Winning the only Billie Jean King “Outstanding Journalist” award in Los Angeles in 2008
In my junior year, I applied for a Carnegie Foundation Grant, given to twenty women in the country who wanted to go into jobs that were 95 percent male—which, really, were all white-collar jobs. This was 1973, not 1873, yet women were still mostly teachers, nurses, or secretaries. They were just starting to go to law school or medical school.
There were a series of interviews for the grant in Pittsburgh and New York. When they were complete, out of the twenty grant winners, one woman from Michigan got it for archeology, another woman from Radcliffe got it for anthropology—and I got it for sportswriting! Their heads must have been on a swivel, it was so unheard of.
The Carnegie Corporation would pay a stipend for eight weeks during the summer of 1974. I have never been to Carnegie Hall without saying a prayer of thanks for the great industrialist. (Andrew Carnegie is the greatest philanthropist in the history of this country except for Buffett and Gates, having donated more than a thousand libraries.) The grant entitled me to work anywhere in America, but I went to the paper with the best sports section in the country, the Boston Globe, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. The eagle had landed!
If I could save time in a bottle, I would save the summer of ’74. The staff was world class: Bud Collins on tennis, Pete Gammons on baseball, Bob Ryan on basketball, Will McDonough on football, and columnists Ray Fitzgerald and Leigh Montville. The young reporters (now all Hall of Famers) were Kevin Dupont, Dan Shaughnessy, and me. We did a little bit of everything, and in the fall we covered high school sports.
I met Bud Collins in the fall of my junior year in college. I was a cheerleader at BC (I know it seems strange now, but this was before Title IX and was the only thing remotely athletic for women at the time). In the fourth quarter of a football game, Mike Lupica came down to the field and told me, “Get out of that cheerleader outfit, we’re going to dinner with Bud Collins.” I didn’t know if he was kidding; I didn’t even care. I ran up to my dorm room when the game ended and changed clothes. Mike and I took the T (Boston’s public transit) to Newbury Street and went to this little French restaurant, two floors below street level, where they had things on the menu that I’d never heard of, like tournedos and chanterelles. There was Bud, and everything you’ve heard about him is true. He was the nicest man in the history of the business. He wasn’t just the journalist who taught us all tennis. He was the socially conscious figure who traveled for a year with Muhammad Ali, defending him as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, and the man who went to South Africa with Arthur Ashe to combat apartheid. Bud cared about everything, from race relations to Vietnam to how your day went.
With legendary tennis writer Bud Collins at a 2007 dinner in Boston
Bud died in March of 2016 at eighty-six, and he was a treasure to us all. He made tennis a major sport in this country, teaching us the backhand volley and making us laugh. He both educated and entertained—for fifty years at the Globe, and on NBC from 1972 to 2007. He made us get up for “Breakfast at Wimbledon.” He said he went from being a scribbler to a babbler and I was lucky enough to start covering Wimbledon with him in 1976. Only a few American papers even traveled to Wimbledon in the late 1970s. It was a fantastic time for American tennis players: the rise of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova; the stability of Billie Jean King; the emergence of John McEnroe, Bjorn Borg, and their elder, Jimmy Connors. The American correspondents had a small corner of the press room—we were called “the Colonials”—and we had to send our copy by Western Union. This wasn’t the 1920s, but the 1970s. Bud famously tried, on one story, to write that girls in the stands loved Borg’s flowing blond hair and went into fits of “Borgasms,” but Western Union wouldn’t send it. Bud didn’t care. He had hundreds of other anecdotes and witticisms to fill the copy, anyway.
I loved college football, but I was meant for the pros. And in the early 1970s, the Globe made me the first woman to cover the NFL as a beat. It was both glorious and brutal. There are no other words. I cherished being near the greatest place on earth, an NFL kickoff, every Sunday at one o’clock, and I’ve tried to make humor out of all the slights that came with that privilege, slights that ranged from jealousy to contempt to no ladies’ rooms to complete dismissal. I never sued anyone or went complaining to my editors, but it wasn’t pretty. For one thing, the wives hated me. I was twenty-three years old, better than average looking (but by no stretch a beauty queen). It didn’t help. The wives were sure I was after their men. I couldn’t betray anyone—I needed the players’ trust—so I never mentioned the clusters of groupies who greeted us in hotel lobbies in Kansas City, Oakland, and Buffalo.
