by Ron Kaplan
NJJN Features Editor

November 20, 2008

Linda Cohn has always taken the road less traveled. Instead of the usual sketches little girls doodle in their school notebooks, she drew New York Rangers logos. An athlete herself, she played ice hockey, despite the fact that it had to be on boys’ teams since there were none for girls.

And when it came time to choose a profession, Cohn decided she wanted to be a sports journalist at a time when such an occupation for a woman was almost unheard of.

But Cohn, who has been with ESPN for the last 16 years, has proved everyone wrong.

Jewish Women International recently named Cohn one of the 10 Jewish Women to Watch in 5769. She will receive an award at a luncheon on Monday, Dec. 8, in Washington, DC.

So far, 2008 has already been a big year for her, thanks to her recently published book, Cohn-Head: A No-Holds-Barred Account of Breaking Into the Boys’ Club (Lyons Press). It’s not your standard tell-all, name-dropping memoir — it’s quite personal, as she discusses her battle with depression and the breakup of her 22-year marriage.

“People asked, ‘Why did you have so much about your personal life?’ How could I write about my life and not include it?” she said in a telephone interview.

“The men who know me from SportsCenter have always been curious about my life because there’s not a lot [written] about me. But once you open the book, more women could probably relate…than men. What it takes to get where I am, what it’s like behind the scenes at ESPN, that’s what men are interested in; women seem more attuned to the professional challenges in a male-dominated industry.”

Cohn said she wanted to go into sports after seeing Phyllis George working on professional football broadcasts in the late 1970s. But even then she knew that George — a former Miss America — was hired as much for her appearance (if not more so) as her football acumen.

Thirty-something years later, Cohn said women in sports journalism “is never a nonissue.”

“Have women made progress? Absolutely. Do we see more women on TV doing sports? Definitely. But — and here’s the big but — it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. So while those in power are giving women another look to see if they can do the job, we have to make sure it’s for the right reason.”

Cohn jokingly lamented that opinion-makers like Oprah Winfrey and the ABC talk show The View have overlooked her book because they believe it’s “just” about sports. She said they were behind the times if they believed women would not be interested. “They have no clue,” she said. “They’re talking about beauty products and pocketbooks.

“In some capacity — whether it’s working mothers or stay-at-home moms, whether it’s young women in college or high school — everyone now has a thread of sports in their life.”

Cohn said some of her influences growing up were Len Berman, Jerry Gerrard, Marv Albert, and Warner Wolf. These days her co-workers at ESPN include Steve Levy, Chris Berman, and Tony Kornheiser, among many others, who happen to be Jewish.

“You wonder where that stems from. Many of these guys will tell you themselves they weren’t star athletes,” which Cohn was, excelling in tennis and field hockey in addition to ice hockey.

Nowadays, she makes it a point not to work on Yom Kippur although she has, on occasion, worked on the second day of Rosh Hashana and wondered how that came across to her Jewish viewers. “But then I’m thinking, wait a minute; they’re not supposed to be watching.”

As a youngster, Cohn had to deal with a situation many Jewish athletes face: whether to participate if a game falls out on the Day of Atonement. Cohn — who attended Hebrew school and synagogue with her family in Long Island and had a bat mitzva ceremony — decided to play.

Despite her mother’s misgivings, Cohn persuaded her to drive her to the game. In their haste to get there, they received a ticket for speeding. “My mother never let me live that down,” Cohn recalled. “She said God was looking down and punishing us for my wanting to play on that special day.”

Evidently she didn’t learn her lesson. Years later, while attending a seder hosted by Orthodox relatives, Cohn and her father snuck upstairs to catch updates on the Rangers playoff game on a forbidden radio.

“These are the types of things where I just roll the dice with God,” Cohn said.

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