Julie Cart Receives 2010 Mary Garber Pioneer Award

By Cathy Henkel

Before the Pulitzer, before being inducted to Arizona State’s Alumni Hall of Fame, before her 27 years and counting at the Los Angeles Times, before being honored as an AWSM Pioneer, Julie Cart was sleeping on the floor, “flat ass broke.”

“I was staying with friends in Los Angeles, stringing for $25 a story, wondering if I had enough money to buy gas," she said, in remembering her leap of faith in leaving her GA job at the Arizona Republic to try to make it in the big leagues.

"Kind of Gidget goes to the big city," she laughed. "It never occurred to me to write sports, but that was 1982, the time of Reagan and there were no jobs, much like right now.  The only freelance available was in sports.’’

Cart had the right stuff, even if she didn't know it at the time.  She had been a competitive athlete, a discus thrower of national scale, finishing 8th in the 1980 Olympic Trials. She knew the culture of sports, and her friends would later become interview worthy.  In the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, she would even get to toast former ASU teammate and pal Ria Stalman, who won the gold for the Netherlands in the discus.

She toasted her many times.

“I drove Julie and Ria to a taqueria in Westwood the night Ria won the  gold,'' recalled San Jose Mercury reporter Elliott Almond, who credits Cart as being instrumental in his career, as she does with him. "I was the designated driver anyway. They were drinking and singing to Patsy Cline on the jukebox, the gold medal was being passed around to everybody in the place. When it was time to take them home, Julie insisted  we take Ria right to her door at the Olympic Village."

Almond had no idea how they would get through security. Cart had the answer. As they approached the guard, she grabbed her friend's medal, flashed it and yelled "Gold medalist coming through!" The gates opened, and Almond's little yellow Honda careened past, delivering Ria right to her doorstep.

It was Almond who had suggested Cart for a job in the Times' Orange County bureau a year before. John Cherwa, then the editor at Orange County, was looking for diversity. And he found it in Cart.

"I have hired hundreds of people and done many more job interviews, but I can still remember my interview with Julie," he said. "I asked some outrageous question just to see what she'd say, and she talked about having a latchkey dog, but that it wasn't hurting the dog socially. She was so clever and smart, and I hired her immediately."

She covered high school sports, but within a year, she and Almond began talking about athletes and performance-enhancing drugs, something she had witnessed as a competitor. They went downtown to talk about it with Randy Harvey, then a reporter, now the associate editor at The Times. The trio launched an investigative series,  the defining moment that moved her downtown, off preps and into the world of college, pro and Olympic sports.

The LA Kings would beome her beat after a time, even though she knew very little about hockey. "It wasn't a sought-after beat then," she said.

There weren't many women covering it, either. When she followed the team to Canada, she would invariably be interviewed about her gender, and not the sport. "You know, Hockey Night in Canada, and they'd have me on," she said. "First question: So, you're a woman, eh?"

One of the team's coaches told her his wife didn't appreciate her being around the team and "couldn't stand" what she was doing. Cart was flabberghasted. "Finally, I just turned and said, 'You know, Bob, If I'm a problem in your marriage, you've got a lot bigger problem.' "

Like all women covering sports, she ran into locker room issues, athletes who would give her guff, but hardest for her, it seemed, was getting respect from within. During one annual review, one editor asked her if her "biological clock was ticking," because he was trying to decide how to position his reporters in the future. Cart, known for her wit and sassiness, said nothing. She shook her head, gave a shrug, and moved on.

"I should have pushed back -- without being whiney or threatening to sue,'' she says now. "But I think everybody has to navigate their own way through this kind of stuff. You have to do what you're comfortable with and stay true to your self and your abilities.''

Cart nearly gave up and chucked it all, though, to be with the love of her life, Gerard Wright, whom she met in Australia on a tennis assignment. He covered tennis and the Olympics for the Sydney Morning Herald, arguably the best sports job in the country.

Talk about your long distance relationship.

"We had decided that I would probably give up my job and go to Australia, but then something unexpected happened. The sports editor and national editor took me to lunch and essentially told me I had a new job.''  

It was her dream job, and after a quick phone call to Wright, they decided he would move to the U.S. instead. They were married eight years ago and Wright now  works for the Fox Sports website.

And so after 15 years as an "accidental" sports writer, she was assigned to the national desk and began her life outside of sports as an investigative reporter, mostly in public land use. That path led to a 2009 Pulitzer prize in explanatory reporting for a fresh and painstaking exploration into firefighting. Her teammate on the story, Bettina Boxall, moved to sit next to Cart for the 15-month-long project.

"I quickly learned that she is great at schmoozing with sources," Boxall said. "I would be silently urging her to ask the damn question (I'm not much of a schmoozer), but of course her natural friendliness and ease with people worked like a charm. She got great details and anecdotes just by being herself."

And that is the key to Julie Cart. Those who know her talk about her brilliance, her humor, her friendliness and her caring. That she shops at thrift stores for clothing, or that she works out at the Y, instead of a trendy gym.

"Her most important quality is that she is unique in so many ways and is so much her own person," said Tracy Dodds, a former AWSM Pioneer winner herself. "She does it her way -- and it's a pretty good way."

Cathy Henkel is a former Pioneer winner and worked previously at the Seattle Times.