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John Paul Filo/CBS
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Hannah Storm was coanchoring NBC’s late-night Olympics coverage from Atlanta on Saturday, July 27, 1996, when she learned that a bomb had exploded in the city’s Centennial Park. Reminding herself that “there are a lot of people who are very scared, so I have to be very levelheaded,” she broke the news with her trademark poise and grace under fire. “Absolutely it was the most dramatic thing I’ve been through on the air,” she said. When you’re a woman trying to break into a male-dominated field like sportscasting in the eighties, those attributes can come in handy. Storm weathered years of frustration and rejection but persevered to became one of the highest-profile sportscasters in the country of either gender, with a list of achievements, including the first full-time female sports anchor for CNN and first woman to host a weekly network pregame show for a major sport. She parlayed that success into one of the most coveted jobs in television: anchoring a network morning news show. Highlights of her work on CBS’s The Early Show include coverage of the Iraq War and interviews with the likes of Laura Bush and Senator John McCain. Commenting on her success, Storm once said: “Communication is the bottom line. The key is to project an aura of confidence, knowledge, and comfortableness—if that’s a word—so the audience is comfortable with you. All that adds up to one key word, and that’s ‘credibility,’ and that goes for a man or a woman.” In 2008, Storm returned to sports as host of ESPN’s new live weekday morning SportsCenter.
The oldest of three children, Storm was born Hannah Storen on June 13, 1962, in Oak Park, Illinois. You might say sports was in her blood—her father, Mike, was a commissioner of the now-defunct American Basketball Association and later president of the National Basketball Association’s Atlanta Hawks. Her mother was a real-estate agent who loved the theater, and for a time Hannah dreamed of being an actress, but ultimately her love of sports prevailed and she became determined to go into sportscasting instead.
Storm attended one of the great sports colleges in the country, the University of Notre Dame, graduating in 1983 with a degree in political science and communications. She kept herself busy at WNDU television, the Notre Dame-owned NBC affiliate in South Bend, Indiana. Ellery Clesemier, a roommate, told CBS News in 2002: “I think she always knew what she wanted to do. She got a job working for the production company that did Notre Dame football games. So we would be going to tailgaters and Hannah would be dressing up and going to work.”
After graduation, Storm mailed out 175 resumes seeking a sportscasting job. “It was something that was clearly a nontraditional job for women,” she said. “And so as I pursued that after college, I just got shot down over and over, told by news directors, you know, ‘We don’t want to hire a woman.’” Forced to regroup, Storm answered an ad for a radio job and wound up at KNCN-FM, a hard-rock radio station twenty miles outside Corpus Christi, Texas, spinning records by Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, and Scorpion from a studio smack in the middle of farm country. “I would drive like an hour to get to the station, which was in the middle of cow pastures,” Storm recalled years later. “And so what I had to do every day before going in to work was get out of my car and chase the cows away from the gate that led into the station.” Seeking “edge” befitting a late-night heavy-metal DJ, the station changed her name from Storen to Storm and teased her arrival by telling listeners that “Storm is coming.”
Storm bolted Corpus Christi within the year, moving to Houston, where she finally landed a sports job for a local radio station. She stayed for four years, working radio jobs (including cohosting a radio sports-talk show), freelancing for Home Sports Entertainment cable, and hosting the halftime and postgame shows for the Rockets, the local NBA franchise, for an independent TV station. In 1988, she lost her main radio gig and searched about for a full-time TV sports job, but no Houston station would hire her. “I interviewed for openings at all the TV stations there and couldn’t get hired. I had a name and a lot of experience, and one news director there said he would hire a woman over his dead body. I was turned down for more jobs than I care to think about now, some simply because of my gender.” Finally, told by one news director that she didn’t have enough experience, she upped and left Houston, settling in Charlotte, North Carolina., where she spent a year as a weekend anchor and sports reporter. “I’m not going to let someone else’s agenda, prejudices, or small-mindedness keep me from doing my job….You can’t control what people’s attitudes are towards you, you can’t control the way they think about women, but what you can control is your reaction.”
