Sometimes You Have to Cross When It Says Don't Walk

by Lesley Visser

  With Deion Sanders of CBS Sports. ©2002 CBS Worldwide Inc. All rights reserved.

  With Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Bill Cowher before the 2002 AFC Championship Game in Pittsburgh. Photo by Rusty Kennedy/CBS ©2002 CBS Worldwide Inc. All rights reserved.

  In the end, any experience changes you, and experiences are good for that. The trick is to own that moment. Almost everyone has a different interpretation of this. The legendary coach Red Auerbach used to say, “If you’re going to keep score, you might as well win.” The Persian poet Rumi said life has three staples, love, knowledge, and the law, and he found love to be the most important. I always thought humor helped me get along—it lightened the load, it defused the tension, it (mostly) diverted the hurt. But everyone has to find a path.

  CHAPTER 6

  We all remember that Donald Trump revived “locker room” talk in his presidential campaign. In 2016, female Harvard soccer players who were the subject of a sexually explicit “scouting report” by the men’s team wrote an op-ed for the Harvard Crimson saying, essentially, “the world is a locker room.” It brought down the male team. The men of Harvard (of all places!) apologized to the women for “rating their appearance” and assigning them “sex positions.” For about forty-five minutes, all was right with the world.

  But has it changed? The basic first step for female sportswriters and broadcasters was to get hired, then we had our own zigzag paths. My Terry Bradshaw story is near legendary in the annals of women covering sports. In the late 1970s, without provisions for equal access after a game, I was in my usual spot—in the parking lot—this time outside freezing Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. Bradshaw, the quarterback, finally emerged and saw me. He took my notebook, signed an autograph, and hustled away. I was left slack-jawed, stammering, “But—but, I’m a reporter!” Terry, now one of my good friends for decades, said that his autograph was worth more than “any crap I was going to write in the Boston Globe.” I think he said it with a smile.

  A little history. The first modern Olympics were for men only, but in 1900 women were allowed to participate. Over the years, the Games were flexible—tug-of-war was weeded out and the women’s marathon was added in Los Angeles in 1984. Professional athletes are now able to compete. I became the first woman to go down the Olympic bobsleigh (bobsled) in 1992 in Albertville, France, when the U.S. Team invited me. I had to get written permission from the president of the Games, Jean-Claude Killy, and the head of the United States Olympic Committee, Harvey Schiller. The thinking had been that women’s trapezius muscles (top of the shoulder) weren’t strong enough for our neck and head to withstand the g-forces going down the run and that our necks would snap back. I agreed to go down in the four-man bobsled (I was in the third position—remember Herschel Walker was on the team?) and all I kept thinking was that line from Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind”—“Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.” It was terrifying, rattling around in that skinny tin can. l was bruised for two weeks and I looked like bad fruit, but I lived to tell the tale.

  As the Olympics has successfully adapted and endured, so have women who cover sports. It’s not been easy, nor has it been a straight path. But women have had a passion and a skill, proving themselves over the years, and a handful of men in the 1970s took a chance on us. We had early rallying cries of equal opportunity and equal pay, but the truth is, if we got the job, most of us didn’t care about the money. The job had its own unique challenges—with no role models—so getting a byline in the paper was triumph enough. Women are still only 13 percent of sports departments, both newspaper and broadcast, and very few women are in positions of executive power. In forty years, I have never been hired by a woman, and only in 2016 at CBS was I able to pitch my story ideas to a fantastic female producer, Emilie Deutsch, a woman I’d worked with at ABC some twenty-five years before.

  Covering Prince Albert at the 1992 Olympic bobsled venue La Plagne in Albertville, France. He was a member of Monaco’s team.

