Playing Ball with the Boys. Betsy Ross
I came in during their afternoon down time, read a few stories at the desk, then did a pretend standup close for a reporter package. When I was finished, the news director, Phil Lengyel, called me into his office.
“Do you have a reason that you want to go to Fort Wayne to work?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “It’s just a lead I have on a reporter’s job.”
“Well,” he continued, “we might have something coming up here soon, so let me keep you posted on our openings here.”
Sure enough, a couple of weeks later there was an opening. Phil called me, and I started on the Monday after my Thursday graduation from Notre Dame. I had made it into television—even using, with some reluctance, my real name.
You see, Betsy Ross is, indeed, my God-given, Mom-given name. Not Elizabeth, not Beth, it’s Betsy. And it’s not like there was some premeditated scheme to give me this name—as I always say, if my parents wanted a daughter named Betsy, they would have given that name to my older sister, Jeanne. In fact, the nurse supposedly told my mother after three days of my being in the hospital without a name, “You can’t call her ‘Hey, You’ all her life.” So Betsy came from somewhere, and my middle name, Melina, came from a baby book (pronounced like Melinda without the “d,” not the Greek pronunciation of Me-lee-na).
I have heard just about every comment anyone can make about my name, most of them lame, some of them cruel, but every once in a while, one that is clever. I was at the ticket window at Comerica Park in Detroit when the woman at the counter saw my name on the credit card and said, “Your parents must have had big plans for you.” I like that comment—it’s probably my favorite.
As I was changing professions, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to change my name, just like all hotshot news anchors did—so I thought. I lobbied Phil to let me change my name. To Jennifer Edwards. I don’t know why. I thought it was a cool name, very un-ethnic, again, just like all the other big anchors.
“Are you crazy?” he said. “You’ve got a name that people won’t forget. You gotta keep it.” And so I did. And Phil, you were right. Even though I have to endure countless bad jokes, it is memorable. Thanks.
From WSJV-TV, I headed home to the Cincinnati area and WCPO-TV, then moved up the interstate to WTHR in Indianapolis, got my first full-time sports anchoring position at SportsChannel America in New York, then headed back to Cincinnati at WLWTTV. And while each television job (except for SportsChannel America) was as a news anchor, I used the same method I used at the Tribune to keep my hand in sports—I’d volunteer to help out the sports department. That was how I was able to put a sports resume reel together for SportsChannel America, and eventually how I was able to catch the attention of ESPN.
Because I was working for the NBC affiliate in Cincinnati, and because NBC had the rights to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, our station was really promoting the upcoming Summer Games. And, as fate would have it, we had an unusual number of area athletes involved in the Olympic trials, and eventually, the Games. Two members of the gold medal-winning “Magnificent Seven” women’s gymnastics team were from Cincinnati, as was one of the coaches. Swimmers, divers, runners, shooters, rowers, you name the sport, we had an athlete competing for a spot at the Olympics. So I lobbied hard to cover their stories. That led to an opportunity to work for NBC NewsChannel, the news feed that goes to affiliate stations, on Olympic coverage. And, eventually, I got to go with our sports crew to Atlanta to cover the Olympics themselves.
At the same time ESPN was getting ready to launch ESPNews, a twenty-four-hour news channel specifically for highlights and scores. They were looking for someone who knew sports and who could anchor in half-hour blocks. Considering that most sports anchors were on the air for only about three to four minutes for their nightly sports reports, having someone who was used to anchoring for longer periods of time, and who also had sports knowledge, would be a perfect fit.
So my agent started making calls and sending my Olympics tapes to Bristol, Connecticut, and after the Games I headed to the Worldwide Leader for an interview. Now, this wasn’t the first time I’d been to ESPN headquarters. When I was working at SportsChannel America, ESPN was getting ready to launch ESPN2, and I interviewed back in 1990 for a position on the new network. So I was familiar with the routine—meet everyone, sit down with a producer in the afternoon, write copy, then go on the set and anchor highlights.
Except the circumstances were very different on this interview for ESPNews. As schedules would have it, I was there on the day of the funeral for ESPN anchor Tom Mees. He was one of the first anchors for ESPN when it signed on the air in 1979 and was still with the network when he drowned in a neighbor’s pool in nearby Southington, Connecticut. The shock was still apparent on everyone’s face, and while I didn’t have the chance to meet him, I heard wonderful stories about Tom on that day, and during the years I worked at ESPN.
Still, we all went through the motions, everyone was very nice, I did my anchor test, then couldn’t wait to get on the airplane back to Cincinnati. Whether it was the pall that hung over the newsroom that day, or whether it was the mess of the construction for the new ESPNews studio, I didn’t have a good feeling about the place. You know when you go into a job interview, you know in the first few minutes whether you think you’d fit in? I didn’t think I’d fit in. I knew I didn’t want to work there.
Of course, I was offered the job. I was to be one of the first wave of ESPNews anchors, being hired from across the country, to launch the new network.
And I said no.
I had no desire to move to Connecticut, my family and friends were all in the Midwest, and I just couldn’t shake the unsettled feeling I had on that day of my interview. So I did the unthinkable—I said no to ESPN.
Until six months later, when I said yes.
What changed? Well, in television, as in any business, when bosses change, they bring in their own managers and their own style. Our station, WLWT, was first rumored to be in line to be purchased by the network itself, which was another reason I didn’t want to leave for ESPN. The opportunity to work for an O & O (network owned and operated) station was tempting. But when that fell through and another purchaser took over, the new news director who came in had a “if it bleeds it leads” philosophy that didn’t necessarily fit what I felt comfortable doing.
So I called my agent. “Think ESPN might still be interested?” I asked.
They were. So in April of 1997, six months after the launch of ESPN2, I was anchoring on ESPNews. I got a quick education in hockey, in soccer, in a lot of sports other than the football, basketball, baseball, and golf I was used to covering. And as much as I thought I knew about sports, my knowledge paled in comparison to most of the folks around me. For a sports fan, it was heaven.
But for all the extra folks brought into ESPN to launch ESPNews, there were still only five females of the nearly sixty anchors for all the networks: Robin Roberts, Linda Cohn, Chris McKendry, Pam Ward, and me. I still have a signed ESPN banner that I keep in my office with all five of our signatures on it. We weren’t numerous, but we were proud of what we did.
For someone who was plopped down in New England with no friends and family in the area, ESPN was, and is, a terrific place to work. ESPN not only hires people who are good at their jobs, but are good people. If you weren’t nice, if you weren’t cordial, if you weren’t respectful to your coworkers, you didn’t stay. I got so used to guys holding doors open for me that it was a shock when I went to the mall and the same thing didn’t happen there.
And it was a place where my writing skills were valued. It remains the only newsroom where I have worked that I wrote every word that I read. It may be more time-consuming, but that’s the only way the anchors can put their own personalities into the writing. It would be silly, let’s face it, for me to read something that Stuart Scott writes, and vice versa. So I loved the opportunity to put my own style into my anchoring, something that, of course, is forbidden in straight news.
In fact, one of the best compliments I received in Bristol was from a producer who said after a show, “I can’t believe you ever anchored news.”