Fabulous Sports Babe Makes Fabulous Money Nancy Donnellan’s Voice Heard Around The Nation
“HONNEEEE, I’M HOOOOME!”
The self-anointed Fabulous Sports Babe is in the house, a wide and wild woman crammed into a tiny and cluttered radio studio. America’s first female nationally syndicated sports talk-show host is mouthing along at her typical 50-calls-per-hour pace. So get your ass out of bed, as she puts it, and give it up for da Babe! Jeff from Florida, bring it to me, bubba. (Ahoooo-ga!) Rich boy on a car phone in Detroit, whadda ya got, darlin’? Jay in Montgomery, you’re on, honey. (Cymbal crash!) Talk to me, sugar. Call 1-800-SAY-BABE.
It was nearly two years ago that the Babe quit her $135,000-a-year Seattle radio gig and her condo overlooking Puget Sound for roughly a $45,000 raise and national syndication on ESPN radio, initially yammering on only 29 stations. Today she’s heard middays in more than 170 markets.
Fame has followed. She’s appeared on Conan O’Brien’s TV show, pocketed a $200,000-plus advance for a book deal and hunkered down in New York Yankee owner George Steinbrenner’s private box during last autumn’s American League playoffs. Such is her clout that guests on the Global Babe Network have included former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and pugilist/felon Mike Tyson. No wonder the Babe is always declaring that, yes honey, it’s great to be the Babe.
But we ask: Who is da Babe?
Is she simply the FSB, a 5-foot-4 firecracker with dark red hair and a gravelly voice whose rock ‘n’ roll-paced shtick includes blowing off callers she doesn’t like with the sound of exploding dynamite? Or is she the not-so-babelike Nanci Donnellan, who says she collects art, adores opera, doesn’t smoke or drink, and can’t remember the last time she stayed up late enough to watch Letterman? Or is she Nancy Dolores Donnellan, the half-Hispanic only child of a broken marriage who was born in Newton, Mass., but keeps many of the details of her early life from friends, co-workers and inquiring journalists, even to the point of supplying misinformation?
“If we were harboring a fugitive, I guess we’d know it by now,” muses Donnellan’s boss, Mark Mason, who says he knows little about his star’s off-mike background. “At this point, I really don’t want to know. I don’t think she’s in the witness protection program, although she jokes that she is.”
Who’s da Babe?
Age? Donnellan says she notched her 40th birthday last summer. Whoops. Both her Massachusetts birth certificate and her Florida driver’s license say she turned 47 in June.
Schools? Donnellan likes to say she matriculated at the University of Mars. Actually, records show she put in four semesters at the University of Tampa from 1966 to 1968, didn’t graduate, and later took a night school course in social development at Northeastern University. She’s a 1966 graduate of Clover Park High School in Tacoma, Wash. Her yearbook reveals that she was a fabulous sports cheerleader at a previous high school in Tripoli, Libya.
Deep background? Donnellan, who friends say lives alone and has apparently never been married, enjoys declaring that she arrived full-blown from the planet Babetron. But the future FSB was born Nancy Dolores Donnellan and says she legally changed the spelling of her first name approximately 20 years ago.
“She wasn’t an easy child growing up,” recollects Art Belliveau, a former college classmate and close friend of William Donnellan. “She had a mind of her own. She was a tough little cookie who wouldn’t conform to any kind of rules.”
The Babe says her reluctance to talk about or even to admit to such details of her life are rooted in her publishing deal. “Read it in my book,” she might say when asked about certain aspects of her background. Her feistiness certainly hasn’t
hurt her career. Donellan’s past radio lives include short, part-time stays at WBOS, WEEI, and WRKO in Boston. But she landed her first real on-air job as an overnight disc jockey at now-defunct WLOM on Cape Cod in 1978 (“The Best From the Bog”), primarily because she wouldn’t do what she was told. “She did a demo tape for me and I told her she wasn’t right for the job,” recalls Phil Redo, who then ran WLOM and is now an executive at a Chicago station. “She came back the next day and told me I was making a big mistake. I liked her attitude, so I hired her.”
