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Women in sports television reflect on the pioneering career of Phyllis George

The irony of Phyllis George’s groundbreaking sports TV career is that CBS Sports first hired her in 1975 simply because she was a pretty face who four years earlier had won the Miss America pageant.

 

But George, who died last week at the age of 70, used her platform on “The NFL Today” to became a role model for women who wanted to break into sports television.

Simply because of the amount of work she put into her craft, she won the respect of some of the best-known sports journalists in the business. It’s noteworthy that after a career that also included serving as Kentucky’s first lady and launching businesses, The New York Times identified George in its obituary headline last week as “a trailblazing sportscaster.”

“If you want to play in the sandbox, you have to at least be in the sandbox; and Phyllis George put us in the sandbox,” said TV sports journalist Andrea Kremer, one of only two women to have won the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Pete Rozelle Radio-Television award. “She put women in a position where we can be hired. We weren’t all going to be beauty queens. She opened the door for other women to be considered. That, to me, is her legacy in sports broadcasting.”

Phyllis George was part of the “NFL Today” team with Brent Musburger, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder and Irv Cross.CBS Sports

Lesley Visser, the only other woman to win the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television award, made the same point.

“Phyllis was a giant in what she did,” Visser said. “She opened the door for many young women. She absolutely was a role model for women who never could have imagined themselves in that role.”

Fox 5 New York sports anchor Tina Cervasio is a case in point. Cervasio never met George but credited her with being a role model, albeit in an indirect way.

“My first role models were Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters, but my dad knew about Phyllis George from ‘The NFL Today,’” Cervasio told my colleague Terry Lefton. “He knew about my love for sports, and he encouraged me to pursue that. Because of what she had done, my dad knew there was a path. The first ones I really noticed were Robin Roberts, Lesley Visser and Andrea Kremer, but, of course, it was Phyllis George who opened the door for all of them.”

What made George so endearing is that she readily admitted that she didn’t know much about football strategy, which made her a unique presence on an NFL pregame show. She became known for feature stories that showed different sides to athletes — such as the time she got straight-laced Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach to talk about his sex life on camera.

“She didn’t talk about a game with which she wasn’t familiar,” Kremer said. “What she was familiar with was how to get people to open up to her; how to get people to feel relaxed around her; how to get them to reveal part of themselves. That’s how she was used.”

While a reporter at the Boston Globe in the early 1980s, Visser recalled a meeting she had with CBS Sports executives Ted Shaker and Neal Pilson, who had traveled to Boston to try and convince Visser to work at CBS. The idea was to get Visser to fill the role created by George.

“They said, ‘We had a woman who knew television but didn’t know sports. Now we want a woman who knows sports, and we’ll teach you TV,’” Visser recalled. “They weren’t diminishing Phyllis. They hired Miss America in 1975, and America fell in love with her.”

Some of America did, anyway. As Kremer points out, much of the criticism directed at George at the time dealt with the fact that she discussed football on television during an era when hers was the only female voice. Kremer, who calls “Thursday Night Football” games with Hannah Storm for Amazon, said she regularly hears similar complaints.

“One thing I took away from Phyllis is the idea that you have to put blinders on — you cannot let all the noise that surrounds us get to you,” she said. “It’s always the same thing, and it persists to this day.”

Despite her pioneering role for women in sports, Visser remembered George more for her warm disposition and sunny outlook. Visser recalled seeing her at a Boston Celtics game in 1979. At the time, George was married to the team’s owner, John Y. Brown, who spent four years as the governor of Kentucky. Visser asked George what she thought of Boston Garden.

“You have to picture her beautiful Southern accent from Denton, Texas,” Visser said. “She said, ‘Well, I love Boston Garden. But it was … quite smoky.’”

Visser would see George every year at the Kentucky Derby. One year while Visser was conducting interviews for ABC, George took note of her hat — something Visser described as “a fedora thing.”

George told Visser, “Oh honey, that hat is just not network quality,” and insisted that the two trade hats.

“It felt sisterly,” Visser said with a laugh. “She was so well-mannered.”

 
John Ourand can be reached at jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Ourand_SBJ and read his twice-weekly newsletter.

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