Some call this fast-rising star the best sports reporter on TV
“I need a box!” Andrea Kremer’s scrambling request can be heard in locker rooms throughout professional sports, usually spoken with a microphone in her hand and a deadline in her face. The athletes will talk to her. That isn’t the problem. But when the interview gets broadcast to ESPN’s millions of subscribers, often live, the five feet, two inches tall Kremer doesn’t want to look like a munchkin.
“OK! All right, let’s do it.”
The cameraman steadies himself. Kremer steps onto the box, coming reasonably close to Joe Linebacker’s eye level, and proceeds to conduct yet another interview. It might be Bret Favre after leading his Green Bay Packers to victory in the Super Bowl. Maybe Michael Jordan on his return to the NBA. Often just a sweaty soldier reliving the battle.
So what if Kremer, C’80, hasn’t
grown an inch since graduating from Penn 17 years ago? Her rising
stature in television sports has more than made up for it. Some call her
the best sports reporter on TV.
Kremer’s 45-minute Sunday Conversations on ESPN have given viewers a peek at the innermost thoughts of superstar athletes. Her hour-long Outside the Lines
features helped raise awareness of the rise in athletes’ arrests for
sexual assault and domestic violence. Interspersed among the features,
not to mention the Super Bowls, NBA Finals and World Series she has
covered, are hundreds of routine reporting segments that air on the
thrice-nightly SportsCenter.
John
Walsh, the show’s managing editor, says of Kremer, “She is always all
over a story. She works the beat, the phone, the sources. She badgers us
all for something that might spark an idea for another good story. She
is always, and I mean always, there.”
While
she appears a natural now, Kremer never dreamed of being a television
sports reporter. But while growing up in Philadelphia the football bug
bit her early. When she was eight, just before the first Super Bowl, she
clipped preview articles from newspapers to make press kits for her
parents. Her father took her to her first Eagles game in 1971 at
Veterans Stadium, where she became a fan of the visiting Miami Dolphins.
“Some girls had Barbie dolls,” she says. “I had Larry Csonka.”
Kremer,
who now lives in Los Angeles, graduated from Friends Select School and
entered Penn in 1976. As an undergraduate, she pursued a ballet career,
ultimately performing with the Pennsylvania Ballet, and triple-minored
in English, sociology, and anthropology. She loved the writing and
research involved in these subjects, but had no clue what to do after
graduation.
“There
was no woman to look to and say, ‘I’m going to be a sports
journalist,'” Kremer says. Kremer wound up being hired at the Main Line Chronicle,
Pennsylvania’s largest weekly newspaper, where she soon became sports
editor. After she wrote a story on NFL Films, which makes football
highlights films for the league, her mother demanded, “Send them your
resume!” and she did. A question on the company’s football test asked,
“What is a trap play?” Kremer’s answer took up a page. She was hired as a
producer.
Eventually, Kremer co-hosted the syndicated program This is the NFL,
earned an Emmy nomination for one special, and began contributing to
Philadelphia radio station WIP’s Eagles pre-game show. ESPN came calling
in 1989.
She
has had to face the skepticism — even hostility — that greets women
reporters “invading” men’s locker rooms. Privacy aside, there is the
assumption that those without testosterone can’t possibly understand the
intricacies of the flea-flicker and pick-and-roll.
“I try to be professional,” Kremer says. “I dress professionally. I
don’t flirt with them… I don’t pretend I’m their friend. I try to
relate to them as people. I’m not like, ‘Ooh, aah, Michael’ when I
interview Michael Jordan. Because every time I sit and talk with him
about his glory days, there’s another time I have to stand in front of
him and ask about his gambling.”
That
dead-on approach pays off. When Jordan announced his return to
basketball two years ago, all the networks wanted the first in-depth
interview. But Jordan chose Kremer, with whom he had built up trust.
As
an ESPN veteran, she is allowed more to pick and choose her
assignments. Naturally, she covers mostly football, her first love —
evidence of which is embodied in her border collie, named Zonk.
Zonk?
“If it wasn’t for Larry Csonka, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” she laughs. “The least I can do is name my dog after him.”