by Lisa Fenn
“Can you start in two weeks?” he said, finally looking at me.
Huh? For a moment I thought I’d misunderstood. “Excuse me?” I asked.
“You have a bit of, shall we say, spunk,” he flatly conceded. “That seems to go far here.” He folded his arms across his chest and looked at me, waiting for an answer.
“Yes, I can be here in two weeks,” I said.
“Someone from my office will call you with what you need to do from here.”
I showed myself out of his office and heard the door shut quickly behind me. I certainly hadn’t fooled him. He knew what he was getting. I headed back to my car in a daze, stopping at a stone sign inscribed “ESPN, World Wide Leader in Sports.” It was a David versus Goliath moment, causing me to wonder how I, a marginal fan, came to be standing before the gods of sport armed with little more than team flash cards in my satchel.
I RETURNED TO Cleveland and a letter from the CIA, confirming my place in the next round of interviews in Washington, DC, that fall. “Please do not inform anyone of this pursuant path,” the letter read. Their secret was safe. No one would have believed I’d duped this many highly intelligent people in one week. I dug my World Dictator flash cards out of my desk to pack alongside my NBA Position Players index cards.
In that same drawer lay a description of my ideal job that I’d compiled shortly after my college graduation eight months prior. Over the summers, I had interned in law, public relations, magazine journalism, and sports communication. The experiences were thoroughly enjoyable, yet none felt like a perfect fit. My father had encouraged me to write down the qualities of my ideal job. After careful thought, my wish list read like this:
No desk
Casual dress
Lack of routine
Irregular hours
Frequent travel
Opportunities to write
Creative, passionate coworkers
Outlets for serving God and caring for people
My father stared at the list for some time. “None of these things point to an actual job,” he said. “In fact, your first four requirements are characteristics of people who are perpetually unemployed.” He seemed distraught that he had paid six figures for an Ivy League education, and all I left with were several early signs of instability. But the succession of ordinary days is the death of me, and I knew I could not wrap myself in a pencil skirt and live happily ever after in a cubicle.
“And this business about serving God is not a real job, so I don’t know why that’s on the list,” my father added. He believed that if there was a God, He had more important things to do than pay attention to us. “He has a universe to run, and the best way we can free Him up to do that is by taking care of ourselves,” he would say.
Though we were not a religious family, my parents sent me to a private Lutheran elementary school to avoid the financial and racial tensions within the Cleveland public school system throughout my childhood. As church members, we were granted a tuition break, and so my mother and I sat through just enough Sunday services each year to qualify for the annual discount. When I made my first communion in the fifth grade, I hid the wafer in my pocket because I feared eating it without understanding its significance. I was no more enlightened by my eighth-grade confirmation, which was to be my public declaration of faith. I had prepared for it through after-school catechism courses and that disastrous summer camp. However, neither seemed to hit their intended target. At rehearsal a few days before the confirmation service, I stood at a loss when my teacher said, “Now when you reach the altar, the minister will ask you if you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.”
That evening, I asked my mother what this decision involved. It sounded more consequential than simply agreeing that God exists.
“Just say yes, if that’s what they told you to do,” she answered.
“But I can’t say yes if I don’t understand what I am saying yes to.”
“Your father is going,” she said nervously. “Just say yes and don’t cause any trouble.” My father joined us at church for the occasional Christmas or Easter service and special events such as this. He sweated in visible distress in the aisle seat, often ducking out for air and a cigarette. He said that his Catholic school nuns had smacked his backside with wooden rulers for too many years and too many insignificant offenses, and returning to church served as an uncomfortable remembrance for him.
The idea of deceiving a pastor, in a church, in a white dress left me equally troubled. So that night, beside my bed, I kneeled to pray, for the very first time.
“Dear . . . God . . . it’s me, Lisa. Tomorrow I have to go to church and tell a lie. I don’t want to do it, but if I don’t, things will be awkward for you and me both,” I explained. “If you will forgive me, I promise that I will find out what the question really means and answer it again.”
