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Donna Svennevik, ABC Photography
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While still a college student at Southeastern Louisiana University, Robin Roberts hosted a radio show on WHMD/WFPR that she signed off with “and this is Robin Roberts for ESPN.” While she was just joking then, that sign-off would soon become reality. In 1990, after stints as a sports reporter at television stations in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia, Roberts was hired to host ESPN’s overnight broadcast of SportsCenter, making her ESPN’s first on-air African-American female sports reporter. She quickly moved into prime time and went on to host Sunday SportsDay, NFL PrimeTime, WNBA games and specials, and Olympic coverage on ESPN, as well as Vintage NBA on ESPN Classic. One of Roberts’s mentors, tennis great Arthur Ashe, told her that “if she was remembered only for being a sportscaster, then she had not reached her full potential.” Roberts took those words to heart, and starting in 1995, she became a contributor to ABC’s Good Morning America, where she did interviews with athletes and political leaders and stories on such far-ranging topics as the war in Iraq, the gentrification of Harlem, and the AIDS crisis in Africa. Roberts was named the third anchor of Good Morning America in May 2005, and has continued to report on such socially significant stories as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Throughout her career, Roberts has followed the tenet, “I’d prefer to regret the things I did rather than the things I didn’t.” At this point, it seems she’ll have little to regret.
Robin Roberts was born on November 23, 1960, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her father, a member of the Air Force’s Tuskegee Airmen, and her mother, who was the first member of her family to graduate from college, instilled in her the belief that race and gender did not have to be obstacles to her success. Roberts’s earliest successes were athletic ones; she said, “No matter what sport it was I loved it, loved it, loved it. Loved every aspect of it, seeing how fast I could run, competing against someone else.” While she was a Mississippi State Bowling Champion at the age of ten, it was basketball that was Roberts’s real passion. She was both a star basketball player and class salutatorian in high school and attended Southeastern Louisiana University on a basketball scholarship. Roberts became the school’s third all-time-leading scorer and rebounder and averaged 15.2 points per game during her senior year, feats that earned her a spot in the university’s athletic hall of fame.
Roberts majored in communications in college; her career goal was to be a sportscaster at ESPN by 1990. During her junior year, Roberts set about making her goal a reality. She convinced a local country-western radio station to create the position of sports director and, in return, agreed to deejay on the weekends. After graduation, Roberts was offered two jobs in television, the first as the anchor of local news segments for Good Morning America and the second as the weekend sports anchor at WDAM-TV in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. She took the less prestigious weekend anchor spot in order to gain more experience with sports broadcasting. Roberts went on to work as a sports anchor and reporter in Biloxi, Mississippi, and Nashville, Tennessee, and was, in 1988, faced with another important decision. This time, Roberts had to choose between WAGA-TV in Atlanta and ESPN. She chose Atlanta, explaining, “I knew that if I was to have any staying power, I needed more experience.” She gained that experience by covering major league sports and appearing on WVEE-FM’s top-rated morning radio show. She proved quite popular with audiences, especially after she beat NBA all-star Dominique Wilkins in a free-throw shoot-out. The next time ESPN came calling, in 1990, Roberts leapt at the chance to become the host of the overnight edition of SportsCenter.
SportsCenter did not remain Roberts’s only outlet at ESPN; she has also contributed to Sunday SportsDay, NFL PrimeTime, and coverage of events like the winter and summer Olympics, the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments, LPGA tournaments, and the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee. Roberts also hosted her own prime-time interview program, In the SportsLight, and in 1999 was named the host of ESPN Classic’s Vintage NBA, a weekly one-hour show that focuses on a different NBA legend each episode. From 1997 to 2000, Roberts served as play-by-play commentator and host of ESPN’s Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) coverage. Her talents attracted the attention of sister company ABC, which hired her to host Wide World of Sports in June 1995.
At ABC, Roberts was also given the opportunity to host segments for PrimeTime and Good Morning America Sunday before being named news anchor on Good Morning America. Besides interviewing such luminaries as Senator Hillary Clinton and Tiger Woods, Roberts has traveled around the world to bring stories to GMA viewers. She has reported from Kuwait, Buckingham Palace, the Vatican, and even under the Atlantic Ocean aboard the submarine USS Scranton, where she listened to dolphins and whales, slept in a bunk, and watched movies with members of the submarine’s crew. GMA chief Ben Sherwood describes Robin as “a rare life force” and says that promoting her to the third anchor role was “the easiest, most natural, and most obvious decision and transition.”
After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in August 2005, Roberts leapt at the chance to aid its survivors’ efforts to rebuild their homes and lives. She reported for GMA from Pass Christian, Mississippi, the town where she grew up and where her mother still resided. Roberts’s family members were safe, but the town was destroyed and its residents in dire straits. After seeing Roberts’s heartfelt stories about Pass Christian, the Salvation Army and the Corporation for National and Community Service agreed to partner with GMA to help Pass Christian residents in their rebuilding efforts, which Roberts continues to document for the show.
Roberts has amassed a long list of awards and honors, including three Emmy Awards, a sports journalism scholarship fund named after her, a spot on Basketball Times’s 1997 “Five Most Intriguing People in College Basketball” list, and a place in the Women’s Institute on Sport and Education Foundation’s Hall of Fame. She has triumphed as a sportscaster and television journalist despite the challenges she faced at the beginning of her career as an African-American woman in a male-dominated field. Roberts has said, “It always tickled me when people thought I was a trailblazer being a sportscaster,” as she viewed people like her father, the Tuskegee Airman, as true trailblazers. It is undeniable, however, that in her career she has broken down barriers and become a pioneer herself.
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