From the latest Sports Media Watch Podcast, ESPN’s Hannah Storm joins Jon Lewis to discuss her prolific career in television. The full podcast is below, with the Storm interview beginning at the 19:35 mark.
Hannah Storm on calling Amazon’s TNF with Andrea Kremer
The pressure that I felt at Amazon for calling games for all those seasons — we called full seasons for four years — was that I would do a good enough job and that Andrea would do a good enough job that other women would get those opportunities. That was the pressure for me. The pressure wasn’t like, people are gonna hate me or call me out on social media for every mistake I make, because I just knew that those people weren’t gonna like me anyway regardless of if I did a good job or not.
On calling the inaugural WNBA season and if she lobbied for the role
I got an ulcer that summer. I mean, that was hard! The WNBA was a new league, I had just had a baby, oh my gosh I I had never done play-by-play … yeah that was stressful.
No I did not lobby, no. Dick Ebersol said, “you are doing it.” I do commend him for that. I broke so much ground because of his vision at NBC. Obviously I was the first woman to ever host major league sports broadcasts for a season, doing not only baseball, the baseball network, the World Series, but also obviously the NBA … I mean those kind of roles, that just hadn’t been done. Women had not had those kind of prominent hosting roles … I thought his vision, and everything to see me as a host, as an anchor, it was great and it set the standard for so many other women to follow. And he said, “You are doing play-by-play for the WNBA. This is a women’s league and you need to be the voice of it.”
On hosting the 1997 NBA Finals
I had the benefit, before that, of doing all the regular season hosting on the NBA. We had triple headers … we were the only place you could watch basketball and we would do five games a weekend. We would do double header one day triple header the next day. That was a lot of basketball, it really was. Then when Bob [Costas] would come and do the playoffs, I would do the sidelines for the Western Conference. So I had a lot of sideline experience, I knew a lot of the coaches, the players, I really knew the league really really well. So I think by the time it came to hosting Finals and having those huge roles, I was just so comfortable in it.
On moving from sports to news
I loved morning television. When I was in college and I was working in sports radio and our local sports TV station in South Bend, when I looked on television there weren’t women doing sports. But there were women covering the Olympics. The women that were covering the Olympics were the morning show hosts on the networks. So the networks would send Jane Pauley or Kathleen Sullivan because they would send their morning teams to the Olympics.
So I had dual career goals at that point when I was young coming out of college. I wanted to broadcast an Olympics, which I ended up doing four, and I wanted to do morning television at some point. It just so happened too that, because I was a mother — am a mother — but I was a very young mother at the time, I have always sort of looked at my kids looked at their situation looked at what age they are and kinda worked backwards for me, for jobs. Like, what is going to give me the maximum amount of time home?
So I decided when NBC was losing all those sports properties, and they offered me to stay just to do the Olympics, I was like, no — I want to work full time, I always wanted to do morning TV, and my kids are going to be in school. I only looked at morning jobs. That was it, for years. I only looked at morning jobs so I could be there for their games and be there when they got home from school and be there on weekends and so forth. So it really was perfect.
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