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Pam Oliver
 In
the male-dominated field of broadcast sports journalism, Pam Oliver
has distinguished herself as “uber-tough and not to be trifled
with,” according to a writer for GQ (September 2008)—and also
as outstandingly professional and as having a vast knowledge and
understanding of sports. In interviewing athletes and others, “you
have to really work to find something beyond the obvious which means
beyond what the play-by-play and the analyst would talk about,”
Oliver told Melody K. Hoffman for Jet (May 26, 2008). “That’s
your challenge. That’s where your relationships with people come
from. . . . I’m not comfortable if I haven’t read almost every clip,
every bio. That helps you when you’re meeting someone for the first
time.” Oliver's career in broadcast journalism began 25 years ago,
soon after she graduated from college. In 1992, after she had worked
for eight years as a news reporter, her employer at that time, WTVT-TV,
in Tampa, Florida, granted her wish to cover sports. The next year
she was hired by ESPN; in 1995 she joined Fox Sports as a sideline
reporter during National Football League (NFL) games. Commenting on
the difficulty of landing a job as a broadcast journalist in New
York, Los Angeles, or any other major media market, she told Gary
Haber for the Tampa Tribune (November 19, 2000), “You can
have the plan of all plans, but it doesn’t always work out that way.
The minute I stopped looking down the road, things started to
happen.” She added, “It wasn’t one of those things that happened
overnight. It took a lot of hard work, patience, and diligence.”
Oliver has anchored Fox’s Southern Sports Report and Southern Sports
Tonight and contributed to the pregame show Fox NFL Sunday as a
feature reporter. In 2005 she joined Turner Network Television (TNT)
as a sideline reporter for its coverage of National Basketball
Association (NBA) play-offs and finals. “She is a fearless
interviewer,” David Hill, the chairman and chief executive officer
of Fox Sports, told Ernie Suggs for the Tallahassee Democrat
(September 11, 2002). The quality that Hill called “fearless” has
been labeled by others as “brash,” “aggressive,” and
“uncompromising”—a characteristic that, whatever its name, has led
Oliver to criticize teams and individual players on the air for
insufficient effort and to engage in squabbles with some NFL
superstars. Nevertheless, Hill said, “she has a way of making talent
relax when they are talking to her. She has a wonderful way of
putting people at ease.” Ray Buchanan, a Fox Sports Radio
broadcaster and retired NFL defensive back, one of several
players-turned-broadcasters whom Oliver has mentored, told Ernie
Suggs, “Pam is good at her job. She knows what she is talking about.
She has helped to open a lot of doors and set a good example for
females that want to get into sports journalism.”
The youngest of the three daughters of John
Oliver, a master sergeant in the U.S. Air Force, and Mary Oliver, a
homemaker, Pamela Donielle Oliver was born on March 10, 1961 in
Dallas, Texas. During her early years her family lived wherever her
father was stationed—mostly in Dallas but also at locations in
Florida, Michigan, California, and Washington State. On November 22,
1963, when she was two and a half, she drank some of her mother's
hair dye, thinking that it was a milkshake. Her mother took her to
the emergency room of Parkland Hospital, in Dallas, moments before
President John F. Kennedy was brought there after being fatally
shot. “I feel I have a connection” to that event, Oliver told Ray
Buck for the Fort Worth, Texas, Star-Telegram (April 28,
2008). “I really think what happened that day somehow planted my
desire to be in TV news.” In one track meet held at the elementary
school she attended, in the Arlington Park section of Dallas, she
won three races. She often watched sports on television with her
father, who had played football in college and as an air-force
officer.
During her high-school years, Oliver’s family
moved to Niceville, Florida, a few miles from Eglin Air Force Base.
