Mariah Burton Nelson: Article

MARIAH BURTON NELSON
An Athletic Approach to Leadership and Life

Author Celebrates 23 Years of Writing, Inspiring
by Dawn Reiss, 2004, AWSM Newsletter
© Mariah Burton Nelson

"Think of yourself as an athlete. I guarantee you it will change the way you walk, the way you work, and the decisions you make about leadership, teamwork and success." – Mariah Burton Nelson

Like many of us, Mariah Burton Nelson did not plan on being a sports writer when she was growing up, much less a women’s sports writer.

"I remember wanting to write a book when I was just 4 years old,” says Burton Nelson, a former editor for Women's Sports and Fitness magazine. “Mom read to us, and I loved the poetry, the stories, the language, and the humor. I wanted to write books, to communicate with and delight people that way.”

While Burton Nelson can still recite dozens of children's poems, it was a few years before she started writing about sports.

“When I was growing up, no one was writing about women in sports,” Nelson says. “There were not any women's sports on television. I heard names like Gertrude Ederle and Sonia Henie from my mother, but the only woman I read about was Babe Didrikson. Her biography was the only book about a female athlete in the entire Blue Bell (Penn.) Elementary School library. I read it about 15 times.”

Didrikson died in 1956, the year Nelson was born, but Didrikson’s passion for excellence, unapologetic competitiveness and diverse athletic talents inspired Nelson for years to come.

“She excelled in basketball, track and field and golf, and played dozens of other sports well,” Nelson says. “She even played the harmonica well. Everything she did, she did with discipline and determination. She mirrored for me, and validated, my basic approach to life.”

Growing up, Nelson, swam competitively, played field hockey, lacrosse, volleyball and tennis and competed in rowing and water polo. But basketball was the sport in which she excelled.

“Because I had no role models of people writing about women and sports, I literally could not conceive a career as a sports writer -- as I also could not conceive playing professional basketball,” Nelson says. “I did admire the writings of Frank Deford, George Plimpton, and George Leonard, and was influenced, I'm sure, by their styles. But they wrote almost exclusively about men, and of course they were men. I never had a mentor, and sometimes I miss that."

After a blockbuster basketball career at Stanford University, where her rebounding record stood for 24 years, Nelson began playing professionally in Europe and took some advice to heart: write what you know.

At the age of 24, Nelson wrote about her year playing professional basketball in France and published her first article, in 1980, in Matrix Women's Newsmagazine, a free monthly in Santa Cruz, Calif. From there, she started writing more about her own sports experiences and other female athletes. “So by writing about what I knew, I inadvertently created a new niche as a women's sports writer,” says Nelson, who played in the first U.S. women’s pro league, the WBL. “Often it was hard to get newspapers and magazines to believe that anyone cared to read about women's sports experiences – a phenomenon with which AWSM members are still familiar, unfortunately.”

In her 23 years of writing, Nelson has authored five books, including her latest, “We Are All Athletes: Bringing Courage, Confidence, and Peak Performance into Our Everyday Lives.” She also writes for many media outlets including: Newsweek, The Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, Fitness, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Redbook. She has appeared on several television shows, including Today, Good Morning America, Dateline, Crossfire and Larry King Live.

“Change takes time,” Nelson says about equality for women. “Now that I'm older, I can appreciate the dramatic and truly revolutionary changes that have happened in the past 30 years. But, I want us to stay impatient. We're not there yet, and must insist on equal access, equal coverage, equal opportunity - but the truth is, we're living in a very different world from the world many of us grew up in.”

For the public to pay more attention to women’s sports, Nelson thinks everyone should take a closer look at professional tennis.

“Many fans prefer watching women's tennis,” Nelson says. “Why? The women offer excellent entertainment, first and foremost, by being impressive athletes, but also by letting their personalities come through. People are interested in human dramas, and female tennis stars have let the public get to know them. Basketball players and soccer players need to do the same.”

In an era where talk is more frequent that proactivity, Nelson has tried to take her own stance at helping women improve in the sports world with the Frances Willard Society. Nelson, who has been self-employed for 16 years, started the online organization in 1998 to give other women a chance to find mentors and learn from each other among people who write about women’s sports.

Nelson’s advice to young sports reporters and writers: “Follow your heart. Take risks. Remember that life is short, so you might as well do what you really want to do - even if no one else believes you can, even if you're not so sure yourself, even if no one has ever done it before.”