I wanted to cover pro football for a variety of reasons. I loved the NFL. The game was exploding, overtaking baseball and horse racing, and it gave me the chance to show women that we could be something different than a nurse, a teacher, or a secretary. I also got to travel the country, places no one goes unless they are running for office or covering sports. When the Globe told me I’d be covering the Patriots, I almost fainted—I felt like the entire world of feminism was on my shoulders, but deep down I knew I would prove worthy of the task. Then I changed my outfit twenty-five times.
CHAPTER 3
I did a few features on the Patriots in 1975, months before I became the beat writer. That was a fantastic year to love sports or journalism. Watergate had come to its conclusion; Attorney General John Mitchell, along with Nixon’s chief of staff H. R. Haldeman and lawyer John Ehrlichman had been found guilty of the cover-up and were going to prison. John Wooden coached his last game at UCLA by winning a national championship over Kentucky and, yes, a team called Golden State won the NBA title, beating the Washington Bullets in four straight games.
It was a time of basketball emergence. The Warriors, led by Hall of Famer Rick Barry, played in the Cow Palace, outside of San Francisco. The Bullets had two all-time greats, Elvin Hayes and Wes Unseld. Having interviewed both of them, I can tell you that Elvin could really sweat (not like Moses Malone, who would drip smelly droplets on me after a game) and Wes had the biggest rear end I’ve ever seen—way before the Kardashians. It was a fun time in America: the middle class was rocking along (to the sounds of KC and the Sunshine Band), and the general feeling was that people needed a hand up, not a hand out.
The year 1975 was the golden age of newspapers. Everyone had followed the Watergate hearings and wanted to be Woodward or Bernstein. The Boston Globe had already created the “Spotlight” team in the 1970s—the same group depicted in the Academy Award–winning film by that name in 2015. The legendary editor Tom Winship had created the investigative team decades before the current group uncovered the scandal in the Catholic Church. Spotlight even won a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for exposing political favoritism in Somerville, Massachusetts. The Globe’s political cartoonist, Paul Szep, won the Pulitzer for editorial cartooning in 1974. Our sports department was filled with smoke and laughter, with a national following and the clatter of sportswriters on deadline. I pinched myself every day that I was a part of it.
It wasn’t all glory. Our editors, Dave Smith and Vince Doria, along with the great assistant sports editor, Tom Mulvoy (who had a machine-gun mind and an appetite for any kind of knowledge), thought I was sort of a poor man’s George Plimpton and would assign me humiliating first-person stories. Once I had to go hang gliding off some cliff in Plymouth. I nearly killed myself, but hang-gliding was cool and the Globe wanted a personal story on it. Another time, they sent me into the woods for three days for something called “orienteering.” It was a sad form of competitive camping, thirty years before the internet or cell phones or help of any kind. As I recall, the competitors were supposed to sprint from point to point, using only a map and a compass. At night, we actually were given headlamps! I’m not making this up. I didn’t speak to Smith or Doria or Mulvoy for a month. As soon as I opened my mouth, though, they were back at it, making me go to a
skateboarding stadium—a giant U-shaped arena where fearless kids on wooden boards with roller-skate wheels would push off the top of one end, fly down to the bottom, and let momentum carry them to the top of the other end. I told the photographer he better get it the first time, because I was only going to do it once. I have the scars of scraped knees to this day. I’m surprised Doria didn’t think of making me try street luge.
I had a few more absurd assignments. One time I had to do a feature on a baseball player who had a tattoo of a bird and a worm on his inner elbow, and when he would flex his arm, the bird would eat the worm. No wonder I’d make Dan Shaughnessy go drinking with me at night. Dan was a great friend—someone who was safe, someone I could tell my deepest fears and my greatest triumphs to, and with whom I could share my childhood secrets. And we would laugh, God, we would laugh.
