Gayle Gardner (born ca. 1950) is an American sportscaster who worked for

ESPN ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). Th ...

and NBC Sports beginning in 1987 until 1993. Gardner is considered a pioneer in sports broadcasting, having been the first female sports anchor to appear weekly on a major network.

Career

After being hired by

in 1983, Gardner served as a '' SportsCenter'' anchor for three years. Gardner then worked for

NBC The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an American English-language commercial broadcast television and radio network. The flagship property of the NBC Entertainment division of NBCUniversal, a division of Comcast, its headquarters are l ...

from 1987-1993. Among the assignments that she undertook included anchoring NBC's New Year's Day college football bowl game coverage, '' NFL Live!'', '' Major League Baseball: An Inside Look'',

1988 File:1988 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The oil platform Piper Alpha explodes and collapses in the North Sea, killing 165 workers; The USS Vincennes (CG-49) mistakenly shoots down Iran Air Flight 655; Australia celebrates its Bicenten ...

and

1992 Summer Olympics The 1992 Summer Olympics ( es, Juegos Olímpicos de Verano de 1992, ca, Jocs Olímpics d'estiu de 1992), officially known as the Games of the XXV Olympiad ( es, Juegos de la XXV Olimpiada, ca, Jocs de la XXV Olimpíada) and commonly known as ...

coverage, the French Open, Wimbledon, and NBC's "Prudential Sports Updates". In January, 1989, Gardner was a member of the NBC broadcast team for

Super Bowl XXIII Super Bowl XXIII was an American football game between the American Football Conference (AFC) champion Cincinnati Bengals and the National Football Conference (NFC) champion San Francisco 49ers to decide the National Football League (NFL) champ ...

(

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

vs.

Cincinnati Cincinnati ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located at the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line wit ...

). On August 3, 1993, Gardner became the first woman to do televised

play-by-play In sports broadcasting, a sports commentator (also known as sports announcer or sportscaster) provides a real-time commentary of a game or event, usually during a live broadcast, traditionally delivered in the historical present tense. Radio was ...

of a

baseball Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each, taking turns batting and fielding. The game occurs over the course of several plays, with each play generally beginning when a player on the fielding t ...

game when she called the action of a game between the Colorado Rockies and the Cincinnati Reds. Gardner later worked on the

Food Network Food Network is an American basic cable channel owned by Television Food Network, G.P., a joint venture and general partnership between Warner Bros. Discovery Networks (which holds a 69% ownership stake of the network) and Nexstar Media Group ( ...

before writing a screenplay. She spent three years on the Food Network.USA Today
"Disney-owned networks pass on early talks with NFL", by Rudy Martzke, August 10, 2004, Retrieved March 3, 2012. In 2004 (to celebrate the 25th anniversary of ''SportsCenter''), Gardner returned to anchor a special " old school" edition of ''SportsCenter'' alongside

Stuart Scott Stuart Orlando Scott (July 19, 1965 – January 4, 2015) was an American sportscaster and anchor on ESPN, most notably on ''SportsCenter''. Well known for his hip-hop style and use of catchphrases, Scott was also a regular for the network i ...

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Gardner, Gayle 1950 births Living people Olympic Games broadcasters American television reporters and correspondents Women sports announcers American television sports announcers Major League Baseball broadcasters Colorado Rockies announcers National Football League announcers Tennis commentators College football announcers American women television journalists 21st-century American women

Career

See also

References

External links