When Will She Be In the Booth?
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(I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this - don't hold back just because I'm a woman! Not that you will, but just thought I'd put that out there.)
Ok, not necessarily the "she" pictured here, but you get the idea.
I've been watching Monday Night Football (up tonight, Favre and the Green Bay Packers vs. the Denver Broncos. Nothing too exciting Update: Great ending!). As I watch Michelle Tafoya pop up periodically to give us the scoop from the sidelines, I think to myself, "Well that's good. But how come there's never a woman in the booth?"
While more women are getting opportunities (Tafoya, Suzy Kolber, Pam Oliver, Lisa Salters, or Bonnie Bernstein, to name a few, and Jemele Hill sort of counts, but she's not on TV as often as the others), no women are getting the big jobs of analyst or play-by-play. Gayle Sierens once did an NFL broadcast in a local market (or was it national?), but it must not have gone too well because they never asked her to do it again, and no woman has ever been in the booth for an NBA, NHL, or MLB game. Ok, so it turns out the MLB is a little bit more advanced, or at least its teams have been in their local markets. As Cecilio's Scribe pointed out to me, Suzyn Waldman (now infamous for crying following the Yankees loss in the playoffs), did a play-by-play stint on local TV for the Yankees in the mid-90's, and another woman, Gayle Gardner, was the first woman to do play-by-play -- with the now-World Series runner-ups, the Colorado Rockies.
So it's not only possible, but it has happened before. Yet today, you can't find a woman doing the play-by-play or the analyzing on TV in a professional men's sport.
I'm sure much of this has to do with the fact that women don't see other female sportscasters, and we certainly aren't encouraged to pursue the field. Heck, I wasn't even encouraged to do the blog, but seeing Jemele Hill do it gave me the extra "oomph" I needed to say that I could do it, too. Those women who have made it even onto the sidelines are putting in a whole lot of work to be where they are. The one thing about sports is that no matter how good you look, if you don't know what you're talking about, you are going to be the first one on the chopping block.
Not to mention that many of the sports fans, who are overwhelmingly male, have nothing better to do than compare which female sportscaster they'd rather sleep with, concocting entire "tournaments" devoted to the debate. I will not be linking to any of them on here, so you will just have to check that out for yourself.
Despite the women as sexual beings issue, I don't think men can't get used to hearing a woman do the analysis or the play-by-play for a major men's sport. We heard this all before when we entered the work place. This is nothing new. Someone (or some network) just has to let it happen once, be willing to take all the criticism, and then open the door for the rest. Like I said before about the NFL in London, change is always painful. But it's about time that the networks felt the pain of breaking that glass ceiling and put a woman in the broadcasting booth.
(Cross-published at Pleats 'n Cleats)