  First woman down the bobsled run during the 1992 U.S. Olympic team’s practice run in Albertville, France

  Speaking at a 2009 event for young women in New York

  The early years were full of nerves and disappointments, yet many nights were filled with laughter and celebration. The first handful of women were so close that we were on each other’s holiday lists. We used to say, “We will have made it when we all don’t know each other!” Well, that time has come. The fight for access and status has resulted in women not even giving a second thought as to how they’ll get in the press box, or where they’ll go to the bathroom. Sometimes there is even a line! Women today, for the most part, can focus on the job, not wondering if there will be some ugly incident or access denial. After Robin Herman, covering professional hockey for the New York Times, and Marcel St. Cyr, a Montreal-based radio reporter, broke the locker room barrier in 1975, Herman received a handful of letters calling her a “prostitute.” That’s not the scene today, although many people, Herman among them, are dismayed that women are on the sideline and not in the booth.

  I love her impatience. As the person who invented the sideline role for women (I replaced three men—Irv Cross at CBS, Jack Whitaker on the Kentucky Derby, and Lynn Swann on Monday Night Football), I appreciate the job. Think of it. There are only three people total on a broadcast and the person on the sideline is one of them. I admit, in some ways, the job has diminished; some even consider it a dumping ground for women. It used to be a real reporter’s job, the gathering of information unavailable to the men in the booth. In many instances now, the job has been reduced to sticking a microphone in or near the player’s face for his or her response.

  The optimist in me knows how difficult that job is. You have no idea, at the end of a game, what a scrum it is out there in the middle of the field, how complicated it is to get the player you want, keep your wits about you, and be mindful of holding the player in place through a commercial break. Then the job starts. I was the first woman to provide color in an NFL booth (2001, the Dolphins) and on Monday Night Radio (Westwood One, 2000), but although these opportunities, like being the first woman on the sideline, were huge breakthroughs, neither appealed to me. I’m a reporter at heart, and that’s the path I’ve followed, but I believe a lot of social progress has been made. A young girl can now say I want to cover football or baseball, I want to be in print or on TV. I want to be a director, like Suzanne Smith at CBS, who handles a truck for NFL games, or a producer like Emilie Deutsch.

  Reporting from the field at Super Bowl XLVII in New Orleans

  The athletes themselves have made a change. Decades ago, they would scream about a woman being in their space. Now, for the most part, they accept that reporters will be there to get the story. There are eighty-two games in the NBA’s regular season and almost twice that many in Major League Baseball, and athletes only care if the same questions are being asked over and over again, as waves of journalists advance to their locker. It doesn’t bother them, it bores them. Even when the NFL locker rooms became open to women in the early-to-mid 1980s, more players were respectful than those who tried to make a scene. Many franchises now have their own media teams and their own studios, and a good number of those reporters are women. I call that progress.

  Progress, yes, but so much more to do. Amid the big sports headlines in 2016 about the Golden State Warriors and the Oakland Raiders, there was a small note in the New York Times that said, “Princeton cancels the remainder of the season in swimming and diving” . . . because team members had posted “vulgar and offensive” material about women on their electronic mailing list. Sound familiar? In the same year that Simone Biles took gymnastics to a nearly inhuman level, when Katie Ledecky pushed the pace in the pool faster than the cars at Indy, schools from Harvard to Amherst—oh, did I mention that Amherst College suspended its men’s cross-country team after reports that the athletes made racist and misogynistic comments in team-wide emails? Where was I? It was a year that a woman w
as nominated for president, a year that inspired more women to seek higher office, yet the tweets of Donald Trump took center stage.

  With CBS director Suzanne Smith at dinner in 2010. She is the only woman currently directing NFL games.

  There was a time before Facebook, which was founded in 2004, and Twitter and Instagram (2006 and 2010, respectively), when opinion makers had to attach their names to anything they wrote. Women make up 51 percent of the U.S. population and account for 47 percent of the labor force, yet many women don’t even root for each other. In many ways, we’re still swimming upstream. Katy Perry has more than 97 million Twitter followers, yet athletes from small, academically accomplished schools are still rating women on their looks. There is no way to counter that Lesley Stahl has to look great while doing a great job (in places like Syria, no less!), while Morley Safer and Andy Rooney never had to look anywhere near as stylish. Maybe we should all listen to the late, great Carrie Fisher, who said, “Please stop debating about whether or not I aged well . . . it hurts all three of my feelings.” Okay, maybe, as Carrie continued, “my body hasn’t aged as well as I have.” It’s another of the reasons I love sports. The game is there for all of you to see, the ultimate selfie.

