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Photo by John Filo
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Female sports reporters may be ho-hum news today, but thirty years ago it was a different story, and Lesley Visser can tell you all about it. A true pioneer, she counts numerous historic firsts among her accomplishments, including first female beat reporter to cover the NFL, first female member of the Monday Night Football announcing team, first woman sportscaster to preside over the post–Super Bowl presentation of the Vince Lombardi Trophy, first woman analyst in an NFL broadcast booth, first woman Super Bowl sideline reporter, and first female sportscaster to carry the Olympic torch. But Visser remembers a time when credentials specifically barred women and children from press boxes, women’s restrooms were nowhere to be found in the press area, and players and coaches were rude and threatening and refused to allow women reporters access to locker rooms. Through it all, Visser persevered, covering every major sporting event—from the Super Bowl to the World Series to the NCAA championships to the Triple Crown to the Olympics—earning tremendous respect from both broadcasters and athletes, and blazing a trail that eased the way for the generations of female sportscasters who followed. New York Yankees manager Joe Torre once said of Visser: “She doesn’t demand respect, she commands it.” Visser’s response to all this acclaim? “I was never in it for the fame, I was in it for the game.”
Born on September 11, 1953, in Quincy, Massachusetts, to a school teacher and engineer, Visser has been a sports fanatic for as long as she can remember: she was an avid box-score reader as a child and once dressed up as former Boston Celtics guard Sam Jones for Halloween. She had her heart set on being a sportswriter early, but, she said, there was one major problem: “The job didn’t exist”—not for women, anyway. Still, her family never discouraged her. “My parents didn’t say girls can’t do that, and my mother told me, ‘Sometimes you have to cross when it says “don’t walk.”’”
As a junior at Boston College in 1974, Visser landed an internship in the sports department of the Boston Globe on a Carnegie Foundation grant intended for college women who wanted to go into jobs that were 95 percent male. She stayed on at the paper after graduation in 1975. It wasn’t an easy time to be a female sportswriter. In addition to the absence of women’s restrooms in the press area and credentials specifically barring women and children from the press box, female sportswriters had to deal with rude, condescending athletes and coaches who threw food and jockstraps at them, yelled obscenities, or refused to talk to them at all, paraded around naked just to make them uncomfortable, and—in one infamous case involving baseball player Dave Kingman (but NOT involving Visser)—sent over a giftwrapped shoebox with a dead rat inside. Once, at a public seminar on women sportswriters, Visser had to defend herself for agreeing to interview Dale Murphy of the Atlanta Braves outside the clubhouse when he refused to talk to her inside.”My boss doesn’t want to hear why I didn’t talk to him,” Visser responded at a seminar in 1988. He wants a story by 6:30. But how many of you did I compromise by doing it out on the steps?”
One of the most traumatic moments in Visser’s career occurred after the 1980 Cotton Bowl between Nebraska and Houston. Blocking Visser from entering the locker room, Houston coach Bill Yeoman declared, “I don’t give a damn about the equal rights amendment. She’s not coming into my locker room.” The exchange was captured by the media, and Visser felt humiliated. “I remember thinking earlier that afternoon it was a new decade, and that I was so excited to be doing this job,” she told Kevin Kaminski of Palm Beach Illustrated in 2005. “But after it happened, I went back into the stadium, walked to the top of the Cotton Bowl, and just sat there and cried.” (Years later, while covering NCAA basketball for television, Visser had a run-in with famously combustible Indiana coach Bobby Knight that ended much more happily. As she recalled in 2004 in the New York Times, Visser asked Knight how he had handled Temple’s matchup zone, to which Knight replied, “We scored more points.” “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” Visser retorted, rolling her eyes, cracking Knight up.)