I lived with eight girls in two apartments in Brookline Village, a crummy space over the post office, so everyone woke up at 5 AM when the trucks would pull in beneath us to pick up the mail. My friend Jan and I would go up on the tar roof of the apartment building when it was 95 degrees and sing Elton John songs. We each had cheap guitars and thought we were Joan Baez. Across from us was an Irish bar, and we’d go sing “Four Green Fields” like we’d come to America in the potato famine. Jan was Scottish, and I was Dutch, but we didn’t care.
While everyone was living and dying with the Red Sox, the Globe sent me to Shea Stadium, where the Giants, Yankees, Mets, and Jets were all playing in one year in one stadium. It was crazy—people don’t remember, but under new Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, it was announced that Yankee Stadium would undergo two years of renovation and the team would have to play at Shea. Picture all four teams playing in one facility, juggling schedules and dates and billboards. Shea had a Kentucky bluegrass outfield and a dirt infield. No one on the grounds crew, led by Pete Flynn, had a day off for more than a year. It was twelve months of scheduling nightmares, field issues, locker room sharing (the Yankees thrown in with the Jets), and media competition. Bill Virdon was the manager of the Yankees, and the players complained that the dimensions were so much bigger at Shea than at Yankee Stadium that they couldn’t hit home runs. No one came to the games, even though the Yankees had Catfish Hunter and Bobby Bonds. The planes overhead, waiting to land at La Guardia Airport, bothered the pitchers and, of course, there was no room on the scoreboard for an American League DH. I thought it was funny, and I was glad to get back to Fenway.
The year 1975 also led to one of my favorite arguments: What do you think the greatest sporting event of your lifetime was? The Thrilla in Manila, Secretariat, the Miracle on Ice? My husband, who grew up in Columbus, Ohio, would say the it was the last-second Buckeye win over Michigan in 2016. To me, without question, it was Game 6 of the 1975 World Series—a game that began on Tuesday, October 21, but actually ended, as Sinatra would say, “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” of Wednesday, October 22.
Fans had started paying real attention to the Red Sox that September. They were obviously headed for the playoffs; I did stories on rookies Fred Lynn and Jim Rice, the golden twins who were so integral to the Sox title chase. Rice missed the playoffs with a broken hand, but he helped get them there. Lynn, of course, was the Rookie of the Year and the MVP in the same season, and he was both polite and kind. Luis Tiant had been rescued from the scrap heap years before, yet he led the Sox to two wins over the Reds in the World Series. Before the games, he would wander the stands and pose for pictures. There was even an El Tiante Cubano Sandwich—twenty-five years before stadiums started having specialty foods—and people wore fake Fu Manchu mustaches in his honor.
The sixth game of the 1975 World Series followed a three-day rain delay. On Tuesday, October 21, 1975, the skies finally cleared. It was game time. Cincinnati manager Sparky Anderson popped a piece of gum in his mouth at 6 AM, and All-Star catcher Johnny Bench felt lousy, but he knew it was the day. Luis Tiant shook off his own cold; it was late October and, for everyone, it was cold. Fred Lynn had watched Monday Night Football the night before (he could have played football at USC) and he didn’t get much sleep. It had been five days since both teams played in Cincinnati. The Globe had everyone on duty—fifteen story lines—would the Carmine Hose finally win at home against the Big Red Machine?
I was a twenty-one-year-old graduate of Boston College. Sports, especially baseball, had been a man’s game, and I was glad to be part of the periphery. I was not included in the vast array of assignments, but Peter Gammons, whom I will love until the day I die, said that he and Tony Kubek of NBC had an extra credential—would I like to go to the game? Cue the archangels. I was insane with joy, and I went to the press box on Tuesday night three hours early and sat there like a statue.
The tarp over the infield had been put on and pulled off at least five times and Joe Mooney, the famous groundskeeper, finally said the field was ready to go. Chet Simmons, head of NBC, knew that the last three World Series had been won by Charles Finley’s colorful but small-market Oakland Athletics, and that this game had the chance to be really big time. A gibbous moon (I looked it up—it means the moon and the sun are on opposite sides of Earth) hung over Fenway.
Before the game, I had been introduced to announcer Dick Stockton, who was calling the game for NBC. He barely acknowledged me, but said maybe some night we could have dinner. I thought he was smart and funny—who else would be asked to do the World Series? But both of us were otherwise occupied.
