Giving It to Them Straight....

Liz Habib was the first woman to hold the main sports anchor job in Los Angeles,

She did her job and did it well.

But, after 16 years as of May 2021, KTTV did not renew Habib’s contract.

Habib says that throughout her 33 years in the industry, she said she would stay late in the office, work over 10 hours a day and sacrifice family holidays to pursue her career.

Now, as a professor at the Newhouse School of Public Communications, she said she shares her experiences with the SU community, never pretending or lying about the challenges she faced as a woman sports anchor and reporter. She said she always tells her students the truth: that the industry is hard, and it only gets harder.

“The mistreatment is because people turn the other way when they see it happening. It’s not like the opportunities haven’t been there. It’s just they get taken away,” Habib said.

When Habib began her broadcast career in October 1988 in Steubenville, Ohio, she said the industry was male-dominated. She made $3.93 an hour, working behind the scenes running cameras and teleprompters, she said.

Throughout her career, Habib walked into locker rooms and felt players didn’t want to talk with her because of her different style of asking questions. She didn’t ask the traditional sports questions, she said. Sometimes she just wanted to know what they had for breakfast. And, she said she knew the men in the industry saw how the players and managers treated her differently.

Gathered around Dodgers manager Joe Torre in the clubhouse, Habib asked Torre a question about one of his players, Manny Ramirez, getting a haircut after he refused to. Torre was irritated by the question, she recalled. Habib — humiliated and sweaty — held the microphone steadily in her hand, knowing she had to be fierce and not back down. She refused to break eye contact to look at the guys snickering around her.

“I can’t cry, I can’t get upset, I can’t put the mic down,” she remembered thinking to herself.

As hard as it was, she took the mic back, asked a follow-up question, and put it back in Torre’s face, looking him dead in the eye. As a woman, Habib said she had coaches yell at her while reporting, and she just had to stand there and take it.

“I even hate saying it. I hate it. But maybe being a woman in sports was my obstacle,” she said. “It shouldn’t have been an obstacle. That shouldn’t have mattered. And I did the job as though it didn’t matter. But I suppose ultimately it did.”

Read the full story at the Daily Orange