May 22, 2018 by Philip Lewenstein

Female Sports Journalists Have Overcome Obstacles But Gaps Remain

Last week, Jenny Cavnar became the first woman since 1993 to do televised play-by-play on a Major League Baseball telecast of the game between the Colorado Rockies and the San Diego Padres. Her usual role was pre-and postgame TV shows.

In 1993, Gayle Gardner was the first female play-by-play announcer on a telecast for a Major League team when she called a Rockies-Reds game. Suzyn Waldman does occasional play-by- play for the New York Yankees on radio. Jessica Mendoza does color commentary on ESPN Sunday night baseball.

A New York Times article last Sunday featured Doris Burke, the first female, full-time analyst on national NBA broadcasts. Twenty-seven years into her career, she has broken one of the highest glass ceilings on TV. Viewing NHL playoff games this spring (and earlier the 2018 women’s Olympic hockey team games), I have enjoyed the expert commentary by AJ Mleczko.

In watching games, I see many female sideline and courtside reporters but few women doing play-by-play or color commentary in the broadcast booth, the exceptions Burke and pioneering football broadcaster Beth Mowins notwithstanding. Mowins debuted last September on Monday Night Football as the first female play-by-play announcer on a nationally televised NFL game.

Throughout my lifetime, I have observed women struggling to overcome barrier to ensure their rights in many areas—social, political, and economic. Likewise, women have faced obstacles in sports journalism; they have made progress, but gaps remain.

When I worked on the Minnesota Daily in the late 1960s, I recall one female sports reporter one year, and when I was the night sports editor at the San Bernardino Sun Telegram in the early 1970s, Betty Cuniberti joined the staff shortly before my departure in 1973. She was one of the first generation of female sportswriters and went on to work for several large newspapers.

I was reminded of the challenges women face while reading CBS reporter Leslie Visser’s memoir Sometimes You Have to Cross When It Says Don’t Walk: A Memoir of Breaking Barriers (2017).

I also read about the challenges while reading “Breaking Balls,” an article by Gail Shister in the winter 2018 Northwestern University Medill alumni magazine. Shister, who earned her master’s degree at Medill four years after me, learned tough lessons about working as a female sportswriter in the l970s and l980s.

Visser worked with the many of the country’s greatest sports journalists and covered the world’s greatest sports events during her 40-year career, trailblazing women’s presence in men’s professional sports. Visser is the first and only woman to be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. She’s the only sportscaster, male or female, to have worked on network (CBS, ABC, ESPN) broadcasts of the Final Four, Super Bowl, World Series, NBA Finals, Triple Crown, Olympics, U.S. Open, and World Figure Skating Championship. She covered most of these events multiple times and, among many prestigious awards, was voted the No. 1 female sportscaster of all time.

As a child, Visser fell in love with the great Boston Celtics teams and decided she wanted to become a sportswriter and told her mother in 1965.

“It was saying I wanted to go to Mars since the job didn’t exist for women,” Visser says in her memoir. “Instead of my mom telling me it would be next to impossible, she said the greatest words I have ever heard: ‘Sometimes you have to cross when it says Don’t Walk.’ It crystalized everything for me, changed my life in an instant. I was ready to lasso the moon.”

Visser went to Boston College where she wrote for the college paper, The Heights. In her junior year, she applied for a Carnegie Foundation grant, given to twenty women in the country who wanted to go into jobs that were 95 percent male. Visser notes that although it was 1973, not 1873, women were still mostly teachers, nurses, or secretaries and just starting to go to law school or medical school. She received the grant, which paid a stipend for eight weeks in the summer of 1974. Although she could work anywhere in the country, she chose the Boston Globe sports department.

Visser went on to work for the Globe, which made her the first woman beat writer to cover the NFL.

“It was both glorious and brutal,” she writes. “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 or went complaining to my editors, but it wasn’t pretty.”

Visser wanted to cover pro football for several reasons. She 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,” she says. “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.”

However, Visser notes that there were no provisions for equality when she started. She had to wait outside in ten-degree weather in the parking lots for the athletes or coaches instead of going in the locker rooms with the other journalists. After one game in Pittsburgh in the late 1970s, Visser was waiting in the parking lot when Steelers’ quarterback Terry Bradshaw finally came by, took her notebook, signed an autograph, and left. “I was left slack-jawed, stammering, ‘But-but, I’m a reporter!’”she recalls.

“Standing in parking lots was kind of existential loneliness,” Visser says. “I was divided from my colleagues. That separation made me feel alone and apart, and I had no remedy. It was an unsupported existence.  But covering these games, my lifelong dream, was like oxygen to my brain. Some of the solitary confinement was even good for me. I had to think about what questions I would ask which players, not just stick a microphone in a player’s face behind a pack of journalists who never even make eye contact.”

Visser explains that The Locker Room—“those three little words”—dominated her life in sports for fifteen years. For the first seven or eight years, women were typically not allowed in locker rooms. She says that many people think she was a product of Title IX, but she owes much of her career to the women’s movement, specifically the Equal Rights Amendment.

“Things were happening in the late seventies, all to the good,” Visser says. “Women were being hired as sportswriters, not for their looks, but for their ability to get the story, get it on deadline, and get it right. I didn’t see many of these women near the beginning, but they were coming, and when Title IX passed in 1972 and kicked in for generations of women after that, the dam had been broken and there was no going back.”

