Tuesday, September 11, 2012

The Rise & Fall (& Rise) Of The Fabulous Sports Babe


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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