In Doha, Qatar, with Olympic gold medalists Nancy Hogshead-Makar and Donna de Varona
One of the other big changes I’ve seen is Title IX. Passed in 1972, it really came of age at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, when the young women of Title IX won everything—soccer, softball, basketball, and gymnastics—the first time ever that the United States won the team gold. The U.S. women ruled those games. And the opportunities created by Billie Jean King were no less than those created by Jackie Robinson, it’s just that as a society we gravitate toward the men. When asked who the greatest tennis player in history is, at least we can argue Serena or Steffi, along with Roger Federer and Rod Laver.
Many other women are powering all kinds of success, and that’s what we need to celebrate: the mother who makes a difference, the teacher, Ellen DeGeneres, Tina Fey, Viola Davis, the female boss who promotes younger women. Aristotle said that “educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” In the end, only kindness matters. I’m not great on infrastructure or technology; I hope you will teach me. You might be younger, but I see you. I hope you see me. And if you are older, you must know, you’re not too old and it’s not too late. And thank you, Les Moonves and Sean McManus from CBS, for starting the first national show of all women talking sports, which includes veterans like Dara Torres, Andrea Kremer, Amy Trask, Laila Ali, Tracy Wolfson, Katrina Adams, Dana Jacobson, Summer Sanders, Allie LaForce, and Swin Cash. We need to talk. And we definitely need to listen.
CHAPTER 25
I had the blessing of having a passion—actually two. I loved sports and I loved journalism. I’m a natural reporter, born of observation and curiosity. I can read anything. And I mean anything. From how the universe exploded to the Orioles’ brilliant pitching staff of 1971 (recited by Amy Adams in Trouble with the Curve, although she mispronounced “Mike Cuellar”). The renowned poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Nothing great can be accomplished without enthusiasm.” Know that anything and everything is open to you. Another great poet, William Blake, put it best in his poem “The Tyger,” from Songs of Innocence and Experience, often quoted by my mother: “On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire?”
Most of my earliest lessons came from books that made an enormous impact on me as a child—The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, where all the animals, with no anger, went to the “peace trough” during the dry season (why can’t we have that now?), and especially the Winnie-the-Pooh series by A. A. Milne. My favorite was When We Were Very Young, which had wonderful poetry and profound secret messages. In “Halfway Down,” Milne writes:
Halfway down the stairs
is a stair
where i sit . . .
i’m not at the bottom,
i’m not at the top . . .
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head.
It isn’t really
Anywhere!
It’s somewhere else
Instead!
Once you realize that anywhere you go, there you are, you’ll be comfortable in your skin. And the book teaches us that no one is any greater than anyone else. In “Teddy Bear,” Milne writes about Winnie-the-Pooh meeting the chubby King of France, called the “Handsome King.” Pooh couldn’t believe it, a fat king considered stately and dignified! Pooh asked,
“Are you . . . by any chance
His Majesty the King of France?”
The other answered, “I am that,”
Bowed stiffly and removed his hat;
Then he said, “Excuse me,” with an air,
“But is it Mr. Edward Bear?”
And Teddy, bending very low
Replied politely, “Even so!”
Perfect.
Everything interests me, but nothing as much as a great game, either in person or on TV. My husband and I were in Norway this summer when France beat Germany—the world’s greatest soccer team—in the semis of Euro 2016. The continent erupted when France won, 2–0. It was the same day the great Roger Federer lost at Wimbledon. Sports is an embarrassment of riches. And unlike the movies, it isn’t scripted. It’s for all of us to see when the magic happens, all over the world. It’s why I’ve always hated the term “walk-off home run” for the double play—one of the most beautiful moments in baseball and sports as a whole. No one walks off—they celebrate, high-five, dance. “Walk-off” is so boring and among the stands I’ve taken, I’ve made it a point never to call it that.
One element of my career that I learned early, and so can you, is collaboration. No one landed on Normandy by himself. We need each other. What do we love about Tim Duncan or Bill Russell? Teamwork. It doesn’t mean they weren’t MVPs, the best at what they did. It means they were consistently able to be counted on, they were foundations of their teams. As Rudyard Kipling wrote, “The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.” Perhaps this is why another element I haven’t mastered well enough is to enjoy quiet and solitude. My husband does the New York Times crossword puzzle every morning and barely moves. There’s much to be learned in closing out the noisy world.
