Lisa Nehus Saxon

Last updated

Lisa Nehus Saxon (born October 28, 1959) is an American professional sports writer.

While working for the Daily News of Los Angeles from 1979 until 1987, Saxon became the second woman to cover Major League Baseball as a full-time beat for a daily newspaper, joining Claire Smith, who started at the Hartford Courant a year earlier. While fighting for women to gain equal access to press boxes and locker rooms, Saxon endured both verbal and physical abuse: [1] "Going into the locker room, knots would get in my stomach; it was actually a physically uncomfortable thing to do because you didn't know what you would face. At the very least, you would have jockstraps thrown at you, and dirty undergarments. And that was an everyday occurrence. And then you would just build onto that what might happen. And you just hoped for the best when you went in." [2] At one point the abuse became so horrific that Angels players George Hendrick and John Candelaria stepped in to create a human shield between Saxon and one of her greatest tormentors, Reggie Jackson. [3] Saxon said she did not go public with much of the abuse, because she feared that doing so would derail the ongoing efforts to allow women to have equal access to the team clubhouses. [4]

Saxon won numerous writing awards during her journalism career, which spanned four decades. [5] She also worked at the Long Beach Press-Telegram and Riverside Press-Enterprise. In 2001, she began teaching Media, accepting jobs at Santa Monica College and Palisades Charter High School. [6]

Saxon received a bachelor's degree in journalism from California State University, Northridge in 1983 and a graduate degree from Mount St. Mary's University in 2009. She left journalism in 2001 to become an educator. In 2016 and 2017, she was a featured speaker at events sponsored by the Baseball Reliquary. [7] Saxon also appeared in some episodes of "The Sweet Spot, A Treasury of Baseball Stories," an anthology series by Jon Leonoudakis. [8]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kim Ng</span> American baseball executive

Kimberly J. Ng is an advisor with Athletes Unlimited Pro Softball and was recently an American executive in Major League Baseball. She is the former general manager of the Miami Marlins. She was the first woman to serve as general manager of a team in the Big Four leagues in North America and the first person of East Asian descent to serve as general manager of an MLB team.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sports journalism</span> Form of journalism that reports on sporting topics and competitions

Sports journalism is a form of writing that reports on matters pertaining to sporting topics and competitions. Sports journalism has its roots in coverage of horse racing and boxing in the early 1800s, mainly targeted towards elites, and into the 1900s transitioned into an integral part of the news business with newspapers having dedicated sports sections. The increased popularity of sports amongst the middle and lower class led to the more coverage of sports content in publications. The appetite for sports resulted in sports-only media such as Sports Illustrated and ESPN. There are many different forms of sports journalism, ranging from play-by-play and game recaps to analysis and investigative journalism on important developments in the sport. Technology and the internet age has massively changed the sports journalism space as it is struggling with the same problems that the broader category of print journalism is struggling with, mainly not being able to cover costs due to falling subscriptions. New forms of internet blogging and tweeting in the current millennium have pushed the boundaries of sports journalism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gloria Allred</span> American attorney

Gloria Rachel Allred is an American attorney known for taking high-profile and often controversial cases, particularly those involving the protection of women's rights. She has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Shannon Faulkner is an American teacher, best known for being the first female student to attend The Citadel in 1994, following a lawsuit. She currently teaches English in Greenville, South Carolina.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Hendrick</span> American baseball player and coach (born 1949)

George Andrew Hendrick Jr. is an American former professional baseball player and coach. He played in Major League Baseball as an outfielder between 1971 and 1988, most prominently as an integral member of the St. Louis Cardinals team that won the 1982 World Series.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lisa Fernandez</span> American Olympic gold medalist

Lisa Maria Fernandez is an American former softball player and current associate head coach at UCLA. She played college softball at UCLA as a pitcher and third baseman, and is a three-time medal winning Olympian with Team USA.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Candelaria</span> American baseball player (born 1953)

John Robert Candelaria is a Puerto Rican-American former Major League Baseball pitcher. Nicknamed "the Candy Man", he played in MLB during the years 1975–1993 for eight teams, the Pittsburgh Pirates, California Angels, New York Mets, New York Yankees, Montreal Expos, Minnesota Twins, Toronto Blue Jays, and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lisa Bloom</span> American lawyer (born 1961)

Lisa Read Bloom is an American attorney known for advising Harvey Weinstein amid various sexual abuse allegations, and for representing women whose sexual harassment claims precipitated the firing of Bill O'Reilly from Fox News.

