It’s hard to believe, but outspoken ESPN personality Michelle Beadle once feared speaking before a large audience.
The year was 1990, and Beadle was just days from being introduced among the freshman athletes and band members at Boerne High School’s annual “Meet the Greyhounds.”
“All week long she couldn’t sleep, she was so hyped up,” her father, Bob Beadle, recalled. “The threat of public speaking spooked her to no end. We would talk to her about it, tell her, ‘Take a deep breath, picture the audience in their underwear,’ all those old bromides.”
“Well, she got up there, and it probably took her 1½ seconds to introduce herself, no different than the rest of them. To think how she makes her living, it’s kind of an inside family joke now.”
Twenty-five years later, as host of ESPN2’s popular “SportsNation,” Beadle sparkles as a provocative TV star in the social media era.
More than capable of holding her own with her male co-stars, the brash Beadle is funny, frank and free wheeling, a big reason why she boasts almost 2 million combined Twitter and Facebook followers.
While the light-hearted, 30-minute show bounces from topic to topic, she handles the transitions like a savvy NBA point guard, deftly inserting her razor-sharp opinions and providing much of the banter that is the program’s lifeblood.
It’s a far cry from Beadle’s first on-camera experience as a Spurs intern in the late 1990s.
“I did my first piece for the Coyote Clubhouse, a three-minute package on how to take care of your dogs, and it was god-awful,” she said. “I was like, ‘Hi, I’m Michelle Beadle,’ and it looked like I wasn’t even sure that was my name. Then it got progressively worse.”
It was so bad a couple of her father’s friends called him to offer some unsolicited advice.
“They said, ‘Tell her she is allowed to breathe,’” said the elder Beadle, a former executive at Valero Energy Corp.
Credit to the San Antonio Express who originally published this article