It’s okay to be courageous and honest, but it’s also okay to take advice. Having lived my entire life as an outlier, I realize that being different is all right, too. Imagine being the first woman in hip-hop or on the Supreme Court. How difficult was that? Have no fear of being distinct, just try to have integrity when faced with a choice. I was offered a Miller Lite beer commercial thirty-five years ago, when the campaign was paying huge money and was enormously popular. The script called for me to pretend I was in a locker room. I had to pull a towel off a player, smile at the camera, and say, “This is all you have to know about locker room coverage.” I said no thank you. They said I had no sense of humor. I never made jokes about the locker room. That was a place of business for me, not a cheap throwaway line. I never verbally crossed the sideline onto the playing field. That side is for the players; I am the reporter. I respect that the field is not my space nor my place. I took all the early abuse I had suffered—plenty of “What’s she doing here?”—and I channeled it into humor. Yes, I’ve been embarrassed on occasion, humiliated on others (no one teaches a course in humiliation), but I hadn’t been sold into marriage at sixteen or grown up under Taliban rule. I was covering sports! I learned to be confident in my abilities, and that made all the difference. I knew what I was looking at and I had the ability to translate it.
The legendary player Joe DiMaggio was once asked why he put his heart and soul into every at bat after playing for the Yankees for thirteen years. His answer was so simple and so profound: “Because,” he said, “someone in the stands might be seeing Joe DiMaggio for the first time.” I loved that thought and I want you to take it into every meeting, every greeting, every time you’re on display. It might be the only time you interact with someone. The great Maya Angelou once wrote, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Isn’t that beautiful? Try it. It works. When I was a sophomore in college, I met Howard Cosell at the airport when he came to Boston for a Patriots game. I was leaving to visit a roommate and we ended up next to each other. I told him I aspired to work in sports. Many years later, I ran into Cosell in a press box, where he was both funny and rude. He said, “Open your coat,” and I replied, “Take off your toupee.” I couldn’t believe my brain gave me that line that fast, but Cosell laughed and we went on to become friends. Toward the end of his life, we’d meet for lunch on Madison Avenue. He could only sip orange juice through a straw, but we enjoyed each other. It was how we made each other feel.
With great announcer Howard Cosell in 1980
I was never interested in being famous—I wasn’t even sure what it meant, unless it went with Dr. Jonas Salk or Martin Luther King Jr. I certainly wasn’t going to rip people to get there. I wanted, in both print and TV, to be considered easy and original, even nostalgic if required. One time when Alberto Tomba,
the skier, won the World Championship, I asked him how he was going to celebrate. He said, in his thick Italian accent, “I will follow you home.” I quickly replied, “That’s why they call you Al-Flirto Tomba.”
I don’t care if you’re black or white or Hispanic, male or female, Catholic, Jewish, or Hindu; I had zero connections when I started—my father was from Nazi-occupied Holland and my mother was from a lower-middle-class Irish family that had never been out of New England. My mom always said, though, that I had “sand in my shoes,” and that I was going somewhere. You can do the same. It’s called desire, dedication, and focus. We can’t all be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but we can all take one hundred skyhooks a day. We can’t all be picked first on a team, but we can all show up to have a chance. Everything Shakespeare didn’t say, John Wooden or Red Auerbach did. Read what they wrote. Wooden’s aphorisms were simple: “If you don’t have the time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over?” or “Never mistake activity for achievement.” Red Auerbach had eleven principles for playoff basketball that he included in his book Basketball for the Player, the Fan & the Coach. They were not unlike Wooden’s perfect pyramid for life—maybe a little rougher—but the ideas aren’t that different. “The only correct actions are those that require no explanation and no apology,” Auerbach wrote.
The Shakespeare play that had the most impact on me was the pastoral comedy As You Like It. There are themes of love and forgiveness, but the most important lesson in the play is risk. A group of people leave Duke Frederick’s court, tired of the arbitrary justice, and take a chance on living with nothing in the Arden Forest. Such is life. You must take risks to learn about yourself, away from all that has made you comfortable. The late, great Christopher Hitchens once said, “DNA can tell you who you are, but not what you are.” That is up to you. Think big, think small, but take a chance. And don’t forget to write thank-you notes.
I’ve been blessed to have had a billion-dollar life, where I’ve been paid to go to London for Wimbledon or Shanghai for Yao Ming or France for the Olympics. I hope I’ve shared with you some of the lessons I learned, but anyone reading this can know one thing: It can happen to you.
