The Big Picture: Ward Does Play-by-Play

By Chuck Finder, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

If Pam Ward could get her hands on curmudgeonly critic Andy Rooney, why, she oughtta plop his posterior in front of an ESPN2 football broadcast some noontime Saturday and force him to watch a game announced by ... Pam Ward.

"I don't think it would do any good," she said with a smirk.

The heck with sideline reporters, a flawed position regardless of sex, color, creed, hairdresser or haberdasher. This woman is showing the sports-media world that a girl can play a guy's game, or at least play-by-play it well. She is one of 125-plus women working on the air in network-television sports, and she's the only one calling every down. She is a perfectly lovely glazed donut stuck inside a window growing increasingly full of what even she describes as cheesecake: An agent once told her Cosmetically, you're not there.

"It's just wrong," Ward said of sexist thinking such as CBS' Rooney grousing last month that women shouldn't talk on TV about football. "If you're a play-by-play guy, you're a play-by-play guy. Whether you're a girl or a guy.

"We're announcers, we're not experts. I think it's the biggest misconception. Play-by-play announcers aren't athletes. They didn't play football. If you threw a football at them, they probably couldn't catch it right." Ward can, so she claimed, throwing the gauntlet down for a possible Fox spin-off to boxing: Celebrity Passing and Receiving.

This female knows football. You probably watched one of her broadcasts and didn't even realize it, thanks to her deep voice. Sure, the only woman working network football play-by-play has made mistakes. What announcer doesn't? Try memorizing a roster sometime and calling a game off the living-room TV -- it ain't easy. Whether it's the local gents in the booth or the cable guys (and girl) or the network hands from whom we should expect an even higher standard, they all goof.

Just listen to Ward steadily, and you'll appreciate her ability. This reporter remembers from December a 4-hour, 24-minute, BYU-Hawaii telecast that she helped to make enjoyable rather than interminable. Two weeks ago, she worked the Miami-West Virginia game. This past weekend, after her Michigan State-Michigan telecast, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Ron Rapoport was moved to opine: "I'm inclined to agree with Andy Rooney that women shouldn't be reporting from the sidelines. More of them should be doing play-by-play."

Ward announces Northwestern-Iowa this week and Wisconsin-Michigan the next, being ESPN2's personal Big Ten play-by-play person. And conference Commissioner Jim Delany called her up before the season and welcomed her aboard, saying her presence would send a great message to students. In a business in which so many women sports reporters and anchors model their eye candy looks in magazines, the only posing Ward will do is questions.

She takes seriously her job, her role. It isn't a publicity stunt, like Gayle Sierens' turn at an NFL microphone for NBC in 1987, on a Kansas City-Seattle yawner. "I want to do this forever," Ward said.

It all started three years ago, after USA Today wrote about the sorry tale of women basically being prohibited from the football booth (as if men should be prohibited from, say, delivering babies). Ward went into the ESPN office of John Walsh, the senior vice president, executive editor and resident genius.

"I threw the paper down and said, 'I don't want to read this stuff anymore. Let me do it.'" And he did. "All I had to do was ask," Ward said, in retrospect. "If I had known that, I would have done it earlier. People don't bat an eye when guys do play-by-play. I figured I could."

The four-letter network eased her into it, giving her a Toledo-Bowling Green kickoff and three games that first season. Last year, she worked 11. Now, she's got mad game: the Big Ten spot and 17 telecasts in all and three bowls. Ward will work the New Orleans Bowl, the San Francisco Bowl (a possible stop for WVU) and the Detroit-in-December bash known as the Motor City Bowl.

"For the third straight year," she said of that last one. "They can't play without me." Ward, a former Cleveland and Washington, D.C., sports talker and six-year ESPN employee, also works women's college basketball play-by-play. She used to work in Rooney's favorite spot -- football sidelines. "I did sideline for one year, 1996, and hated it. It's tough to be good at it. And I was not good at it." Getting heaped with snow at the Tennessee-Kentucky game that season, she vowed out loud: I'm never doing this again.

"I'm the only one," she said from the WVU press box the Saturday before last. "So it's kind of cool."

"After understanding how important it was to her to break down a barrier," booth partner Chris Spielman said earlier this season, "I'm honored to be part of it."

ESPN should continue to boost her ascension up the male-dominated ladder and provide her with a Saturday prime-time window. Then that could enable her to knock down the next barrier: NFL play-by-play. And, Ward said, "not just that one game."

No Sierens song for her.