Cincinnati had a 3–2 lead in the Series. Bernie Carbo’s pinch-hit three-run homer tied the game in the eighth inning, 6–6, and things really got tense. Dwight Evans robbed Joe Morgan of the go-ahead run in the eleventh inning with a spectacular catch in right field and it was still tied, deep into a crisp October night.
When Carlton Fisk came up to face Pat Darcy in the bottom of the twelfth, no one knew his home run and body language would become the stuff of lore. Fisk had been born across the Massachusetts state line in Bellows Falls, Vermont, and was raised in Charlestown, New Hampshire. He’d played baseball at Charlestown High and had been called “Pudge” from the time he was eight years old. With his massive shoulders and square jaw, he told people that he would never give up and never give in.
Dick Stockton called Fisk’s titanic blast down the left field foul pole, saying, “If it stays fair, home run!” Bells rang out all over New England, especially in Charlestown. The organist at Fenway, John Kiley, played Handel’s Hallelujah chorus. It was 1:15 AM, and a son of New England had hit one of the most famous home runs in baseball history. Harry Coyle’s famous use of the left field scoreboard camera caught Fisk willing the ball to stay fair. Because of that shot, baseball changed. Networks refigured where they would put their cameras, and reaction shots became standard stuff. Not only was Game 6 one of the best games ever played—it was certainly, to that point, the best baseball broadcast.
Dick Stockton and I did go out for that dinner a week later, and he related the story of how, as a thirty-two-year-old broadcaster, he got a telegram saying that NBC would like him to do the World Series. It was from legendary producer Chet Simmons, who also wished Dick luck. After many days of rain, Bowie Kuhn decided that going up against Monday Night Football and All in the Family wasn’t a good trade for twenty-four more hours, so that is why Game 6 was finally played on Tuesday night. Dick had done Game 1, then Simmons had a rotation among Curt Gowdy and Joe Garagiola. It just happened that Dick had Game 6. We used to joke that meeting me (we were married for twenty-six years) wasn’t even the greatest thing that happened to Dick that night! A week after the series, Dick took me to the famous Cafe Budapest. Someone at the Globe had put a note in my typewriter: “Before you think you like Dick Stockton, you should know that he’s been to the Cafe Budapest three times in the last week with three different girls.” When I confronted Dick with this, he said, sheepishly, “I like the chicken paprikash.”
At home in front of a painting given to me by my husband in 2011. Photo by Joe Fisti
ck ©2016 SportsBusiness Journal. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
CHAPTER 4
I’ve been blessed in my life to have had two great husbands. I was a young Boston Globe reporter when I met Dick Stockton at the sixth game of the ’75 World Series, and I was fifty-six years old when I went to say hello to Rick Pitino at the Kentucky Derby and he introduced me to my lifetime love, Bob Kanuth. Dick and I were married for almost twenty-six years, and now Bob and I are going on eight. And while I’ve had plenty of regrets, those men aren’t two of them.
Dick’s had a forty-five-year broadcasting career characterized by class and the comprehension of his role—not too much, not too little. He grew up listening to broadcasters like Russ Hodges and Ernie Harwell. I think the greatest day of his life was October 3, 1951—known in baseball as “the Shot Heard ’Round the World.” Dick was nine years old when New York Giants third baseman Bobby Thomson hit the game-winning home run off Dodger Ralph Branca at the Polo Grounds in the first-ever nationally televised game.
Dick heard it on the radio—Russ Hodges’s famous call, “The Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant!”—and every year on October 3, we used to make a pilgrimage to where the Polo Grounds used to be so I could hear the whole story . . . again. Thomson’s dramatic three-run homer in the ninth inning (with Willie Mays on deck) was also known as “The Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff,” coined by legendary sportswriter Red Smith. Of course, being born in Boston, I always thought the “Shot Heard ’Round the World” was from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem about the first battle of the Revolutionary War between Lexington and Concord, but once I threw in with Dick, the phrase took on a new meaning.
With Hall of Fame Coach Rick Pitino, who won NCAA titles with both Kentucky and Louisville, at the 2010 Kentucky Derby
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