Visser says that much of it in the beginning was ugly, but “all of us know that this wasn’t ISIS or child slavery—we were covering sports. Still, it was a frontier.”

In 1978, Time Inc., parent company of Sports Illustrated, on behalf of reporter Melissa Ludtke sued the New York Yankees who had banned her from entering the locker room to interview players during the 1977 World Series. A federal judge decided that the practice of banning female reporters violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14^th Amendment. The legal victory opened the door for female sports journalists. The Globe sent Visser the day after the Yankee clubhouse opened to women.

For Shister, memories from her days as one of the first female sportswriters in the country are unhappy. She worked at the New Orleans State-Item (now Times Picayune) in the mid-‘70s and the Philadelphia Inquirer in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

“I quickly learned that breaking balls was the only way for a woman to survive in the sports world,” Shister writes. “I faced open hostility from the athletes I covered (all male), their coaches (all male), my editors (all male), and my fellow sportswriters (take a guess).

“The popular assumption was—and still is to some degree—that women wanted access to men’s locker rooms in order to ogle naked jocks. In reality, all I cared about was filing my game story before deadline. And, truth be told, not slipping on some gladiator’s errant towel.”

After surviving about four years in New Orleans, Shister moved to Philadelphia, thinking her job would get easier, but it got worse.

“When I walked into the Inquirer’s sports department in 1979, there were girlie pin-ups on the wall,”Shister said. “A few days later I sneaked in and trashed the pics. I thought about replacing them with Playgirl foldouts but decided it might be a tad early to push the envelope. The boys got the message, sort of.

“Aside from our columnists, both gentlemen of the old school, virtually no one spoke to me. Because I mostly worked nights and the sports department was a floor below the newsroom, I didn’t even meet another female colleague for six months. And then it was only because she had reached out to me. Going on the road was worse.”

Shister says that between the isolation and anxiety, she was going mad.

“As the games wound down, I dreaded the locker room confrontation I knew was coming. I would have to stand in the hallway, my deadline fast approaching, as my male competitors got the fresh quotes. A sympathetic publicist might bring out a player or two but only after the players had showered and dressed, then frantically file. Good times.”

In the early ‘80s, Shister transferred to features. She was a TV columnist for the Inquirer for 25 years. She is a senior fellow in critical writing at the University of Pennyslvania.

As women increasingly participated in sports journalism, more Northwestern graduates gained success such as Christine Brennan, a national columnist, author, and commentator. Brennan became first president of Access for Women in Sports Media. The nonprofit organization, founded in 1987, serves as a support network and advocacy group for women who work in sports media; it has over 750 members, both female and male.

Rachel Nichols, who followed Brennan at Northwestern and now works at ESPN, has had a successful career in sports journalism.

Early female sports reporters, like Shister, encountered various levels of treatment—some were physically assaulted, others sexually abused. Working in sports journalism has been a historically difficult area for women to be taken seriously. Many female sports journalists have yet to advance their careers, not for lack of talent.

Despite improvements over the past decade, women still face hostility, including harassment from athletes and colleagues.  Female reporters are still critiqued more on their outfits and physiques than their knowledge of sports. An internet search of female sports journalists comes up with titles like “30 Hottest Female Sports Reporters” or “The Sexiest Female Sports Reporters of All Time.”

Last fall, Charlotte Observer Panthers beat writer Jourdan Rodrigue attended Cam Newton’s weekly press conference and asked the quarterback about his receivers’ routes. Instead of answering the question, Newton said, “It’s funny to hear a female talk about routes. Like it’s funny.” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said the comments were wrong and disrespectful to the exceptional female reporter and all journalists who cover the league. They (the comments) do not reflect the thinking of the league, McCarthy said. Newton later expressed regret.

In August 2015, soon after University of Minnesota Athletic Director Norwood Teague abruptly resigned amid sexual harassment complaints, Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Amelia Rayno, who covered Gopher basketball, wrote a first-person story describing several incidents of being harassed by Teague. University President Eric Kaler issued a statement expressing regret that a reporter covering the University was subject to this type of deplorable behavior and extended an apology to Rayno, who left the sports beat to become a travel and features reporter.

Only about 13 percent of sports reporters are women, both newspaper and broadcast, and few women are in positions of executive power. In forty years, Visser has never been hired by a woman, and only in 2016 at CBS was she able to pitch her story ideas to a female producer, she writes.

Reflecting on her career, Visser says women who cover sports have adapted and endured.

“It’s not been easy, nor has it been a straight path,”Visser says. “But women have had a passion and a skill, proving themselves over the years, and a handful of men in the l970s 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—and no role models—so getting a byline in the paper was triumph enough.”

Visser writes that 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!”Visser says. “Women today, for the most part, can focus on the job, not wondering if there will be some ugly incident or access denial.”

Visser defends the role of women on the sideline rather than in the booth.

“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, “she says. “Think of it. There are only three people in 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.”

Today, owing largely to the pioneering of Visser, women as professional journalists are covering sports in almost every media market in the country. Their work has increased the enjoyment of sports for avid readers and viewers like me.