The Tampa Tribune
June 5th, 1993

"USF Graduate Is The Queen of Jock Talk"
By: Martin Fennelly

It is quite the transition: from homecoming queen to chatting with Jerry from Queens. She lives in New York, where she does her radio show: fast lane, fast talk, know your sports or you're dead, double dead if you're a woman.
New Yawk on the line.
Liguori, what about duh Knicks?
"You can't fake it up here," says Ann Liguori, University of South Florida '82.
You have to know your stuff. You have to grab New York and get it's attention."
Liguori is in Central Florida this weekend to accept a USF Distinguished Alumns Award. The award will be presented today at an alumni event at Disney World. It is appropriate. There is more than a little fairy tale to this story.
Small-town Ohio kid goes to large Apple, works hard, fights off rejection, makes it big on radio and eventually produces, distributes, syndicates her own talk show. "Sports Innerview," in its fourth year, can be seen here on SportsChannel Florida.
Success can also be read on a Manhatten office door.
Ann Liguori Productions, Inc.
Very Distinguished.
"Advice for somebody starting out?" Liguori says. "Go for it."

Making A Connection

At 32, she is the only woman to produce, sell and distribute her own talk show.
She has worked for networks, written for newspapers and magazines, but mostly she has gotten athletes in front of her, asked them things you'd thought they'd never answer, and listen while they did. Mickey Mantle cried over Roger Maris. Jim Brown talked about wife beating. Pete Rose talked about gambling.
"I think I connect," Liguori says. "Most athletes have overcome one thing or another. There's a struggle. I can relate to that."
A lot or women can.
In high school, Liguori wanted to run, but had to form her own Women's track team because Brecksville, Ohio, wasn't into that sort of thing. She won at conference tennis while playing with the boys, there wasn't a tennis team for women.
She won a fellowship straight out of South Florida, where she really was a homecoming queen. With the fellowship came a summer stint at CBS, where she did a little of everything. "Even getting Brent Musburger's coffee."
She had this plan, though, formulated as a kid.
I was going to ask questions," she says. "I was always pretending to interview people. Even on family vacations, those long drives, I'd interview my dad while he was driving. I'd do a whole show. It was always me asking the questions."
She hit the ground running in New York. She hit the ground, and a jock strap hit her from behind, or somebody would pinch her, or a network executive would smile and pat her. Sexual harassment wasn't a catch phrase then. It was just around.
This was the real world. Women didn't ask questions. Men did, and invariably, if the woman was attractive, the questions dwindled into one: Whaddya doing tonight?
"Athletes I don't even know would ask me for dates," Liguori says. "Now you can say I just put myself in that position, that world, but think about it – if men were treated like that while doing their jobs at sports events, how would they feel? They can't really relate."

Making Her own Breaks

This is the battle. It is trench warfare to those extremely simple guys who think that all women get jobs because they are women…damn quotas. These are invariable the same fellows who shave their ridged eyebrows in a country where, as a general rule for hundreds of years- including this one- they get those jobs because they are men. You see, unwritten laws, they're OK.
Liguori went around the law. She got ahead by networking, by knocking on doors for a story or an interview or an advertiser for her show. She called on newspapers, set up breakfasts; spread the word – her word. There was self-promotion, but how else to get there?
She made breaks. And after joining WFAN radio, after she started talking and knowing her telling, she caught on almost as quickly as a fave phrase…"Hey Liguori, what's the Story?"
The Story is not about being a woman or attractive. It makes an alma mater proud. It is not a crusader, but it gets you Disney World. Forget gender. Forget equity.
The story: Ann Liguori is damn good.