Nanci Donnellan, better known as the Fabulous Sports Babe,
walked slowly one afternoon this past April to a table at a gelato shop on
Beach Drive in St. Petersburg. She wore white Easy Spirit sneakers and a pink
T-shirt and baggy rainbow-striped shorts. Her hands shook slightly.
"I'm the Babe," she told Michael Kruse at Grantland.com.
Donnellan once was a sports-talk radio phenomenon, loud,
brash, and 5-foot-2 and 300-plus pounds. She quickly became one of the top
personalities on ESPN Radio when she debuted in the summer of 1994. She was the
first woman ever to host a nationally syndicated sports show, and many in the
industry consider her a trailblazer not just because of her gender but also
because of her caustic, entertainment-first, sports-second style. She was the
first person to have her sports radio show translated to TV. She signed a
lucrative book deal with ReganBooks, the same publisher who turned Rush
Limbaugh and Howard Stern into best-selling authors. She was a guest on Late
Night with Conan O'Brien. She was written about in Newsweek.
It was a long way down. She got sick. Shows got canceled.
She went mostly silent. This past January, she was in her fourth year doing a
local show in a midday slot on the second-tier AM sports station in the Tampa
Bay market, near her home, when she disappeared. The station said she had
health problems. It was hard to know when or if she would return. She was
replaced in late February.
In April, at the gelato shop, she sat at the table and took
off her sunglasses.
"On January 22, I had a stroke," she said.
"You're the first person I've told that to."
But now she was better, she said, or at least getting
better, and going to a speech pathologist. At times, she spoke sort of
deliberately, but her diction was unmuddled. She thought she was ready to be
back on the air.
The Babe wanted to work again, Nanci said. "I'd go
anywhere at all."
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