Author, Athlete Celebrates 23 Years of Writing, Inspiring

An interview with Mariah Burton Nelson, December 2003
By Dawn Reiss, Association for Women in Sports Media (ASWM) (published in profile format in AWSM's newsletter, Winter 2004)

What is the biggest challenge for women working in sports?

I think some of our challenges are the same for women working anywhere. We need to define success for ourselves; compete courageously for what we want; develop our skills; ask for help; persist, even the face of disappointment and defeat; and forgive ourselves immediately for all mistakes. :-)

What advice would give to young women who are about to begin or just began working in sports?

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.

What changes would you like to see in the next 10 years for women working in sports?

I'd like us to comprise at least 50 percent of all reporters, broadcasters, producers, executives, coaches, and athletes!

What are the tools women need to be successful in sports?

Courage, persistence, intelligence, education, teammates, coaches, and a passion for the game - not the game of sports so much as the game of writing, editing, reporting, broadcasting, or whatever you do best.

Why did you begin writing about women in sports?

I was 24, just having retired from professional basketball (I played in France for a year, and briefly in the WBL, the first women's pro league in this country.)

When I was growing up, no one was writing about women in sports. There were no women's sports on television. I heard names like Gertrude Ederle and Sonia Henie from my mother, but the only woman I read about myself was Babe Didrikson. Her biography was the only book about a female athlete in the entire Blue Bell (PA) Elementary School library. I read it about 15 times.

Babe had died the year I was born (1956) but I was totally inspired by her passion for excellence, her unapologetic competitiveness, and her diverse athletic talents. She excelled in basketball, track and field, and golf, and played dozens of other sports well. She even played the harmonica well. Everything she did, she did with discipline and determination. As you can see, I'm still inspired by her!

She mirrored for me, and validated, my basic approach to life. I swam competitively between the ages of 6 and 16, played field hockey, basketball, and lacrosse starting in 7th grade, added volleyball and tennis when I moved from the Philadelphia area to Phoenix in high school, and have also competed in rowing and water polo. Though basketball became my best sport, I love almost all sports the way Babe did. (Nowadays I swim about 2 miles or lift weights each morning and play golf every chance I get. At 47, my resting pulse is still 44. Am I bragging? Yes! You should have heard Babe brag: "I came out here to beat everyone in sight, and that's just what I'm going to do!" :-) But really, I mention my current athletic status because it's unusual for women of my generation to be lifelong athletes. Fortunately, that won't be unusual when the post-Title IX generation gets to be my age.

Anyway: Because I had no role models of people writing about women and sports, I literally could not conceive if a career as a sportswriter -- as I also could not conceive of playing professional basketball. 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.

(That's why I started the Frances Willard Society: To give other women a chance to find mentors and learn from each other.)

Though I did not plan to become a women's sports writer, I did always love writing. I remember wanting to write a book when I was just four years old. Mom read to us, and I loved the poetry, the stories, the language, and humor, the meaning. ("Oh how I love to go up in a swing/up in the sky so blue/oh I do think it the pleasantest thing/ever a child can do." -- Robert Louis Stevenson) Isn't that wonderful? I can still recite dozens of children's poems, without ever having intentionally memorized them. So at an early age, I wanted to write books, to communicate with and delight people that way, but it took a long time to figure out what I would write about.

Then someone said "Write about what you know," and I wrote about my year playing pro basketball in France. That was my first published article, in 1980, in Matrix Women's Newsmagazine, a free monthly in Santa Cruz, California. From there I started writing more about my own sports experiences, and other female athletes' experiences, for other newspapers and magazines. I also worked as an editor and writer for Women's Sports and Fitness magazine for three years.

So by writing about what I knew, I inadvertently created a new niche as a women's sports writer. 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.

Eventually a literary agent called. She had read a piece I wrote in Ms. Magazine ("My Mother, My Rival") about swimming races with my mother, and asked if I was working on a book. I said, Yes. That was not exactly true -- I just WANTED to write a book -- so I told her I'd call back the next day, and quickly polled my friends to find out what my book should be about. They said, "Sports. Duh." Oh. So my first book, published in 1991, became Are We Winning Yet? How Women Are Changing Sports and Sports Are Changing Women. (Random House.)

Why haven't women sports magazines, women's professional teams and coverage of women sports taken off?

