Читать книгу Playing Ball with the Boys - Betsy Ross - Страница 8

I can remember exactly where I was when the idea hit me that I wanted to cover sports for a living, and do it on television. While I was in college at South Bend a group of us drove to Chicago to see a White Sox game at old Comiskey Park. Yes, it was old and creaky, but it was like going to old Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park—you could touch the baseball history everywhere. Babe Ruth played there, so did Foxx, Gehrig, any number of American League legends. It smelled of baseball greatness.

Those were the days when you could drive up on an early Saturday evening and get good seats, ten rows up, along the first base line. That’s exactly what we did this particular summer evening. As we settled into our seats, the visiting Kansas City Royals’ television broadcast team was on the field, doing the pre-game show for the home market.

I watched them do their standups and requisite anchor banter while the teams warmed up behind them, and I thought, “I can do that. I can talk baseball, or basketball, or football before the games, do interviews and the like. There’s no reason why I can’t do that.”

It absolutely never occurred to me that, because I was female, I wouldn’t have the chance to cover sports. I just was going on the assumption that, if I was good enough, I’d get the opportunity.

Perhaps that was being more naïve than practical, but by then, we were seeing more women on television and more women covering sports. Now, I grew up during the time when about the only women you would see on TV on a regular basis were on the news: Nancy Dickerson, who covered the White House, and Pauline Frederick at the United Nations for NBC News. Later, Barbara Walters moved across town from The Today Show to ABC News. Jane Pauley, from my home state of Indiana, slid into The Today Show anchor position.

By the time I was in college, however, more women were covering sports on television, and so it didn’t seem like such a farfetched idea that I could do the same. Jane Chastain and Phyllis George were covering sports just about every weekend, and by the time ESPN was on twenty-four hours a day, women were regularly seen on the anchor desk and in the field.

Now, I wish I could tell you that just by thinking I could do it, the doors opened and sports departments welcomed me with open arms. Not quite that easy. It didn’t happen overnight, but it eventually happened, mainly because I never thought I couldn’t reach that goal. I didn’t get there by myself—many people helped me along the way—just like the women in this book were helped as they achieved their dreams.

But one of my great regrets involves a young woman whom I couldn’t figure out how to help. When I was student teaching, I had a girl in our journalism class who was an excellent writer. She enjoyed it, you could tell, and had a real talent for expressing herself in her newspaper stories. One day after class I told her that she should think about majoring in journalism in college.

“I’m not planning to go to college,” she said. “My dad says girls don’t need to go to college, so I’ll be done when I get out of high school.”

I smiled and told her to keep writing, and maybe she’d have the opportunity to expand her talents in some other way. But frankly, I was speechless. This wasn’t the 1800s. This wasn’t a Third World country. But this very talented young lady was being told, by someone she respected, that she didn’t need to grow, to make herself better, to offer a talent that few people discover and embrace. I don’t know if she ever had a chance to write, or to go to college. I regret not figuring out a way to help her. I hope for her sake, and for her family’s, that she was able to find a way to use her talents.

And there are still opportunities for education. When we were starting our public relations business, Game Day Communications, our small-business contact at our company bank changed a couple of times in just the few months from when we first signed with them. The third small-business vice president, when he called to introduce himself, started the conversation with me by saying, “Now what is it that you girls do?” Amazing that he could insult us twice in one little sentence—first, by not taking the time to research what our company did, and, second, by calling two businesswomen “girls.” It should go without saying that we switched banks rather quickly after that.

One more comment on this theme: The first Super Bowl I attended, XXVIII in Atlanta, I was making some observations on the Dallas offense to the people I was sitting with in the stands, when the gentleman in front, I’d guess in his early forties, turned around and said, “You seem to know a lot about football for a girl.” He didn’t know I was going to be doing a live wrap-up from the field for my station in Cincinnati once the game was over. I gave him my business card, signed it, and said, “Hang onto that so you’ll remember my name.” Hope he still has it.

Not long ago I was sitting in a college press box when a young woman in the university’s sports information office said to me, “I don’t know how you put up with working in sports. The funny looks, being disrespected sometimes—I still hear it, and I’m sure you did, too. It’s hard enough now, but I can’t imagine how tough it must have been years ago.”

Well, years ago, a group of women defied the odds and followed their passions to get into sports—and made it possible for my sports information friend to sit in press boxes and cover games. These are the stories of some of them who were among the first to break through and break barriers. These are the women who were, and still are, “playing ball with the boys.”