She attended the predominantly white Niceville High School, where
she lettered in basketball, tennis, and track. Unlike her sisters,
who got married shortly after they completed high school, Oliver was
determined to attend college. Thanks to her ability as a runner, she
earned track scholarships from several colleges. While many of her
classmates enrolled at Florida State University, she accepted a
track scholarship from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical
University (Florida A&M, also referred to as FAMU), a historically
black college in Tallahassee, the state capital. “I needed a genuine
black experience,” she told Ernie Suggs. “I hadn’t had the
experience of being with black people.” Most of the other students
at Florida A&M had grown up in black communities, and Oliver's way
of speaking and her worldview differed from theirs—so much so that
she had difficulty relating to her classmates and feared that they
did not accept her. With time she became adept in social situations
on campus and comfortable with other students. A star on the
school's track team, she was an All-American in the 400-meter and
mile relay events. She set a school record in the 400-meter event
(which still stood as of 2005), and her relay team helped bring home
Florida A&M's first national track championship. As a journalism
major Oliver honed her skills in writing and interviewing. In her
senior year she qualified for the Olympic trials in track but gave
up the sport at the end of the school year, because the demands of
track had come to seem too onerous. “It all felt like a job,” she
told Suggs. “I was over it, because it was all-consuming.” She
earned a B.S. degree in broadcast journalism in 1984.
As a new college graduate, Oliver landed a
20-hour-a-week, unpaid internship at a Tallahassee television
station, where she worked as a community-affairs reporter. She also
worked part-time at the makeup counter at a local J. C. Penney
store. She next was hired as a news reporter at WALB-TV, in Albany,
Georgia, after hearing from a Florida A&M teacher about an opening
there. Following her stint in Georgia, she worked successively at
WAAY-TV, in Huntsville, Alabama; WIVB-TV, in Buffalo, New York; KHOU-TV,
in Houston, Texas; and WTVT-TV, in Tampa. In total she spent eight
years reporting on the news and serving as a news anchor, “but not
by choice,” she noted to Suggs; whenever she had expressed to
higher-ups her desire to cover sporting events, she had been
rebuffed. “I mainly assumed it was because I was a woman,” she told
Suggs. “But I eagerly took news jobs, and it was a really great
experience.” During her time as a news reporter and anchor, Oliver
often worked nights and developed sports stories on her own on the
side. In about 1992 she secured a transfer to the sports department
of WTVT-TV--a move that some of her colleagues disparaged as a step
down but which she regarded as “a natural extension of what I’ve
always been interested in,” she told Bill Fleischman for the
Philadelphia Daily News (January 16, 2004). She also liked the
predictability of her working hours as a sports reporter; unlike
news reporting, sports journalism seldom involves unanticipated,
sudden events that require being on the job far longer than usual.
Oliver’s good looks and broadcasting skills soon caught the
attention of executives at ESPN, and in 1993 that national cable
sports network hired her as a sportscaster. “They loved the fact
that I had a news background,” she told Suggs. “In news, you really
are trained to cut through the bull crap. You know how to get the
answers and avoid the clichés and crap. I covered a lot of
politicians during my news days.”
In 1995 Oliver left ESPN to offer sideline
reporting during NFL games for Fox Sports. She currently serves as
Fox NFL Sunday’s features and sideline reporter and contributes to
both pregame and postgame shows. On game day she teams up with Fox's
announcers Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, usually reporting from the
sidelines during telecasts of New York Giants games. She has also
covered the Super Bowl and served as an anchor for Fox’s
Atlanta-based shows Southern Sports Report and Southern Sports
Tonight. In 2005 Oliver joined Turner Network Television (TNT) as a
sideline reporter for the NBA. Now in her fourth season with TNT,
she switches from the NFL to the NBA during the latter's play-offs
and finals. One of only three female African-American sideline
reporters who cover the NBA—the others are Lisa Salters and Cheryl
Miller—she is known for her professionalism and class and for not
drawing attention to herself. “You have to remember what you are
there for,” she told Suggs. “You have an audience that expects you
to be a certain way. It is not a black-white thing. But where is it
written that you can’t have a good time? You can do both and be
professional.” Oliver reportedly prepares and writes all of her own
scripts, which is highly unusual for a sportscaster of her stature.