  Which leads me to another thought (thanks for coming along)—why are professional sports for women so much less popular than the men’s? I admit, I wanted to cover the Final Four, not “the Women’s Final Four.” I wanted to cover Duke and Kansas, Louisville and Kentucky, not Tennessee and Connecticut women. I was both right and wrong. Men’s basketball, absent those two women’s programs, had been where the action was for almost fifty years. I only went to WNBA games when either of my friends Donna Orender or Val Ackerman were the commissioners. I did one of the last interviews with the late Pat Summitt of Tennessee, and it made my heart swell with sadness and pride.

  She was everything every woman would want to be: tough, original, a fighter, and a friend. She was nearing the end, but she did recall one national championship (she won eight), when the Lady Vols were trailing by ten with eight minutes to go against North Carolina. She gathered her team in the huddle and said, “We are not going home without a national championship!” I adored her, as did so many of her players and fans. She managed to raise a terrific son, Tyler, while making homemade ice cream and shooting hoops with him in the backyard. Geno Auriemma is close to the same at UConn, but I admit I knew Jim Calhoun much better. Auriemma, like many people, would quote John Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success,” adding that Wooden had Lew Alcindor, Bill Walton, and Gail Goodrich, while she had Diana Taurasi, Maya Moore, and Breanna Stewart.

  Most of us know names like Wooden, even sixty years later, but many Americans would have no idea who Auriemma is talking about. And why is that? All coaches want their players to live up to their potential, to practice like they play, to contribute and not to slack off. So why do we pay attention to the men and not the women? I have a theory; tell me what you think. I believe Americans love a big event; it’s why we know Simone Biles but have not seen another gymnastics event outside the Olympics. It’s why we know Hope Solo, but have never been to a women’s professional soccer game. I went to one in Boca Raton, Florida, when she was the goalie and there were maybe five hundred people at the game—and this was after the World Championships. I also think we’ll follow women’s individual sports—tennis or golf—but not team sports. Admittedly, it’s a circular chain of popularity. The media follows where the sponsors and the investors go; the advertisers go where the popularity is. The Women’s Sports Foundation estimated that women receive only 7 percent of media coverage and less than 1 percent of commercial sponsorship. The PGA offers more than $250 million in prize money; the LPGA, less than $50 million.

  With Kevin Costner at his fortieth birthday party in Los Angeles in 1995. I bought him a Green Bay cheesehead for a present.

  There are small steps of hope for women. LaChina Robinson from ESPN was asked if she wanted to cover the NBA and the former basketball player declined, telling Lauren Gentile (the senior VP of ESPN’s women’s initiatives) and producer Carol Stiff that she preferred to cover the women’s NCAA and WNBA. And after the 2012 Olympics in London, more than 500,000 women took up some form of sport. Are we going back to the future? In 1908, Marie Marvingt was denied the right to ride in the Tour de France. She did anyway and of the 115 people who started the 4,500-kilometer race, 37 managed to complete it: 36 men and 1 woman.

