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  Praise for Sometimes You Have to Cross When It Says Don’t Walk

  “Lesley has been part of the CBS family for more than thirty years and we consider her the trailblazer for women in sports journalism, blessed with both knowledge and heart. Enjoy this romp through her forty years of covering sports.”

  —Les Moonves, chairman of the board and CEO of CBS

  “I’ve known Lesley Visser for more than forty years. She covered our team at Boston University for the Boston Globe, which was my first head coaching job. Then she served with CBS and covered all seven of my Final Fours. Not much has changed with her from the ’70s to now. Lesley has remained charming, talented, witty, and an incredible story teller.”

  —Rick Pitino, Hall of Fame basketball coach and

  winner of two National Championships

  “Every single woman writing sports today owes a debt to Lesley Visser, who proved that women could both out-report and out-write men long before we took that for granted, as we do now.”

  —John Feinstein, Washington Post columnist and

  bestselling author of more than forty books, including

  New York Times #1 bestseller Season on the Brink

  “I have known Lesley for decades and she not only loves football, she really knows the game. I recommend this book to anyone who ever wanted to hear great stories from someone who has been around the game for forty years.”

  —Dan Marino, NFL Hall of Famer

  “Lesley Visser was at Ground Zero for women covering sports, first for the Boston Globe, then at CBS. She is one of the greatest storytellers and framers of sports history and many of today’s journalists—men and women—stand on her shoulders.”

  —Billie Jean King

  “Forty years ago, Lesley Visser covered my first professional team, the Boston Lobsters. She earned my trust then and has remained one of my favorite people in sports. Her accomplishments in a male-dominated industry allowed her to break through barriers and blaze a trail that has opened doors for generations of talented women in sports since. Lesley has always been one of the best at getting and telling a story. Now, she tells her story.”

  —Robert Kraft, owner of the five-time World Champion

  New England Patriots and CEO of the Kraft Group

  “Lesley Visser is a giant in women’s sports journalism. I don’t mean physically, of course. Physically, she has excellent proportions. What I mean is, she blazed the trail for all the women who followed after her. She also paved the way. That’s right: This woman blazed AND paved, as well as forging the path, charting the course, raising the bar, and breaking through the glass ceiling. She covered professional football when the gridiron was literally a grid made out of iron and women reporters were not allowed in the locker room without bustles, yet despite these obstacles she broke big story after big story, including the discovery of the forward pass. She was also the first journalist of any gender to spell ‘Krzyzewski’ correctly. Lesley truly is a pioneer, and all those who followed in her footsteps owe her a debt of gratitude, which they could repay by buying this book. She will also accept cash.”

  —Dave Barry, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and humorist

  “Lesley doesn’t demand respect, she commands it.”

  —Joe Torre, Hall of Fame baseball manager who helped

  guide the Yankees to four World Series Championships

  The events, locations, and conversations in this book, while true, are re-created from the author’s memory. However, the essence of the story and the feelings and emotions evoked are intended to be accurate representations.

  Copyright © 2017 by Lesley Visser

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  BenBella Books, Inc.

  10440 N. Central Expressway, Suite 800

  Dallas, TX 75231

  www.benbellabooks.com

  Send feedback to [email protected]

  First E-Book Edition: December

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Visser, Lesley, 1953—author.

  Title: Sometimes you have to cross when it says don’t walk : a memoir of breaking barriers / Lesley Visser.

  Description: Dallas, TX : BenBella Books, Inc., [2017] | “Distributed by Perseus Distribution”— T.p. verso. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017030578 (print) | LCCN 2017031608 (ebook) | ISBN 9781944648893 (electronic) | ISBN 9781944648879 (trade cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781944648893 (eBook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Visser, Lesley, 1953- | Sportscasters—United

  States—Biography. | Women sportswriters—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC GV742.42.V57 (ebook) | LCC GV742.42.V57 A3 2017 (print) | DDC 070.4/49796092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030578

  Copyediting by James Fraleigh

  Cover photo by David M. Russell

  Proofreading by Jenny Bridges and Michael Fedison

  Cover design by Kit Sweeney

  Text design by Publishers’ Design

  and Production Services, Inc.

  Jacket design by Sarah Avinger

  Printed by Lake Book Manufacturing

  Text composition by PerfecType, Nashville, TN

  Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution

  www.tworiversdistribution.com

  To place orders through Two Rivers Distribution:

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  Fax: (800) 351-5073

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Special discounts for bulk sales (minimum of 25 copies) are available. Please contact Aida Herrera at [email protected].