God did not answer.
I stood before the church that next day with my fingers crossed and professed Jesus as the Lord of my life. My mother nodded with relief. The reverend nodded with approval. My father retreated for air. And I slumped back into my pew, utterly conflicted. A few hours later, during my party to celebrate the charade, I slipped back upstairs to my bedroom and apologized to God again. This time, tingling warmth emanated from my toes and slowly traveled the length of my body, to the tips of my fingers and face. The spiritual realm became real to me that day—not in church or in my lily-white dress, but in my shameful transparency. I did not understand the theology of forgiveness at that moment, but I knew I had received it.
That fall I entered a Lutheran high school and quickly learned what Christians mean when they say they accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior. The formula was simple: acknowledge your sin and yield your will to God for His glory and service. But while the steps appeared straightforward, neither action came naturally to me. I didn’t see myself as a sinner. I had never been grounded or uttered a curse word. I was kind to others. I was class salutatorian. I could see no compelling reason to give God holy control of my life when I was wholly proficient at running it myself.
Various teenage afflictions bruised my high school years: my first broken heart, the unraveling of my parents’ marriage, a debilitating anemia that hampered me athletically. These disappointments exposed the flimsy nature of my own control, and the fractured relationships left me craving an abiding acceptance—one for which I did not need to strive and strain. I wanted to be guided by someone larger and wiser than me. And as I came to understand the relevance of faith, I found that God was there, waiting.
“Take my will and make it your own,” I prayed aloud. The same pulses of warmth I had experienced following my fraudulent confirmation again traveled from the tips of my toes to the top of my head. This time, the message resonated differently. The whisper in my heart said, You are my beloved.
My faith deepened in college through my studies of the Bible, and I came to understand that there was nothing that would make God love me more or love me less. This liberating approach to love spurred me around the world in hopes of sharing it with those in need. I cared for orphans in Russia. I delivered Bibles and companionship to remote aboriginal tribes in the Australian outback. The pain of this world drew me in, and faith became more personal than religious, an adventure rather than a duty.
Still, as I clutched my silly crumpled list, I wondered how the heart of God extended to ESPN. I feared I had been so caught up in proving my father wrong or living up to our storied family journalism gene that I had badgered my way past Al Jaffe through my own resolve, and was now drifting away from the kind of service work that had beckoned throughout college. I couldn’t imagine the possibility of God having a rooting interest in cable sports television.
ESPN HIRED ME as a production assistant (PA), its entry-level position. In the first month I learned to operate a teleprompter, print scripts for on-camera anchors, and retrieve archived video of legendary sports moments, but my $7-an-hour paycheck rested on one critical res
ponsibility: watching sports on television. Each night between 4:00 and 6:00 p.m., I reported to the screening pit alongside a herd of other PAs. We huddled around the master daily schedule of sporting events taped to the wall, scanning for our name and assigned game. Seasoned PAs received higher-profile games that warranted longer highlights, such as Yankees–Red Sox or Auburn–Alabama. PAs with less experience or skill got events that were not likely to have a highlight on SportsCenter, like European golf tournaments or Division III college football games. “Score only,” we would grumble when forced to watch a humdrum game in its entirety, fully knowing that the only thing that would make the show would be the final score.
We sat before our television monitors with pens in the ready position and kept track of plays by documenting precisely what time, to the second, they happened. If I were assigned to screen a Giants–Diamondbacks game, I wrote down every at-bat, fly ball, home run, stolen base, and pitch count, along with the camera angles of those plays. At the end, I revisited my logs and chose the plays and angles that best told the story of the game in thirty to forty-five seconds. Once approved by highlight supervisors—or hi-supes, as they are hiply known—I carried my stack of beta video tapes of the game to a waiting editor, read off time codes for the plays, and watched the editor splice the highlight together. Next I delivered the tape to the SportsCenter control room, and the description of plays to the anchor. And finally, around one o’clock in the morning, I typed the logs of my game into the library system so that a week or a decade later, if another PA needed to find Barry Bonds striking out against Randy Johnson, she could search the computer for the exact tape and time.
