Ann Meyers

In 1979 Meyers entered the competition for the American Broadcasting Company's (ABC) Superstars title, an annually televised, all-around competition between prominent athletes. After a fourth-place finish in her first appearance, Meyers went into intensive training and followed up with first place finishes for three years in succession, from 1980-82. The event, which paid $50,000 for first place, brought Meyers a much greater reward in meeting her future husband, Don Drysdale, at the event. Drysdale, a hall-of-fame baseball pitcher, was working in retirement as a broadcaster. With Drysdale's encouragement, Meyers enrolled in broadcasting school and embarked on a new career as a sportscaster.

As a sportscaster and color analyst for two decades, Meyers reported on some of the most prominent and popular sporting events on record, having worked for many major networks and for several college athletic departments in addition to her arrangement with the Pacers of Indiana in 1979-80. In 1981-82 she announced games for the University of Hawaii, and in 1982-84 she announced the Bruins games at UCLA. After working the 1984 Olympics with ABC in Los Angeles, she was seen on Sportsvision in 1985-87, on CBS-TV in 1991, and on WTBS in 1986 and again in 1990. Her other network affiliations encompass WNBA-NBC, Fox Network, ESPN, and ESPN2. She provided color coverage of Women's NCAA Basketball tournaments in the 1990s, and covered the basketball regional games and final four for ESPN.

Across a two-decade span, she reported on a range of sports, including volleyball, soccer, track, baseball, and softball. At the turn of the century she was heard on both the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Fox Network. She presented games for the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) often with the late Chick Hearn.

When Meyers and Drysdale were married in November of 1986. Drysdale had just prior, in 1984, been inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. In 1993, with the induction of Meyers into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the couple became the first two-way Hall-of-Fame marriage in the history of sports. Additionally Meyers earned the distinction of being the first woman inductee to the hall.

In 1994 Meyers amended her long list sports firsts yet again, becoming the first woman ever to compete in the Celebrity Golf Association Championship. By virtue of her extensive career of firsts she earned a reputation in the sports world as a key role model for women athletes of the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first.