With my husband Bob Kanuth at the 2013 CBS Christmas party in New York
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
After more than forty years of covering sports, I have thousands and thousands of people to thank. First to those who really pushed me to do this, Tom and Jerry Caraccioli, Andrew Blauner, and my brother Chris. Bill Gladstone coached me through it and the people from BenBella Books, especially publisher Glenn Yeffeth, editor-in-chief Leah Wilson, and production editor Jessika Rieck have been terrific. A handful of men really gave me the chance to cover all these sports: Vince Doria, Dave Smith, Bill Griffith, Joe Concannon, and Tom Mulvoy from the Boston Globe; Ted Shaker, Neal Pilson, Peter Lund, Rob Correa, Les Moonves, and Sean McManus from CBS; plus Curt Gowdy Jr. and John Filippelli from my years at ABC. I always wanted to work for John Walsh and finally did at ESPN, and the Globe sports department is filled with people to thank: Dan Shaughnessy, Bud Collins, Peter Gammons, Bob Ryan, Kevin Dupont, John Powers, Leigh Montville, Ray Fitzgerald, Ron Borges, Alan Richman (who gave me a lock of Elvis Presley’s hair), and especially the late Will McDonough. We had others who would join us at a bar in Faneuil Hall or in Kenmore Square: Judy Carlough, John Spooner, Mitch Sikora, Matt Storin, Suzanne and Bijette, Paul Szep, Rick and Joanne Pitino, Bob Rodophele, and Tom Palmer (who bought me Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and took me on a flatbed Ford in western Kansas). Thanks to my BC roommates Jeanne and Lori and Joan (who let me play David Bowie’s album fifty times in a row!), and my Brookline Village roommate, Jan. Can’t forget Lou Bell and his bag of nothing, the Bruins’ Nate Greenberg, or the late Boo Kleven.
It was the time of the early women sportswriters: Melissa Ludtke, Michele Himmelberg, Robin Herman, Lynne Snierson, Julie Ward, Tracy Dodds, Helene Elliot, Betti Cuniberti, Claire Smith, Nancy Cooney, and Susan Fornoff. Because of the size and prestige of the Boston Globe, I covered every game for a decade sitting between John Feinstein of the Washington Post and Dick Weiss of the Philadelphia Daily News, still great friends to this day. There are other national writers to be thanked—Curry Kirkpatrick, Mike Downey, Lenn Robbins, Tom Callahan, Dave Anderson, George Vescey, Ira Berkow, and especially Red Smith, who told me to “make a memory” every time I’d go someplace new. George Solomon, legendary editor of the Washington Post sports section, always rooted for women. The next generation of women sportswriters were equally talented: Sally Jenkins, Jill Lieber, Lisa Olson, Christine Brennan, Jackie MacMullan, Johnette Howard, Melissa Isaacson, Michelle Kaufman, Kristen Huckshorn, Linda Robinson, Judy Battista, and Alysse Minkoff. Because I was the only woman in the beginning, it took a while to gather the really close ones: Cindy Shmerler of Tennis magazine, Susan Kerr, Suzanne Smith, and LeslieAnne Wade from CBS. I love and thank the posse we had in New York for ten years, with a rotating cast of Janice Platt, Cecily Lesko, Kim Bohuny, Jeane Willis, Barb Ricke, Jo Ann Ross, Chris Plonsky, Donna Orender, Amy Berg, Ann Liguori, Pat Hall, Tom Healy, Frank Vuono, and Joey C. We’d often finish the night at one of Tommy O’Neill’s bars. Sometimes Suzanne Smith would have a “girls’ night” at her apartment, along with Andrea Joyce, Robin Roberts, Cat Newman, Lydia Stephans, Alanna Campbell, Deb Gelman, Kathy Cook, Suzy Kolber, Marci Kempner, Mary Carillo, and the great Billie Jean King.