More than a decade later, when ESPN weighed in with the irresistible offer that would make the Fabulous Sports Babe a national figure, Donnellan again wasn’t taking no for an answer. When she asked out of her three-year contract at KJR in Seattle, the station balked. After all, she had increased the ratings in her time slot nearly fourfold and become a local cult figure while honing the wisecracking image of the Babe. She had come to understand that the power of AM radio lies in the Personality- just ask Rush, ask Howard. She had learned not to worry if people didn’t like her, so long as they listened.
“Liked, hated, it doesn’t matter to me,” she says. “The only thing that matters is to get a reaction. The worst thing that can happen to you in my business is to have people be able to take you or leave you.”
Strong-willed as usual, she fought back when KJR tried to keep her local. “She went on the air and basically blasted our upper management, and she refused to say our call letters,” says Tom Lee, KJR’s program director. “She was then told to go home until something was worked out.” Donnellan hired an agent out of Chicago to negotiate for her, and the exit deal was eventually done. But she never, Lee says, went back on the air in Seattle. “She wanted national exposure,” Lee recalls.
In between the Cape and Seattle, Donnellan had done sports news and talk on a quartet of mostly minor-league Florida stations. A hopeless Red Sox fan and a devout worshiper of Bobby Orr, she says that “the only reason I ever got into radio was to do a sports talk show.” But she was hardly a star at first. One Tampa station canceled her, then later rehired her under new management.
Donnellan herself contends that “Nanci and the Babe are the same person, with the only difference being when I go into that studio the energy level goes up about three notches.” But talk to her friends - who tend to be extremely protective of her - and they reveal a more complex off-air persona. They describe a hockey-loving and soccer-hating wisegal who is easily bored and intolerant of stupidity, an opinionated and often tempestuous workaholic who is as demanding of herself as she is of others and whose fusillades can send co-workers scurrying. But they also point to a friend who is fiercely loyal, sensitive and generous, a person who is capable of - as she did once in Florida - picking up the lunch tab when she and a dozen or so staffers have just been fired.
“If she’s your friend, she’ll go to the wall for you,” says Jay Marvin, who worked with Donnellan in Tampa and now hosts a talk show in Chicago. “You may fight a lot, but she’ll be your friend forever.”
Lord knows it’s not always easy being the Babe. There is, for example, what Donnellan disparagingly calls “the woman question.” As in “Hey, Babe, what’s it like being a female in a testosterone-dominated field, a babe in boyland?” Please. Don’t ask. “This is 1995, for God’s sake,” she huffs. “I mean, c’mon, women have been covering sports for 20 years. It’s no longer the bearded lady, the sideshow.”
Still, the overwhelming majority of Babe callers are men, and she is still the only woman heard talking sports coast to coast. She’s a pioneer, and that’s something she will discuss.
“About five years ago I realized that I have been chosen to do some things, and I’m the right person to do it,” she says. “But I never had any role models. Because this is a boys’ club. I was constantly told coming up that I couldn’t do this because I was a woman. I once had a general manager who actually told me, ‘I can’t accept getting sports from a woman.’ So what I do now is set the table for the women who’ll come after me.
“And plus, what am I gonna get, a real job?”
Having finished her lunch, the Fabulous Sports Babe, a k a Nanci Donnellan, a k a Nancy Dolores Donnellan, gingerly makes her way across the frozen parking lot and climbs behind the wheel of the Babe Truck. She will motor 15 miles northward to her $185,000, 3-bedroom house, maybe crank up the satellite dish and watch a game or two with the volume off while her stereo pumps out, say, Maria Callas. She will be surrounded by paintings and antiques, not sports pennants and plaques. “If a burglar broke into her house, he wouldn’t think it was a sports babe’s house,” says her producer Denis Horgan. “He’d think it was an art critic’s house.”
And that’s da Babe.