Her feature stories typically include subjects beyond the realms of
football and basketball. According to Bill Fleischman, many NFL
players have called Oliver their favorite interviewer, and some have
asked their teams' public-relations directors to alert them ahead of
time if she will be conducting interviews. “The players said that if
they’d known Pam was coming in, they would have dolled themselves up
a lot more,” Ed Goren, the president of Fox Sports, told Fleischman.
Oliver has won the respect of NFL players and
coaches, despite an aversion to sugarcoating that has sometimes led
her to be unusually blunt. During a game between the New York Giants
and the Green Bay Packers in September 2007, for example, she
criticized the Giants’ defense for lack of effort. Writing for the
New York Daily News (September 18, 2007), Bob Raissman quoted
her as saying, “I have not seen any kind of emotion, or any kind of
leadership. Usually guys like Antonio Pierce, Michael Strahan are up
trying to fire the guys up, but these guys have just been dead all
day.” “As Oliver spoke, Fox presented visual evidence . . . ,”
Raissman wrote. “Cameras panned the Giants' bench. Each and every
member of the defensive unit wore a blank expression. They all
looked lost. Oliver's ‘dead' reference was kind. Those defensive
faces had the look of quitters.” Some have accused Oliver of casting
them in a bad light. That happened in 2004, after Oliver reported
during an October game between the Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers
that the wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson had had a heated exchange
with his team's assistant coach Sean Payton. On his weekly show,
Taking It to the House, broadcast on Sirius Satellite Radio, Johnson
accused Oliver of fabricating her account and said, “I almost wanted
to get on a plane, find where she is at, and sit her down and spank
her with a ruler really, really hard, because it makes no sense,” as
quoted on nbcsports.msnbc.com (November 2, 2004). According to many
articles posted on the Internet, Oliver told a Dallas Morning News
reporter, “My job is to report what I see. I do not make stories up.
. . . Keyshawn is having a complete denial of reality.” She also
said that she would “punch him in the face” if he approached her
with a ruler in his hand. Another much-publicized incident involving
Oliver occurred in December 2007, when the Philadelphia Eagles
quarterback Donovan McNabb denied controversial statements that
Oliver had attributed to him during a pregame interview. According
to Oliver, McNabb told her that he was unhappy on the team and
believed his days with the Eagles were numbered. As reported by the
GQ writer, Oliver responded to his denials by saying that her on-air
remarks were “on-my-mother’s-grave-accurate.” She added, “McNabb
questioned my integrity. As far as I’m concerned, I’m done with
him.”
Oliver has said that more often than not, female
sports journalists are not considered the equals of their male
counterparts simply because they are women, and that being a woman
is a greater handicap than being an African-American. She told
Michael Martin, who interviewed her for the National Public Radio
program News and Notes (February 2, 2007), “For whatever reason,
people still don’t get it. It’s just difficult for the guy next to
you on the plane to process why you would be up to your eyeballs in
all these football notes without you either being a wife [of a
player] or cheerleader. So, I find it more maddening. . . . Comments
that I get from people most often have to do with me being female.
[They ask,] Do you really know; do people tell you what to say--I
mean, those are insulting things. . . . I sort of laugh at it, but
generally, I get mad about it, and so I would definitely say, from a
female aspect, I get more interesting comments than as a black
woman.”
To maintain her body heat while reporting outdoors
in subzero temperatures for hours at a stretch, Oliver wears a
half-dozen layers of clothing over a layer of petroleum jelly. She
has suffered from migraine headaches for many years; according to
the Web site of the Black Women's Health Imperative, with which she
is associated, she is working with that organization and as a
representative of the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline “to
educate black women about migraine.” Oliver and her husband, Alvin
Whitney, a freelance sports producer, live in Atlanta, Georgia. In
2004 she was honored with the Outstanding Woman in Journalism Award
from Ebony magazine. A member of Florida A&M’s Sports Hall of
Fame, she returns to her alma mater periodically to serve as a
journalist-in-residence.
Citation:
Original source: Current Biography
Original publication date: 2009
Original publication type: Print
Publisher of original publication: The H. W. Wilson Company
Database publisher: The H. W. Wilson Company
Database: Biography Reference Bank
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