came to the realization I had to leave town.'' (22)
She went to Charlotte, North Carolina for a year, where she was a weekend anchor and sports reporter. Then in 1989 CNN hired her. But first she was given a quiz to test her knowledge about sports. "I was just floored. I asked him, 'Do you give this quiz to everybody?' He said, 'Oh yes, everybody takes this test.'" (23) Later she found out that none of her male colleagues had been tested. At that time, the CNN sports department had 75 men and three women.
Storm was a sportscaster for CNN for three years. She served as the anchor of "CNN Sports Tonight" and host of "CNN Sports Saturday" and "CNN Sports Sunday," and co-host of the 1990 Goodwill Games. "On some weekends, we were doing five half-hour shows, writing all of our own material. You were working 12-hour days, working like crazy. By the time I got to NBC, I had so much experience I felt like it helped me jump right in there." (24)
NBC hired her in 1992. There she covered tennis, co-hosted "Notre Dame Saturday," and was a sideline reporter for college football games. In 1994 she was named the primary sideline reporter for NBC's NFL coverage. She also served as a reporter for NBA games. In 1995 she anchored "Baseball Night in America," making her the first woman to host a weekly network pregame show for a major sport. In 1996 she co-anchored the Atlanta Olympics late-night show, as she had also done in Barcelona at the 1992 Games.
In 1997 she became the host of "NBA Showtime." Bob Costas, who had been host, moved into play-by-play coverage and Storm took over the studio job. "What was really gratifying is that a woman has never had this role in network television, and nobody made a big deal of it. People accepted me as a sportscaster and there was no fanfare, no, 'She does a good job for a woman.'" (25)
In 1997 she also became the play-by-play voice for NBC's coverage of the WNBA. "It's unusual to be doing your first play-by-play in the middle of your career. Usually you take the (Bob) Costas route, starting when you're 20 years old.
"I love basketball, but I was never sure an opportunity like this would present itself." (26)
"You're only as good as your last game. You have to strive every time you go on camera for excellence and believe that nothing short of that is acceptable.
"I never want to sit back and say, 'Now that I am at NBC I can coast.' Everything I do, every time I do it, I want to be better." (27)
''Communication is the bottom line. The key is to project an aura of confidence, knowledge and comfortableness - if that's a word - so the audience is comfortable with you. All that adds up to one key word, and that's 'credibility,' and that goes for a man or a woman.'' (28)
"I'm not going to let someone else's agenda, prejudices or small-mindedness keep me from doing my job." (29)
"You can't control what people's attitudes are towards you, you can't control the way they think about women, but what you can control is your reaction." (30)
"I would say there are still definitely areas to conquer, and I'm certain that they will be at some point. It's just a natural evolution of the ways things have gone and the opportunities that have increased for women. I think at some point you'll see a team hire a woman as its play-by-play or color voice." (31)
Like other women in sportscasting, Storm has talked about the demands on her personal life. "I had a problem as far as long-term relationships because a lot of the men I dated weren't secure with what I was doing. They weren't secure with the fact that I was on TV, that I worked every weekend, that I worked with all men, that I went into locker rooms -- it was the whole nine yards." (32)
In 1994 Storm married Dan Hicks, a fellow sportscaster she met at CNN. He also moved to NBC in 1992 and currently covers golf, the NFL, and Olympic sports. Said Hicks, "Having her as a wife has been ideal because she understands the demands and intensity of the business. When we go out on the road or research an event, we each know from firsthand experience what it's like." (33) They are both frequently on the road and have to juggle running a household between them. "Nobody is anchored here taking care of all the little household things.
"It's a pretty wild situation but somehow we get it all done," he noted. (34) NBC cooperates by making sure Storm and Hicks are never kept apart more than three weeks at a time and the network has accommodated them in their parenting of two young daughters.
After she graduated she went to work as a news anchor and sports reporter for a radio station in Patchoque, New York. She worked for three other New York radio stations between 1984 and 1987. In 1985 she got a part-time job as a sports/news anchor and reporter for a Long Island television station. From 1985 to 1986 she also worked as anchor, news director, and chief correspondent for "Long Island News Tonight," a daily television news program.
In 1987 she worked for ABC Radio Network, where she became the first full-time female sports anchor on a national radio network. From 1988 to 1989, she served as a sports reporter for both SportsChannel America and News 12 on Long Island.
In 1989 she hosted a call-in show and provided sports updates at WFAN in New York. Later that year she became the sports anchor for the Seattle CBS affiliate. That meant her husband had to give up his job to make the move. "He was not thrilled. My in-laws were not thrilled. He's not even a mega- sports fan. I was asking him to leave his job to go to Seattle, where he had one business connection. But he really knows me. He understood that there was real potential for me to grow in my career." (35)
Shortly after Cohn arrived in Seattle, ESPN made her an offer. She declined because her husband would have had to leave his new job. In 1992 ESPN made another offer and she took it. Her husband, a market researcher, now works at home and helps to watch their two children. "It doesn't work without an understanding spouse. It just doesn't. If he were home complaining, 'Oh, Mommy isn't here,' then it would be a big deal to the kids, too." (36)
Cohn is aware of the expectations of her. "If I have a hair out of place, both the men and the women on the couch are going to pay more attention to that than anything I'm saying. ...
"I know there are always going to be people out there who are just not going to like me no matter what I do. They're just not going to like the whole Linda Cohn package. But I think people who do like me say, 'She's no phony. You can see it in her face and in her eyes, she really knows her stuff.'" (37)
She hoped to replace Keith Olbermann in 1997 when he left his spot at the main "SportsCenter," which runs at 11 PM on the East Coast. But Kenny Mayne got the job. "I'll be honest. I was disappointed. But I thought I had done everything I could do to get the job, and the way I look at it, it's fate. One door closes, another opens. I didn't get that job, so I want to go out and cover more things, grow in another way." (38)
"The best advice [I can give to females wanting to enter sportscasting] would be to expect sacrifice and make sacrifices. Another important thing is to always be accurate. People will always want to find mistakes because you're a woman. So if you're accurate then they'll have nothing on you that way. What's important to me in me going as far as I have is that I really love what I do and I'm able to parlay that on the screen. I think that's a big reason for my success. It's not fake, it's not phony. If there's someone out there who wants to get into this field and look in the mirror and if it fits the requirement of 'I really love this' then that's the best start you can have." (39)