I thank Rick Majerus and Jim Valvano for being the funniest coaches and funniest people I ever met; both of them let me in their lives. Many coaches, athletes, and people in TV have been enormously helpful to me: the late Dean Smith, Coach K, Rollie Massimino, Chuck Daly, Peter Gammage, Digger Phelps, Dr. Tom Davis, Gary Williams, Jerry Tarkanian, Roy Williams, Lou Carnesecca, Tom Izzo, Chris Mullin, Greg Anthony, Tommy Amaker, Jay Bilas, Dale Brown, Jack Hartman, Sam Jones, Joe Bertagna (who played goalie at Harvard and really was the goalie in Love Story), George Blaney, Mike Tirico, the entire Carlesimo family, Tom Coughlin, Steve Mariucci, Joe Gibbs, Denny Green, Marv Levy (who famously said before every game, “Where would you rather be than Right Here, Right Now?”), John Calipari, Slice, Doug Flutie, Terry Robiskie, Burt Bacharach, Paul Hornung, Lonnie Ali, Jerry Glanville, Jerry Richardson, Doris Burke, Jim Mandich, Tony LaRussa, Dick Stockton, Jim and Julie Boeheim, Rachel Nichols, Shelley Smith, Bonnie Bernstein, Anita Marks, Jemele Hill, Sage Steele, Betsy Ross, Beth Mowins, Trenni Kusnierek, Donna de Varona, Nancy Hogshead, Suzyn Waldman, Richard Johnson, Rusty Sullivan, Gene DeFilippo, Eddie Miller, Jack Grinold, Anita Collins, Ed Carpenter, Steve Nazro, Ronni Fisher, Suzanne Grande, Joel Drucker, Pam Ganley, Dick Friedman, Craig Miller, Suzy Shuster, Caton Bredar, Barry Weisbord, Glenn Mathis, Fran Labelle from NYRA, Tom Durkin, Carol and Michael Weisman, Sharon and Andy Chansen, John McClain, Pat Hanlon, Dereck Whittenburg, Joan Siegel, Pam and Sonny Vaccaro, Doris Burke, Bob Bache, Ed Goren, Ann O’Grady, Joe Bertagna, Ian Eagle, Ana Leaird, Jocelyn Kalsmith, Joellyn Lankin, Joe O’Donnell, Kelly Neal, Heather Albert, Susie and Tommy Penders, Max Visser, Beat Visser, Ellen Whalen, Ed Werder, Peter Rogan, Mike Pereira, Nick Faldo, Chris Berman, Al McGuire, Reid Oslin, Joel Drucker, Jim Otto, Anthony Munoz, Junior Seau, Wendy Burch, George Schweitzer, Al Michaels, Dan Dierdorf, Dave Johnson, Tom Hammond and Charlsie Cantey, Mike Lupica, Lenny DeLuca, Faye DeHoff, Craig Silver, Lance Barrow, Dick Ebersol, Joe Valerio, Sandy Grossman, Bob Stenner, Lea Miller, Jim Tooley, Ray Stallone, Tom Odjakjian, who still loves the Big East, Dick Kelley, the former PR director for Boston College who died too young, Hank Goldberg, Larry Wahl, Joe Healey (and 305 East 50th St.), Sam Jones, Dave Goren, and the entire Pitino family, and of course, Vinnie, and Ralph Willard. Also thanks to Wayne Lukas, Ali and Shug McGaughey, Karl Schmitt, Steven Nagler, all the Bafferts, Jamie Saults, and Nick Zito for making the Triple Crown so much fun for six weeks straight.
With good friend Robin Roberts
Thanks to best friends Teri Schindler and Mike Gorman, Tom and Julie McGrath, Erin and Sean McDonough, Lorraine and Dic
k Vitale, Greg Gumbel, Ian Eagle, Terry Bradshaw, James Brown, Marcus Allen, Tom Shine, Eddie White, the Andruzzi family, Joe Iracane, Marty Aranoff, Bob Mansbach, Abby Lopez, Liz Dolan, Tony Segreto, Chris Sullivan, Mike Ornstein, Dick Enberg and Bill Walton, Don and Mary Anne Shula, the entire Lesko family, and Boomer and Cheryl Esiason. Thanks to Bryan in London and Timmy in Oslo, Josephine Traina at the Garden, and Jim Dunn in Boca. I was lucky to begin my TV career with Brent Musburger and Jim Nantz, Len DeLuca and Ric LaCivita, then added Shea Johnson, Janet O’Leary, Matty Hetzel, Deanna O’Toole, Peter Lund, John Madden, the Madden family, plus Madden Cruiser drivers Willie and Joe and Dave. Big thanks to Dan Marino, Bill Parcells, Jim Steeg, Tony Tortorici, Jay Wright, Jimmy O’Brien, Gil Brandt, Mike Westhoff, Seth Davis, Gregg Popovich, Chris and Pat Riley, and producers David Blatt, Eric Mann, Lance Barrow, Charlie Bloom, Mike Horvath, George Veras, and Lindsey Felling. Bob Dekas and Bob Fishman had a huge impact on my career. All the people at both AWSM and WISE have been great. Thanks to Paul Doherty, former head of the English department at Boston College, and to David Barrett, who wrote my favorite song, “One Shining Moment” (and to Armen Keteyian, who brought it to CBS). Good friend Christian McBride has won half a dozen jazz Grammys, but he still loves that song as much as we do. Kisses to John Filo, Paula Breck, and the entire CBS photo department. As always, to all my cousins, plus David and Amy Kanuth and baby Brady.
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