Seeking national exposure, Storm interviewed for a job at CNN Sports in Atlanta in 1989. Recalling the experience years later, Storm said she was stunned that even though she had spent years covering sports in Houston and Charlotte, “I literally had to sit down at a desk and fill out a quiz.” (Sample question: What is the difference between the American League and the National League?) “I was just floored,” she said. “I asked him, ‘Do you give this quiz to everybody?’ He said, ‘Oh, yes, everybody takes this test.’” Not! After getting the job, Storm discovered that none of her male colleagues had ever been tested. At the time, CNN Sports employed just three women—and seventy-five men.
Storm stayed at CNN for three years, coanchoring CNN Sports Tonight and hosting CNN Sports Sunday, in addition to cohosting the 1990 Goodwill Games for sister channel TBS. Her years at the all-news channel were invaluable, Storm said: “On some weekends, we were doing five half-hour shows, writing all of our own material. You were working 12-hour days, working like crazy.”
She did pick up one other thing at CNN—a husband. She and fellow sportscaster Dan Hicks began dating in 1991 and wed three years later; today they are the parents of three children. “We had our desks next to each other,” Storm said. “I helped him get assimilated to Atlanta, and he really helped me because I had a lot of pressure as the first woman sports anchor at CNN.”
In 1992, Storm moved to NBC, where once again she made television history. She initially covered tennis, cohosted Notre Dame Saturday, and reported from the sidelines at college football games, and in 1994 was named primary sideline reporter for NBC’s National Football League coverage and served as a reporter for NBA games. But the following year she anchored Baseball Night in America, making her the first woman to host a weekly network pregame show for a major sport. In 1997 she became host of NBA Showtime. “What was really gratifying is that a woman has never had this role in network television, and nobody made a big deal of it. People accepted me as a sportscaster and there was no fanfare, no, ‘She does a good job for a woman.’” That same year, Storm also became the play-by-play voice for the Women’s National Basketball Association.
Storm’s eventful NBC tenure also included Wimbledon, figure skating, golf, and four Olympics, including the Atlanta Games. One of her more distasteful career experiences also happened at the network, during the 1995 World Series, when—seemingly out of the blue—Cleveland Indians slugger Albert Belle launched an obscenity-laced tirade at her as she waited in the dugout to interview another player.
Persevering through difficult times like these helped not only Storm’s career, but the careers of women sportscasters everywhere. Asked once by CBS whether women sportscasters have it easier now than they did when she started out, Storm replied: “I’ll notice just traveling around the country that you’ll see at least one woman in every market doing sports, whereas before, when I started off, back in the day, twenty years ago, there really weren’t any.”
Storm’s career shifted radically in 2002 when CBS—in a bold attempt to shake up its lethargic morning news show—hired Storm and three others (Harry Smith, Julie Chen, and Rene Syler) as coanchors of The Early Show. The revamped program launched in October 2002. Asked at the time what she would miss most about sports, Storm replied, “I love what sports tell us about human emotion and strength and frailty. No one dies. Hearts are broken, but not in the most serious of ways.” Highlights of Storm’s tenure at The Early Show have included her coverage of the war in Iraq and interviews with major newsmakers, including Condeleeza Rice. In 2004 she removed her makeup on-air and revealed that she has a port-wine stain, or vascular birthmark—an accumulation of larger-than-normal blood vessels that gives the appearance of a stain ranging in color from pink to dark purple—under her left eye. Storm said she had been encouraged to talk about it publicly by the Sturge-Weber Foundation, to increase awareness of health concerns faced by people with port-wine stains, which can prompt glaucoma or seizures. Her tenure as host of The Early Show ended in late 2007, and she joined ESPN the following year.
In 2002, Storm and Mark Jenkins coauthored Go Girl! Raising Healthy, Confident and Successful Girls Through Sports, a guide to nurturing active girls. Her second book, Notre Dame Inspirations: The University’s Most Successful Alumni Talk About Life, Spirituality, Football—and Everything Else Under the Dome, was published in 2006 and includes interviews with such illustrious “Fighting Irish” alumni as Nicholas Sparks, Joe Montana, Regis Philbin, and Phil Donahue. Storm also sponsors an eponymous journalism internship at Notre Dame, awarded for the first time in 2007.
In 2005 Storm won the American Women in Radio and Television Gracie Allen Award for outstanding anchor for news or news magazine, including the reports “Hannah’s Portwine Birthmark,” “Fabulous Zoo Animals,” and “Living with Anorexia.” She was also the first woman to be nominated twice for an Emmy Award for best sports TV host.
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