  To my husband Bob, my brother Chris, and my

  mother Mary, who set wind to my sails when she said,

  “Sometimes you have to cross when it says, ‘Don’t walk.’ ”

  My mother, Mary Visser, with John Madden on the Madden Cruiser in 1995

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PREFACE

  People used to ask me where I lived and I’d say, “Baggage claim.” It’s true. In more than forty years of covering sports, I’ve been almost everywhere. For ten years with the Boston Globe, I covered everything from Wimbledon to the NCAA Tournament, in places like Pullman, Washington; Albuquerque; and two Philadelphias—the City of Brotherly Love, and Philadelphia, Mississippi, where I had to sit outside Marcus Dupree’s house for three days hoping I could get a story out of the wayward running back. For CBS, I covered the story of the century, the fall of the Berlin Wall (I broke off small chips to give as Christmas presents), and for ABC I did World Figure Skating in places like London and St. Petersburg, Russia.

  Those were trying assignments, and honestly, I didn’
t see any of them coming. I was just a young girl who loved sports. To imagine that I would ascend to the top of two professions, stay there for forty years, and influence thousands of young women was like saying that I would be the first woman on the Supreme Court (thank you, Sandra Day O’Connor) or the first American woman to go up in space (here’s to you, Sally Ride). But I had a true passion for the games; I really cared if the Red Sox moved the runner over or if Sam Jones banked it off the backboard. And I have accepted the scar tissue that has come with being a trailblazer. My husband says if I win one more Pioneer Award, I have to wear a coonskin cap.

  With Brian Boitano and Peggy Fleming while reporting for ABC at the World Figure Skating Championships

  I’ve been able to find humor or pathos in almost all my assignments—I grew up reading Erma Bombeck and Dorothy Parker and the other wits of the Algonquin Round Table (Parker’s best line was about when she broke her arm in London “sliding down a barrister”). And through it all, I’ve had the good fortune to have Barry Frank as my agent, who gave me two pieces of advice: “If it interests you, it will interest the audience” and “Write it down—everything is a bit.” This book would be so much easier if I’d listened to the second part. I only took notes for the story I was covering—I didn’t want to look like Dustin Hoffman in All the President’s Men. Remember when someone would say something and he’d run to the men’s room, stuff himself in a stall, and write it down on a piece of crumpled paper? I just wanted to live life, not record every second of it.

  I always say sports is the great meritocracy. It doesn’t matter where your mother went to college or how much money your father has—can you hit the jumper, did you sink the putt? The great Bill Bradley said the mixture of people in a locker room is the “ultimate laboratory.” Athletes from every ethnic and socioeconomic background are forced together. This wonderful mix has played out for me, having interviewed five U.S. presidents, every superstar of every color, plus high school quarterbacks, college greats, and kids in slums. I did a terrible infomercial with Marcus Allen (for copper wristbands; it ran at 4 AM and they never sold) and I’ve been assigned everything from the World Series to Monday Night Football to box lacrosse. I’ve worked with all the great broadcasters and covered almost every sport, and I’m looking forward to sharing the stories and experiences they provided me. I hope you get some inspiration or maybe a few laughs along the way.

  CHAPTER 1

  How lucky was I to be born in Boston? Boston was interested in three things: the Red Sox, politics, and AM radio, and my family weighed in on all three. We thought the Book of Genesis began with Abner Doubleday. In the late 1950s, it was either WMEX or WBZ. People either listened to Arnie “Woo-Woo” Ginsburg, the leader of The Night Train Show on WMEX, or Bruce Bradley on WBZ. I was a Ginsburg guy. He was imaginative, sometimes pretending to be a train whistle or a clown or playing “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On the Bedpost Overnight?).” He first played “Louie Louie” as a joke. I even begged my parents to take us to Route 1 North (wherever that was—my family lived on the South Shore of Boston) because some restaurant sold “Ginsburgers.” I should actually say I begged my mother, since my father was rarely around.

  Max Visser, my father, was born in Amsterdam under the Nazi occupation. My father’s father was a doctor, and he went off to Swiss boarding schools and the opera before the Germans came. Even though his family wasn’t Jewish, they were all starving for more than five years. Everyone hid a Jewish neighbor, everyone was afraid of the SS. My dad went to Montessori school with Anne Frank. Jews and WASPs all took the same class. When my dad and I would skate on a frozen pond, he would embarrass me by putting one arm low behind his back and a muffler around his neck. He knew nothing of my three passions: football, basketball, and baseball.

  My mother, Mary, was the opposite. She was born in western Massachusetts to a poor, funny Irish family. She often told me that if she and Max had dated today, they would have ditched each other in two months. Back then, you got married. She was the first in her family to go to college and she became an English teacher so popular that, at her funeral, more than thirty years of students from her classes came to honor her. She encouraged my love of sports, and told me of the great Wilma Rudolph, who won three gold medals in the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. I got to interview Rudolph once, the “Tornado” of Saint Bethlehem, Tennessee, the twentieth of twenty-two siblings. She’d recovered from polio, and I’ll never forget how her eyes misted over as she said, “There is no triumph without struggle.”

  I seldom saw my father because he was a sailor, and a wandering seaman at heart. I was born in Boston but my father sent my mother, my older brother Chris, and me to the Netherlands to live with his mother when I was two years old. Max didn’t come, and my mother’s Dutch wasn’t really that polished, having grown up in the Berkshires. But she looked at it as an adventure (she always said I had “sand in my shoes”), and it must have started my love of travel. My father probably moved three times in the year we lived in the Netherlands. And so it went. He would move, we would move, then he would move again. This was great if you loved sports (new teams in Baltimore and Cincinnati!) but lousy for a marriage.

