Perhaps the folks behind Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort’s sports-betting app should have offered up some prop bets for Monday’s Little Rock Touchdown Club meeting. As in, who’d be the first to get emotional — Oaklawn pitchman, club founder and host David Bazzel or Holly Rowe, the trailblazing, award-winning, cancer-surviving ESPN broadcaster who was the club’s guest before a full house at the Marriott Hotel downtown.
Rowe, a stage IV melanoma survivor who has missed just one day of work in 30 years, spoke of her childhood obsession with sports, college football in particular; her entry into journalism and subsequent, ascendant career path at ESPN; and challenges overcome. Rowe is counted among the most respected female broadcasters and sideline reporters in the business — there’s Erin Andrews at Fox Sports, Tracy Woodson of CBS Sports and Rowe.
Prospective prop-bet placers on Baz to cave first would have collected, though both began to tear up as Rowe outlined her battle against cancer, her determination to focus on those things that bring her joy during the low points of the battle and the foundation she created to help fellow cancer victims.
Photo by Ryan Parker
After her four-year fight with the disease, in which she cataloged the things that made her happy in a daily “joy journal,” Rowe launched the Joy+US Foundation to help “those who need it most” find joy. Ironically, Rowe said she would be delivering a $10,000 check from the foundation to an undisclosed aspiring college softball player from an undisclosed location in Arkansas later that afternoon.
Rowe never missed an ESPN assignment because of her cancer treatment — the one college football Saturday night from which she was absent was due to a COVID-19 diagnosis.
The Utah native, who as a kid attended college football games at BYU with her dad, said focusing on the things that made her happy helped her get through her treatment, no small feat. Rowe was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic skin cancer, which she said has a 22 percent survival rate. The cancer ended up in her lungs, where doctors discovered multiple, inoperable stage IV tumors. Rowe said she was then told it was time to start thinking about how she was going to spend her time.
“What made me happy and kept me going was sports and going to these games,” she said. “I felt like I was living better when I was dying because everything else was washed away. All the little things…I didn’t care. My only focus was, ‘Get to the game, get to chemo and be with my son. I tried to find things every day that were fun.”
As for her latest cancer-free diagnosis, she said, “The universe and God had something planned. The universe blesses you when you are trying to help people be joyful. I want to try to teach all of us how to tap into your joy.”
Photo by Ryan Parker
Rowe also shared anecdotes from her career:
- She was given her initial cancer diagnosis in 2018, 11 days before the start of the college football season. She opted not to tell her bosses at ESPN at first for fear of being told to stay home. Enter Wanda, her wig. The first time she wore Wanda was covering a Texas practice, and wouldn’t you know it — Texas supporter and the “sexiest man alive” Matthew McConaughey showed up.
- Rowe considers herself a “psychotically competitive” person.
- She broke up with a former boyfriend, a bodybuilder who once crowned Mr. Switzerland, for a flippant comment about the late, former Tennessee women’s hoops coach Pat Summit, a person she fiercely admired. “He said, ‘What’s wrong with you? She’s just a coach.'”
- About Summit, Rowe said, “She was the first woman I saw on TV being fierce, competitive and feminine.”
- “I wanted to be a boy so bad growing up because I wanted to play football.”
- On the tricks of the sideline-interview trade, she said that interviewing coaches as they walk off the field can be a “really interesting dynamic” that can go “very wrong” depending on the coach and the circumstances. Covering the 2006 Rose Bowl, that season’s BCS national championship game pitting Texas and USC, Rowe interviewed then-UT coach Mack Brown before he hit the locker room at halftime with his team down. When asked what went wrong, Brown essentially said his team stunk, but Rowe was persistent. “I wanted to get more information about what happened, so my follow-up question was, ‘What stunk?’ and he opened up. I wanted him to describe more about what stunk, so we could pay attention to those things in the second half. You’ve got to get good information for the viewers at home so they can know what to look for and know some of the inside secrets.” Rowe had previously noted that former Alabama coach Nick Saban would give her “real stuff” most every time. “If I asked the right questions, I’d get these unbelievable stories.”
Rowe now has her own stories to tell. She said her appearance at the club would definitely fill an entry in her joy journal.
“I walked in that door today, and you all stood up for me,” she said, fighting back tears. “That was beautiful.”
AY Media Group is a proud media sponsor of the Little Rock Touchdown Club.
Feature Photo Credit: DeWaine Duncan
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