By 1997, Donna de Varona had long been associated with women’s sports. She had served as Women’s Sports Foundation president and spent much of the 1980s using relationships she had forged with elected officials to help get Title IX funded. So it made sense that Alan Rothenberg, chairman of the 1999 Women’s World Cup, would ask her to give their event some heft. Access to that Rolodex didn’t hurt, either.
“Just bringing her in opened doors,” said Marla Messing, president and CEO of the event. “She was incredibly articulate and eloquent and persuasive. And she had access to sponsors, broadcasters and the political community.”
De Varona was the rainmaker. She convinced her contacts in business and the media to transform an event of modest interest into a national occasion. As a guiding principle, she used “Up Close and Personal,” the ABC feature she coined to showcase Olympic athletes.
“We put the women in all our commercials,” she said. “We brought in press from around the world for a U.S.-[world] all-star match so they could meet players one-on-one. So they wouldn’t all want to just talk to Mia Hamm but also the star on the Brazilian team. Because they’d met her, too.”
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De Varona, standing behind President Clinton at the White House with the 1999 U.S. women’s soccer team, was chair of the organizing committee for the ’99 Women’s World Cup.
Photo by: COURTESY OF DONNA DE VARONA
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“It was the exact moment when everyone was questioning whether we could pull this off,” said Julie Foudy, one of the stars of the U.S. team who today works for ESPN. “But that was the beauty of Donna. She made everyone believe.”
“I don’t think any of us saw how big it could be — except Donna,” said USA Today columnist Christine Brennan, who was among the journalists de Varona lobbied to cover the event. “I didn’t know a red card from a yellow card from a green card. But like everyone else, I eventually jumped on the bandwagon.”
Most important, de Varona called on her connections with the Clintons. Both the president and first lady attended the quarterfinal against Germany. Before the U.S.-China final, she convinced them to come to that, too. At the time, relations were tense because Chinese warplanes had crossed into Taiwanese airspace. After the match, Clinton visited the losing Chinese first in a display of hospitality.
“All that stuff about the plane went away,” de Varona said.
When it was over and the event was being celebrated as a huge success, de Varona took a call from television legend Roone Arledge. ABC had carried the matches and was jubilant about the ratings. Though ABC and de Varona were embroiled in litigation, Arledge expressed how impressed he was with her accomplishment.
De Varona was thrilled, but she still saw herself as a broadcast journalist. “Can you just go to the guys,” she said, “and get me my old job back?”