  They finally got divorced on our eleventh move, but before then, the early years in Boston were wonderful. I always say I’m a child of the Red Sox and the Kennedys. By the time JFK—a millionaire’s son from Harvard—emerged politically, we were deep into the mythology, and when the first Catholic was elected president, we watched the inauguration and cried with every word. I think my mother tried to join the Peace Corps at fifty years old.

  We learned about the Kennedy–Fitzgerald dynasty early on, how Boston always had upper-crust mayors like John Phillips, Samuel Eliot, or two-time mayor Josiah Quincy before Irishmen like Collins and Honey Fitz took over. I was born in the Quincys’ namesake city on September 11, 1953. Quincy was an early colonial settlement, founded in 1625, and was the birthplace of two U.S. presidents, John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams. All I cared about was that it was a ten-cent bus ride from Fenway. If my brother and I spent too much money at the game, we would walk home, a good ten miles. Once when we were walking, we stopped to sneak on to a miniature golf course. Another time, we brought my mother flowers that we’d pulled off some bushes near the bus stop.

  The Red Sox were no good in my childhood, but it didn’t matter. We were the team of Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. We thought we knew the truth on Ruth. Okay, he won us some World Series, but he was really a beer-guzzling, skirt-chasing, hot-dog-stuffing boor. Well, yes, his lifetime ERA was 2.28 and his winning percentage was .671. He hit with the power of a lumberjack and by the time he was nineteen, he was the best pitcher in baseball. He was still a Red Sox player then, and the stories we heard made us laugh. Like the time he punched an umpire and got a ten-game suspension, or when, on off days, he would drink all day and swim with his new bride. We even thought it was funny that he would shower and put on the same underwear. But when he went to the Yankees, we thought he was crude.

  The Red Sox were nothing when he left, except for the sparkle of Ted Williams. I was born one month after Ted Williams came back to the Red Sox for the second time—after he’d done one tour of duty as a fighter pilot in World War II and another tour of duty in the Korean War. We’d hear about the ‘46 World Series, known for two things: that Ted Williams bunted and Enos Slaughter scored from first on his “Mad Dash Home.” Of course, it was the winning run and the Red Sox lost to St. Louis. We whispered that yes, maybe Johnny Pesky held the ball too long, but when I met him years later I blithered like he was the best shortstop who ever lived. Williams was the greatest hitter and I will have that argument with anyone. He said he was a natural hitter because he took “a thousand swings a day.” Yes, he was moody and could throw a fit. But his teammates said he was careful even there. When Williams would punch a locker, he would do it with his right hand. Of course, he was a lefty at the plate—ooh, that gorgeous swing from deep in his hip
s—although he did throw with his right hand. Curt Gowdy was the Red Sox play-by-play man my entire childhood, for fifteen years (1951–65), but he also did Super Bowls and Final Fours, Olympics, you name it. I was lucky to work for his son Curt Jr. at ABC, doing World Figure Skating, the World Series, and the Triple Crown. And Curt Jr. was kind enough to introduce me to his father on more than a few occasions. I even went to his house in Palm Beach once and pretended to like whiskey.

  (Quick story, but fun. You know Saints quarterback Drew Brees? Do you know why he wears number 9? For Ted Williams! His father used to show him tapes of the Splendid Splinter at the plate, over and over, so Brees could see his hand-eye coordination and the way he shifted his weight. About seven years ago, I brought Drew a battered number 9 Red Sox cap, and he keeps it in his locker to this day.)

  I and my brother Chris, who always listened to Red Sox games on the radio, went many times to Fenway Park to sit in the bleachers and eat Fenway Franks. The thirty-seven-foot-high Green Monster looked like the Great Wall of China to us. The Sox of the late fifties and early sixties were a bumbling group. The first black player, Pumpsie Green, would come in as a pinch runner for either Pete Runnels, who hit lefty but threw righty, or shortstop Don Buddin, who was once called “the most booed man in Boston.” Willie Tasby spent exactly one season in centerfield, and the manager’s name was Pinky (Higgins). My favorite player was journeyman Ike Delock, a devoted right-hander who didn’t even make it to the major leagues until he was twenty-two. With his cap pushed back on his head, he must have caught my eye one time, and I’ve carried his number 14 (the pride of Highland Park, Michigan) ever since. I don’t think he ever won more than fourteen games.

  I never got to see Williams in person. My first visit to Fenway was in 1961. By then, “Teddy Ballgame” had retired. Everyone knows Curt Gowdy’s call of Williams’s famous last at-bat: “Everyone here in Fenway is quiet now after giving Williams a two-minute standing ovation . . . the count 1-1 . . . The drive to deep right—and it’s gone—home run in Ted Williams’s last at-bat!”