  CHAPTER 7

  My four favorite coaches of all time are Rick Majerus, Rick Pitino, Jim Valvano, and Bill Parcells. Majerus and Valvano died too young, Parcells retired, and Pitino won two championships at different schools before being put on administrative leave from Louisville (in his words “effectively fired”) for a pay-for-play scandal in 2017, about which he declared his innocence. My favorite NFL player was Lawrence Taylor, my favorite college player was Chris Mullin, and my favorite owners are Jerry Jones and Robert Kraft. Yes, Jerry Jones! I think he is a scream. He once told me that when he took his then-girlfriend Jean (now wife) to the Arkansas State Fair in the late 1950s and couldn’t knock down the Coke bottles to win her a bear, he went behind the stage and bought a bear from the carnival barker! I had huge admiration for Giants owner Wellington Mara (he once had a Mass said for me when I broke my hip) and for gentleman owner Art Rooney. But Jones made me laugh and Kraft gave me all my breaks. When people asked about the locker room, I told them that Robert Kraft was the first one to let me in. Everyone assumed I meant the Patriots, but I didn’t. I meant the 1976 Boston Lobsters—a World Tennis team that Kraft owned and that I covered for the Globe.

  My access to the Lobsters’ locker room came in the middle of a wild scene at BU’s Walter Brown Arena, with Ion Ţiriac as the player-coach followed by the great Roy Emerson and the newly defected Martina Navratilova as the star. Ţiriac smoked in the locker room and didn’t care who else was there. He was an original—the richest man in Romania (business, insurance, car dealerships) with a wild head of hair and a bowlegged walk. Never one to smile, he was sort of a tennis Bill Belichick, brilliant but surly and slow to laugh. A natural athlete, Ţiriac had been a member of the Romanian ice hockey team that competed in the 1964 Olympics in Innsbruck, and he won the French Open tennis doubles with fellow crazy Ilie Năstase. Ţiriac said he came to Boston because “the people there were civilized and I got $50 a week under the table.”

  Bob Kraft didn’t even own the Patriots then. The team was owned by businessman Billy Sullivan, a rascal himself, who finally sold the team to Victor Kiam in 1988. By then, I had covered the NFL for more than thirteen years. Many people think women started reporting on the NFL when Lisa Olson was bullied by the Patriots, but that was 1990. Women had been covering the NFL for years. Commissioner Pete Rozelle, followed by Paul Tagliabue, started opening the locker rooms to women in 1982. Of course, it was controversial, but the locker room was the place of business after a game. It’s where the stories were. The players could get dressed or cover up if they wanted to. It wasn’t sexy. Players were tired and hurt and wanted to go home. The reporters did, too.

  Of course I had humiliating moments—who didn’t? I remember once, covering the NBA playoffs in 1982, Bob Ryan and I were sent to Game 3 of the Celtics–Bullets Eastern Conference series in Washington. I had always loved Kentucky guards, back to Louie Dampier, through Kevin Grevey and Kyle Macy. Grevey was playing for the Bullets when they lost Game 3. After the game, Bob Ryan went to the Celtics’ winning locker room and I went to the Bullets’. I marched in with the pack of reporters and Grevey saw me. “Oh, God,” he said. “No one told us there’d be a fucking broad in here.” I turned deep purple and walked over to the only person I saw, some bench warmer who never played and was sitting by himself. After a few minutes, Grevey walked over and apologized, offering to buy me dinner, saying his mother didn’t raise him to treat women like that. We’ve been friends ever since, but at the time I felt lower than a fish on a hook.

  It was one moment I wish I’d
had Rick Majerus by my side. He was so honorable, so decent, that he would have taken care of it before my face colored red. One time at the Final Four, when one of his players from Utah, Britton Johnsen, was accused of hurling an ethnic slur at Makhtar N’Diaye, an opposing player from North Carolina, Rick stood at the postgame podium and said, “If this is true, I will resign right now.” N’Diaye said that maybe he’d misunderstood, and the moment passed.

  That’s the kind of person Rick was. His father, a union organizer from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, had taken him to civil rights marches in the South. Rick was the only coach I knew who read the New York Times every day. He loved to argue philosophy or the in-bounds pass, both with equal enthusiasm. Rick was the guy on the playground who was never good enough to get in the game, the sophomore who got cut from his high school team. One time, at Marquette, sitting on the bench for the great Al McGuire, Rick stormed into the coach’s office demanding to know why he didn’t play ahead of that kid Allie, whom Rick thought he was much better than.