Lisa Olson is an American sports journalist. Her work has been featured in the anthology, "The Best American Sports Writing". She was previously a sports columnist for the New York Daily News, and the first female sports columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald, where she covered rugby union, Australian rules football, cricket and rugby league. She also was a national columnist for AOL's FanHouse sports website, and a columnist and the first woman in Sporting News' 120-year history to write the magazine's monthly back page. Olson is a member of the Baseball Writers' Association of America and is a Hall of Fame voter. She has covered sports stories in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Japan, China, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christine Brennan</span> American journalist

Christine Brennan is a sports columnist for USA Today, a commentator on ABC News, CNN, PBS NewsHour and NPR, and a best-selling author. She was the first female sports reporter for the Miami Herald in 1981, the first woman at the Washington Post on the Washington Redskins beat in 1985, and the first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media in 1988. Brennan won the 2020 Red Smith Award, presented annually by the Associated Press Sports Editors to a person who has made "major contributions to sports journalism."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Beth Mowins</span> American sports journalist and announcer

Elizabeth Mowins is an American play-by-play announcer and sports journalist for ESPN, CBS, and Marquee Sports Network. She typically calls women's college sports, and became the second woman to call nationally televised college football games for ESPN in 2005. She began doing play-by-play for NFL games in 2017 and became the first woman to call a nationally televised NFL game. In 2021, she became the first woman to call play-by-play for an NBA game on network TV.

Anne Doyle, is an American journalist, and one of the first women TV sports broadcasters in the United States. As a sports reporter and anchor for WJBK, CBS-TV in Detroit, from 1978 to 1983, she played a leadership role in achieving equal access to sports locker rooms for women journalists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women in journalism</span>

Women in journalism are individuals who participate in journalism. As journalism became a profession, women were restricted by custom from access to journalism occupations, and faced significant discrimination within the profession. Nevertheless, women operated as editors, reporters, sports analysts and journalists even before the 1890s in some countries as far back as the 18th-century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Melissa Ludtke</span> American journalist

Melissa Ludtke is an American journalist. In 1978, as a young sports journalist, Ludtke won a lawsuit for the right to be allowed in Major League Baseball locker rooms.

Robin Cathy Herman was an American writer and journalist. She was the first female sports journalist for The New York Times.

Adeline Helen Daley was one of the first female sportswriters, covering baseball for the San Francisco Call-Bulletin. She later went on to become a nationally syndicated humor columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades. Her writing was praised as mixing "gentle humor with sly wit and an occasional sharp needle."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martha Louise Rayne</span> American journalist

Martha Louise Rayne (1836–1911) was an American who was an early woman journalist. In addition to writing and editing several journals, she serialized short stories and poems in newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit Free Press, and the Los Angeles Herald. In addition to newspaper work, she published a guidebook of Chicago, etiquette books, and several novels. In 1886, she founded what may have been the first women's journalism school in the United States and four years later became a founding member and first vice president of the Michigan Woman's Press Association. Rayne was posthumously inducted into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame in 1998 and the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 2002.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Claire Smith (sportswriter)</span> American sportswriter

Claire Smith is an American sportswriter, who covered Major League Baseball for the Hartford Courant, The New York Times, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She is currently a news editor for ESPN. Smith was the first woman to be honored with the J. G. Taylor Spink Award by the Baseball Writers' Association of America.

Anita Marie Martini was an American sports journalist and broadcaster. She was the first woman to cover a Major League Baseball (MLB) All-Star Game (1973) and the first female journalist allowed into a baseball locker room. Based in Houston for most of her career, Martini worked for radio and television stations in the city from the mid-1960s until shortly before her death.

References

  1. ↑ "Tom Hoffarth: Lisa Nehus Saxon paved the way for female sportswriters". Los Angeles Daily News . 15 July 2017.
  2. ↑ "First Female MLB Writers." Only a Game. WNYC Radio Podcasts. Sept 1, 2017
  3. ↑ "Lisa Saxon, the Woman Who Helped Change Sports Writing Forever | VICE Sports". sports.vice.com. Archived from the original on 2015-07-18.
  4. ↑ "Barker: Saxon opened door for women".
  5. ↑ "Archives". Los Angeles Times . March 2001.
  6. ↑ "Lisa Nehus Saxon". www.smc.edu. Archived from the original on 2016-10-18.
  7. ↑ "Lisa Nehus Saxon: Introduction for Vin Scully's Shrine of the Eternals Induction - the Baseball Reliquary".
  8. ↑ "Lisa Nehus Saxon". IMDb .
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.