Change takes time. Now that I'm older, I can appreciate the dramatic and truly revolutionary changes that have happened in the past 30 years. These include, but are by no means limited to, a televised and sold-out women's Final Four, an exciting if not yet thriving WNBA, Robin Roberts and other pioneering broadcasters commenting on both men's and women's sports; female sports columnists or reporters in most newspapers, and lots of sports magazines that feature female athletes. 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. The pioneering work of many AWSM members has contributed to that change.

What needs to happen before the public pays equal or more attention to women in sports?

Tennis offers a good example that other sports can follow. Many fans prefer watching women's tennis. 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, for instance, need to do the same.

What is your biggest accomplishment and why?

Hmm. My childhood dream was to become an author, and now I've written 5 books. That's cool! Better yet, they're good books: well written, and often breaking new ground. Pioneering. I'm proud of that: my ability to think about things in a fresh way, and express them well. To get people thinking about things they haven't thought about before.

I've had a successful writing and speaking business for 16 years. Lots of people said to me, when I talked about my dream of being an author, "Well, you can't make a living at that." They were wrong. I make a good living at it. (My original goal was "to make a living as a writer"; I later realized that, financially speaking, that's a very LOW goal! I've since gotten much more specific about higher annual financial goals :-) I'm doing what I love do to - that in itself is an accomplishment.

Also, when I'm riding my bike along the Potomac, and see women rowing in the river, or running, roller-blading, and cycling on the trails, I sometimes marvel at the fact that when I was growing up, grown women didn’t even wear pants or sneakers. I'm proud of the fact that (through my writing, speaking, advocacy, and leadership by example,) I have played a small part in effecting this change.

Where do you go from here? What else do you hope to accomplish?

Once I developed a reputation as a women's sports writer, people started inviting me to give speeches. I discovered that I love that form of communication too. So for the past 15 years I've been giving speeches - first about the empowerment of women through sports, and more recently about leadership lessons from the playing fields. I've got a new model I'm developing called The Leadership Game. I'm excited about that. I'm enjoying speaking to corporate, association, and government groups, along with colleges. As for future accomplishments: I hope to finish my body of work! I hope that, on my deathbed (MANY years from now!), I'll be proud of my work, and proud of my influence on the culture.

Please discuss the reason why you decided to write your latest book, "We Are All Athletes: Bringing Courage, Confidence, and Peak Performance into Our Everyday Lives," and what you learned from writing it.

Some books take a lot of planning and struggle and revision; others just flow out of me. The last two have just flowed. Maybe (I hope!) I'm learning how to write a book, and the rest will all be this effortless! I always write books when I have something book-length I want to say. That sounds obvious, but I think each idea can be best expressed in one medium or another: play, poem, article, book, radio broadcast, etc. So when I want to say something, I always ask myself how best to say it -- and whether anyone else cares. I've got all sort of journal writing that's really just for me. We Are All Athletes was the first book to emerge from my speeches. It does not contain speeches, but it contains ideas I first tried out on audiences. And now I'm selling it back to audiences, in bulk before a presentation or one-by-one afterward. I like it. It's a quick read, full of interesting stories, many of them first-person. That's my best writing, egotistical though that may be. When I write about my own experiences, I'm at my most honest, insightful, and humorous.

(We Are All Athletes is my fifth. The fourth was The Unburdened Heart: The only book I've written that is not about sports. It's about forgiveness, though it does include my personal story of forgiving the coach who molested me when I was young.)

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Okay, one more thing. Having been self-employed for 16 years, I really appreciate the importance of identifying and cultivating teammates. I have not been actively involved in AWSM for a while, mostly because I devote most of my professional-networking energy to the National Speakers Association, but I really appreciate AWSM, and want to remind people to reach out to each other and ask for the mentoring or teamwork or just plain advice and support you might need. Women sometimes complain to me that "women don't support each other," but as an athlete, that has never been my experience. The world is full of generous, supportive women, and so is AWSM. So I encourage AWSM members to reach out to each other, and also to consider me a teammate if I can ever be of assistance. Better yet, join the Frances Willard Society (sign up on my website) for access to about 135 people who write about women and sports. And sign up for my newsletter, Two Points: Because Success Happens One Basket at a Time. It's a nice way to stay in touch! Thanks, Dawn!