Lesley Visser

Lesley Visser

Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame

In nine Halls of Fame, including the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame, Lesley Visser is the most highly acclaimed female sportscaster of all time. She has almost always been the first – the first woman inducted in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the first woman to win the Sports Emmy Lifetime Achievement, the first woman to win the Vin Scully Award for Excellence in Sports Broadcasting, the first woman on ABC’s Monday Night Football, and the only winner of the Billie Jean King “Outstanding Journalist” Award. She was the first woman on the network broadcasts of the Super Bowl, the World Series, the NBA Finals and the Final Four, and is the only woman ever to have presented the Championship Lombardi Trophy at the Super Bowl. Named a Mohammad Ali “Daughter of Greatness,” Visser was voted the No. 1 Female Sportscaster of All-Time by the Sportscasters Assoc. of America. In 2018, she was the first female sports journalist to win the Newseum Lifetime Achievement Award, first given to Walter Cronkite. In 2023, Visser was inducted into the Society of Professional Journalists along with Marvin Kalb, who opened CBS’ Moscow Bureau during the Cold War.

In her 50-year career, Visser has done stories from the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to interviewing Yao Ming in Shanghai for HBO’s Real Sports before he entered the NBA draft. Two years ago, she was invited by the U.S. State Department to speak to women in Uzbekistan, which has no freedom of the press and where domestic abuse is the No. 1 issue women face. Protected by the US Embassy in Tashkent, Visser spoke to women across the country about using their collective voice.

Visser’s career began at the Boston Globe in 1974 after winning a Carnegie Foundation Grant, given to only 20 women in America who wanted to go into jobs that were 95 percent male. Two years later, the Globe made Visser the first woman to cover the NFL as a beat, at a time when the credentials said, “No Women or Children in the Press Box.” Now in her 31st year at CBS, it gives her enormous pride to be part of CBS’ groundbreaking all-female sports show We Need to Talk, which is hosted, directed, and produced by women.

Featured in: Tuesday General Sessions (12/17)

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