Think about the qualities that make a great play-by-play broadcaster. You want someone who talks fluently and with contagious enthusiasm, yet who has a certain stay-out-of-the-wayness. Someone who can guide conversation easily, without losing the thread of the game or distracting from the main action. Someone who can wear a sharp suit while sitting for several hours in a booth without ruining the line of the lapel. This last is helpful, but not vital.
None of these qualities, you notice, strictly require a man.
ESPN made it official on Tuesday that Beth Mowins will become the first woman in history to be the lead announcer on a nationally televised NFL game: She’ll call the Week 1 Monday Night Football meeting between the Los Angeles Chargers and the Denver Broncos.
The significance is not that a woman will be on an NFL telecast — there have been plenty of those on the sideline or in studio, largely thanks to ESPN — but rather the chair she’ll occupy. Play-by-play is the last barrier for women in sports broadcasting. It’s a role at which they faced a weird resistance, so it’s worth asking why, and why a breakthrough might be important.
The play-by-play announcer is, as Mowins notes, the leader of the discussion. “They’re the first person to speak when the ball is snapped,” she said. The assumption at networks has been that the role had to be filled by a mansplainer, because a predominately male audience simply wouldn’t accept a voice in the higher registers talking first, and more than others. Which is exactly why Mowins always wanted the job.
“I’ve always seen it — and I think this is probably the way male sports fans look at it too — as the person driving the bus,” Mowins says.
What entitles women to deliver or comment on the sports news and field action? Nothing, really, other than the fact that guys do not have a DNA blueprint that allows them some special understanding of the subject. The answer to the old question, “Yeah but has she played the game?” is that Howard Cosell and Bob Costas didn’t either. Al Michaels? The last time he played something was high school baseball.
Mowins, as it happens, is probably more of an accomplished athlete than any of the people just named. She was a collegiate point guard and team captain at Lafayette College, and also played soccer and softball growing up in Syracuse, New York, with three brothers and a father-coach.
“Sometimes you had to be the loudest one at the dinner table to get your share,” Mowins said. “So maybe it came natural to me, feeling comfortable being the only woman in the room. I’ve never been bothered by that.”
Mowins has done play-by-play at ESPN on one sport or another since 1994, including NCAA football, basketball, softball, soccer and volleyball, and has called preseason games for the Oakland Raiders since 2015. With its recent departures and layoffs, ESPN has holes to fill, and she is as experienced with a microphone as anyone at the network.
“We felt, look, she’s qualified, and if not now, when?” said Stephanie Druley, ESPN’s senior vice president of event and studio production.
Still, the news of Mowins’s assignment was met by resistance on social media: Some guys said they would hit the mute button.
“They don’t like what’s not normal to them,” Druley said. “So there will be detractors. But we’ve had detractors before. … It’s sort of frustrating to think it’s 2017, and people are still going to be obnoxious about it.”
This is just a guess with no clinical study behind it: The obnoxiousness has at its root an attitude by many guys that, though they were never exceptional athletes and quit playing after high school, they’re nevertheless congenitally superior to even a top-flight woman in basic understanding of competitive dynamics.
ESPN execs know from experience that this kind of resistance will wear off over time — if they keep putting women in front of viewers. To their vast credit, they have long Branch Rickeyed women in the business, from Kara Lawson and Doris Burke to Jessica Mendoza and Jemele Hill, while their competitors have basically made zero or small progress.
In the late 1980s, CBS made Lesley Visser a host-fixture on The NFL Today, and NBC gave Gayle Sierens a crack at calling a regional NFL game. But progress since then has been halting.
Meantime, ESPN made stars out of Robin Robert,s followed by Linda Cohn as anchors, and more lately promoted Suzy Kolber, Maria Taylor and Samantha Ponder as hosts on men’s sports.
The fact that the ESPN audience has gotten so used to the female anchor voice tells you that it will get used to the female play-by-play voice too—- in time.
“I hate there is something you have to get used to,” Druley said. But that’s the reality.
Why should it matter if women break into play-by-play? Not for political correctness, let’s be clear on that point. Political correctness only kills interest and discussion; it doesn’t enhance it. The goal for ESPN isn’t correctness; it’s viewership, particularly at a time when its subscribers are cord-cutting. They’re not doing this to make a point; they’re doing it for an audience. And to grow audience they have to kill old notions, which die hard.
Broadcasting should be a job for which anyone can develop the traits and skills, regardless of who they are.
All it requires is a large capacity for homework, and a lot of learned technical expertise. The fact that it has been a genetic sinecure for so long has not resulted in lot of surprising or crackling television. What will be crackling and surprising is hearing Mowins work with Rex Ryan, how their voices and observations flow and intertwine.
There is a broader perspective worth articulating here.
The ultimate argument for diversity is not that it’s morally correct. It’s that it is smarter and more interesting, and makes us all better competitors in the workplace. The fact that women in sports television continue to be paid less and given fewer prestigious assignments than their male counterparts doesn’t particularly make for a stronger industry, but a weaker one.
It will take some getting used to Mowins, and during that time, she’ll be judged more critically by some men for what she says, does, and wears, because she’s the exception in a supposedly enlightened profession.
But the normalization will come, and the female voice will sound usual rather than unusual. Somewhere, a young girl and a young boy will listen to a game on television or live stream, and that voice they hear will be the way into their imagination.
“When I was a kid watching games, I knew I wasn’t going to be the star quarterback or the coach,” Mowins said. “But that other guy, calling the game? If I worked at it, I might be him.”