The job required negligible levels of critical thinking. Production assistants were evaluated on speed, organization, and factual accuracy. As a perfectionist, I thrived in this structure. I had no opinion on whether Wally Szczerbiak would make it in the NBA, but I could spell his name correctly and hit his slot in the rundown. While my college friends talked about the stress of their new teaching jobs or the pressures of Wall Street, my workplace possessed a frat-house-meets-Super-Bowl-party sort of vibe, with a crowd of twentysomethings cheering on their favorite teams across forty different screens. The most pressing discourse revolved around whether Ryan Leaf should be drafted ahead of Peyton Manning and whether Miguel Tejada was a better all-around shortstop than Derek Jeter. The later the nights wore on, the more absurd the predictions grew; during one heated exchange, a PA bet $1,000 that rookie Kobe Bryant would never average 25 points per game. He has yet to pay up.
When my fellow PAs exhausted real-life debates, they moved on to their football and baseball fantasy teams. One oddly zealous PA ran a WNBA fantasy league in which he managed all eight teams and played against himself. I witnessed him alone in an empty conference room late one weekend night conducting the preseason draft—out loud—and wondered if it was time for ESPN to consider setting up a crisis hotline. Production assistants clocked sixty to ninety hours a week, yet for most of them, there was nowhere else they wanted to be. We ordered dozens of pizzas every Saturday and ice cream on Wednesdays. A plastic 7-Eleven Big Gulp labeled “Deep Pool” sat at the hi-supe station. If someone thought the player at the plate would hit a home run in that at-bat, he or she yelled out “Deep Pool!” and tossed a quarter into the cup. (Rates rose to fifty cents for Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa during their 1998 chase for Roger Maris’s home run record.) When correct, the PA won the plunder. Just a month into the job, Jim Thome netted me $16.75 on a bullet down the right field line, more than doubling my hourly wage. I was one of thirteen females in the lot of one hundred PAs, and I was living every man’s dream.
The first nine months of the production program served as a training ground. Each month, a group of coordinating producers voted on the production assistants whose nine months were due to expire, either elevating them to full-time employee status or casting them out of Bristol. It was ESPN’s method of rotating cheap labor and identifying employee potential before committing long-term. My monthly evaluations were largely positive, yet the system certainly incited nervousness, as I’d frequently seen some of my favorite peers voted out. Somewhere around my third month, I ruminated, anxiously, over how to ask for time off for my second CIA interview without letting on where I was going. I was still a temporary employee, and management interpreted requests for time off as a lack of dedication. Then one evening, while I was printing scripts for anchors Rich Eisen and Steve Levy, a senior coordinating producer burst out of his office and bounded toward me. At that point, I should have been relatively unknown to the executives. But this one seemed uncomfortably interested in me.
“I got a call this afternoon,” he said, distressed. “I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing, but take off whatever time you need.” I nodded solemnly, respecting both this man’s agitation and the reach of the CIA. No further dialogue was ever exchanged, and no future schedule requests were ever denied.
Once in Washington, DC, I interviewed with special agents who all began with the same incredulous question: “Why would you ever want to leave ESPN?” To me, working as an undercover international operative sounded far more exciting than logging a Kings–Clippers game at midnight, but when the CIA dismissed me from their consideration after seven months of interviews, polygraphs, and background checks, they seemed to think they were doing me a favor. “You have the best job in the world,” one agent, who had always introduced himself with a different name, told me on several occasions. “Why enter a life in hiding when you could be cheering it on out loud?”
