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`When Christine Brennan was a little girl growing up across the street from the University of Toledo’s football stadium, she would find herself entranced as she watched her father walk to their games. As he made his way towards the glowing lights in the sky, she wondered what was so fascinating about this. What could be so exciting about these football games that her father attended on a regular basis?
Now, as one of the most recognizable female sports columnists in the nation, she feels like she is living a dream.
Brennan visited Millersville University on Tuesday and spoke about her childhood and some of the events that led to her becoming a sports journalist as well as her opinions on some of today’s hot topics in sports.
Brennan eventually joined her father, Jim Brennan, in attending Toledo football games when she was about five years old, and she could not get enough.
During a period in which the Rockets won 35 straight games, she recalled a trip with the Girl Scouts in which she brought a radio so she could listen to a game. As she celebrated a game-winning field goal by her favorite team, her fellow Girl Scouts looked at her with confusion. They did not understand the appeal.
The quarterback of the team, Chuck Ealey, was her favorite player on the team and is still her hero. Despite being the winningest quarterback in college football history, Ealey was not drafted by the NFL, largely because he was an African-American. Brennan felt he could have been a first-round pick if he had played today.
For a column she wrote years later, Brennan finally got to talk to her idol and they have since established Chuck Ealey/Christine Brennan Celebrity Networking and Pro Am Golf Outing, which raises money for youth development. With this, her life with sports has truly come full circle.
“Every time I hear from him, I take stock of where I am and where I was,” Brennan said.
From there, the obsession with sports increased, but, as a girl, she was not offered the same opportunities as the boys. When her childhood friends, who were mostly boys, went off to participate in organized sports, she was forced to throw her baseball against the wall and pretend she was taking the game-winning shot in a women’s basketball championship that did not even exist at the time. Brennan lamented the fact that she was not able to participate in organized sports until high school, but she made the most of it once she got the chance. She became a six-sport athlete, participating in two sports at a time and changing uniforms on the way from one game to another.
“I am who I am because I played sports,” Brennan said.
USA Today columnist Christine Brennan gives a lecture to Millersville students in Caputo Hall on Tuesday afternoon. Brennan spent the day on campus talking with students and faculty. Photo by: David Lu.
That person is one who is aware of the fortunate position she is now in. As her love of journalism started, Brennan originally thought she was going to cover politics.
Despite starting in sports at the Miami Herald covering Miami Hurricanes and Florida Gators football, she thought she would still move towards politics at some point. She wondered how she could keep covering sports in this way and not become bored. However, she eventually segued out of covering football to the Olympics, which she has done since 1984.
Following this, she gained an enormous amount of popularity from her national bestseller Inside Edge, a book that chronicled her first season on the figure skating circuit. Since then, she has become a columnist for USA Today and she has appeared as a commentator on ABC News and ESPN. Even opportunities such as speaking at colleges allow her to escape and keep her life interesting.
Whether she wants to admit it or not, Brennan is already a legend among female sports journalists. She was the first president of the Association of Women in Sports Media from 1988-90. The AWSM also gave her the Pioneer Award in 2004. She realizes that due to the fact that she began her career around the time when women started breaking into the industry that she will be thought of as a role model. This is something that she has accepted.
“It goes with the territory,” Brennan said.
As for her current work, she has recently written columns on the controversies surrounding Michael Phelps and Alex Rodriguez. She referred to Rodriguez as “lame” and talked at length about the problems surrounding baseball due to their lack of a successful drug-testing policy, especially when compared to the one used by the Olympics.
With all of the problems surrounding professional sports, she cannot help but think back to a time when sports were simply entertainment for her.
“Sports is much more a mirror of society today than the escape than it once was,” Brennan said.
Despite the role her father played in her life in her childhood, she does not have a desire to have children of her own to raise in the same way. Rather, she finds satisfaction in helping to bring up her eight nieces and nephews in a similar way that her father did.
“I am extremely involved in their lives and I think the reason is that I know what it’s like to have a very supportive father and mom, too,” Brennan said. “I really want to be a huge part in their lives, not only in sports but throughout their lives.”
Brennan is able to look back on everything she has accomplished and what it would have meant to that girl that used to sit and cheer for the Toledo Rockets from the 40-yard line.
“I feel fortunate to be doing exactly what I want to do,” Brennan said.