Despite the heartache, Visser has extremely fond memories of her years at the Globe, working alongside such legendary scribes as Bud Collins, Peter Gammons, Bob Ryan, and Will McDonough. “They were all so great to me,” she said. “I remember going with [Peter] Gammons to see Bonnie Raitt at a coffeehouse in Cambridge. Those were great times.” Gridiron guru McDonough became one of her greatest advocates. “He was a great mentor,” she shared. In 1976, when she became the first woman to cover a National Football League team beat, it was McDonough who went to the New England Patriots and said, “This will work. She knows football. All you need to do is give her a chance.” And it was during her time at the Globe that she met and married sportscaster Dick Stockton. (The two met at—where else?—a sporting event, Game 6 of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. Stockton was part of NBC’s broadcast team that night, while Visser was still in college and interning at the Globe.)
In the eighties, Visser made the move from sportswriter to sportscaster, joining CBS Sports full time in 1987, after several years as a part-time contributor while she continued to work at the Globe. Visser says the transition was a simple one. “CBS came to me and said, ‘We know you know sports. We’d like to teach you about television.’” During her first stint at CBS, which lasted until 1994, she covered every major sporting event, became a regular on The NFL Today (the network’s high-profile game-day studio show), and became the first woman to handle the televised Super Bowl postgame presentation ceremonies. Also at CBS, she had one of the best experiences of her career, in 1989, when she reported on the sports implications for East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall: “The power of being at the Berlin Wall with people who had walked for days to taste freedom the very second they could…it was staggering.” Because Visser’s father grew up in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation and her grandfather was a doctor from a Jewish family, Visser had a strong sense of what the Berlin Wall represented. She said, “I grew up appreciating the opportunities of freedom.” (Visiting Ground Zero with the New York Giants and Jets in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks twelve years later also ranks high on her list.)
After CBS lost television rights to NFL games, Visser moved to ABC/ESPN, where she became a correspondent for NFL GameDay and SportsCenter; contributed to horse racing and college basketball programming; served as a sideline reporter for college football bowl games, NFL playoff games, and the Super Bowl; and reported for ABC’s Wide World of Sports. During this time she also became a sideline reporter for Monday Night Football, making her the first woman to join that venerable program’s announcing team.
In 2000, Visser’s career suffered a highly publicized setback when she was famously bounced as the Monday Night Football sideline reporter for a less experienced, much younger woman and man. “It was staggering to me,” Visser later recalled. However, she wound up returning to CBS, philosophical as ever. “You can have a short career if it’s based on looks and youth,” she said, “but legitimacy is what lasts.”
Being a woman in a male-dominated field, Visser has had to prove herself time and again—a challenge she has welcomed and met throughout the past thirty years. As Visser herself has said, “Credibility doesn’t come from gender. It comes from the work you’ve done.” Sean McManus, president of CBS News and Sports and one of Visser’s biggest fans, summed up her contributions this way: “Lesley Visser’s career has broken many barriers and defined previously unimagined roles for women in professional sports and sports broadcasting.”
Visser has won numerous honors over the years, including the Outstanding Woman Sportswriter in America Award in 1983, the Women’s Sports Foundation award for journalism in 1992, the first Association for Women in Sports Media’s (AWSM) Pioneer Award in 1999, and the Compass Award from the Women’s Leadership Exchange for “changing the paradigm of her business” in 2003.
One of her most distinguished honors came in 2004, when she became the first female sportscaster in history to be chosen to carry the Olympic Torch, in recognition of her role as a “pioneer and standard-bearer” in sports journalism. Two years later, she was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame—the first woman ever accorded that honor—as winner of the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award, recognizing “long time exceptional contributions to radio and television in professional football.” “The journey is always what has pleased me,” she says. “I’m honored to be called a pioneer, because I’m glad that women can find encouragement in my career.”
In 2006 Visser was honored by the American Women in Radio & Television with the Gracie Allen Award, which celebrates individuals who have made exemplary contributions to the industry. “This is such an honor,” said Visser. “Gracie Allen had humor, wit and energy, and made it all look easy. I am humbled by the American Women in Radio & Television for recognizing me with such a distinguished award.” Then, flashing her own humor and wit in a way that would have made Gracie Allen proud, Visser added: “I wasn’t at the dawn of women covering sports. But I made the breakfast.”
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