I was granted full-time status at the end of my nine months at ESPN, and to my father’s delight, I began working on the daily Baseball Tonight show. Though I grew up competing in softball, basketball, and track, baseball was our family’s year-round love. My father played two years of college ball at Kent State University and told stories of playing alongside teammate Thurman Munson in college. On the day the pro scouts showed up, my father went hitless; Munson went on to be a perennial All-Star and team captain of the New York Yankees. And as my father and I spent summer nights together at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, cheering on our hometown Indians, I knew he grieved for his lost opportunity.
Between 1998 and 2003 I lived baseball for ESPN, and my father lived it vicariously through me. “At least one of us made it to the majors,” he would say. Each February I reported to spring training with pitchers and catchers to produce team preview features for either Florida’s Citrus League or Arizona’s Cactus League. I worked alongside Peter Gammons and Tim Kurkjian, assessing teams’ lineups, pitching staffs, and off-season changes. During the season I traveled to a different major league stadium nearly every week to produce two- to three-minute stories for our nightly shows. If I were covering the success of the Oakland Athletics pitching rotation, I flew to wherever the team played that week and interviewed their starting staff and their coaches, identifying reasons for their surge. I wrapped up after batting practice but stayed for that night’s game just in case a no-hitter broke out and ESPN needed us for news coverage. During those summers, filled with bat cracks and the aroma of roasted peanuts, I realized that the CIA had advised me correctly. Summers in ballparks far surpassed summers in Saudi Arabia.
Each October I hit the road again for four weeks of baseball playoffs, culminating in the World Series. I worked up to 120 hours a week, producing game previews and postgame reports and following my assigned series from city to city. In 2001 I stood beside the Yankees dugout when Tino Martinez and Scott Brosius hit game-tying ninth-inning home runs in Games 4 and 5 of the World Series, and I was doused in champagne two days later when the Arizona Diamondbacks won Game 7 on Luis Gonzalez’s ninth-inning RBI broken-bat liner up the middle off Mariano Rivera, the greatest closer of all time.
People often asked me if I found it difficult to be a woman navigating professional sports locker rooms. To me, it seemed easier than being a man. In most clubhouses there was no shortage of balding white male reporters w
orking for a gaggle of television, radio, print, and Internet outlets. These men had to work harder to differentiate themselves from one another than the subset of women in the locker rooms. A CIA officer once told me that one of the reasons the agency was interested in me was that I was unassuming: because of my petite stature and pale skin, he could have either used me as a trustworthy adult or disguised me as a child and sent me off to school with the teenage family members of potential informants. I thought he was joking. “The CIA doesn’t joke,” he said. Either way, he believed people would have an easy time saying yes to me because physically, I looked like someone who wouldn’t do them wrong. This turned out to be a quality that also allowed me to move about major league locker rooms with ease. No athlete ever ignored my questions, and most answered them politely.
During those years I began to gravitate toward features that highlighted interesting tidbits of players’ personal lives. I spent a weekend with Gary Sheffield and his wife DeLeon, a professional gospel singer. I toured Sammy Sosa’s designer shoe collection. I featured Ryan Klesko surfing on his days off, and Scott Brosius homeschooling his brood. In 2000 I followed Deion Sanders around the minor leagues. A two-sport phenom for fourteen years, Neon Deion was the only man to play in both a Super Bowl and a World Series. During the 1989 season he clubbed a home run for the Atlanta Braves in the afternoon and then scored a touchdown that night for the Atlanta Falcons. The only thing as electrifying as his athletic ability was his charisma. I caught up with Deion in the twilight of his baseball career, when he was grinding out a comeback with the AAA Louisville River Bats baseball team. After one afternoon game in Kentucky, the team boarded a bus to Richmond, Virginia, but Deion climbed into his own tricked-out coach, complete with a bed and a wet bar. My camera crew and I joined him for an eight-hour trip down memory lane, during which he relived what seemed like every one of his twenty-two career NFL touchdowns and their corresponding end-zone dances.