Sportscaster Linda Cohn Talks Sports Television

**Linda Cohn** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Paul Sweeney** (0:07)
Well, in the historical time coming up for ESPN, that we would definitely want to spend some time talking about, Linda Cohn joins us, SportsCenter anchor for ESPN, retiring after 34 years from ESPN. Linda, thank you so much for joining us. I guess I'd love to just get a sense, since you've seen everything in sports television for better or worse, how has it changed? How has sports television changed? Because ESPN changed everything.

**Linda Cohn** (0:39)
Yeah. First of all, thanks for having me, Paul and Scarlet. Really appreciate it. Yeah, it's been a fun time for me. The big shows, the final shows are this Friday.
So I have seen everything, and most of it's been for the great. I like telling this story. I started in 1992, July of 1992, for those who can do the math, 34 years.
When they first instituted the bottom line, that ticker at the bottom, before that, telling the scores before we gave them the information, I share this story because many of us on camera, the SportsCenter anchors, were horrified about this because we really cared about our writing and telling a story, setting up the highlight of the game you're about to see. But you're giving away the score, and this was, I don't even know what year this was, might have been late 90s or whatever, but it was like a Twilight Zone-ish for us. You know what I mean? We thought there was a talent meeting and all of us like stood up and made our case how awful this would be. Of course, we didn't get our way, and then it turned out to be, again, one of these things that if we don't see, you know, what's wrong with the TV? There's no bottom line that tells us the score before we talk about it. So that's always the first thing that jumps up. But then technically, all the stuff we see when we watch live football, get any kind of sporting event, making it easy to watch and all this. But for SportsCenter, ESPN, yes, we were always ahead of it. And I'm really proud that I, you know, I played a small part of it with my colleagues from the golden era.

**Scarlet Fu** (2:30)
I feel like you played an instrumental part of it, not a small part of it. And the fact that you started in radio, that's near and dear to our hearts, of course, because we're talking to you on radio right now. Just give us a little bit of background about you, because I'm intrigued by the fact that you played hockey as a teenager with the boys and against the boys.
How much did that factor into your wanting to go into sports broadcasting?

**Linda Cohn** (2:56)
Yeah, and thanks Scarlet for saying that. Yeah, first, I don't want to forget to say this, how young women like yourself, all these women have reached out to me that are in the business.
And that is like, I'm really proud of that professional legacy of inspiring all these young women who are in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, watching the SportsCenter rears before they jumped on the bus, realizing that they too could do it if they saw a woman up there telling them about what happened in the game, right? So I'm really professionally most proud of that the most. So getting back to the hockey thing, I was a kid with very low self-esteem. I wore very thick glasses. Now the glasses are not as thick, thank God. But I love sports, watched it with my dad. Sports gave me something to look forward to. That's how I always phrase it, because I didn't really have a lot of friends.
I mean, I listened to the carpenters growing up. I love depressing stuff. It was awful. It wasn't, don't worry, no one had a popular.

**Scarlet Fu** (3:59)
You were emo before your time.

**Linda Cohn** (4:00)
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly, Scarlet. So anyway, then I started playing street hockey with the boys, and I realized, you know, I'm really good at this goalie thing. And what I loved about that position is that I could determine, here's this girl, low self-esteem, shy as a wallflower, you know, just kind of melted into the wall. And playing goalie, realizing that I was good at it, and I got contact lenses, by the way, that helped my vision. And, you know, and then I was like, wow, people are noticing me. And it wasn't like, you know, conceited kind of way, but I felt like I was, wow, I'm helping people, I'm winning games, I'm making the save at the right time. I'm suddenly like somebody. And so I rode that emotion. And I added that to just my love of sports and my sports teams, and watching the games with my dad. But being a goalie, I like telling this story too, because I don't think I ever would have had this career in broadcasting and then on to ESPN, you know, because I start out in radio, like you said, in New York, working seven days a week, loved it, then I, you know, hosting three-hour solo sports talk shows.