Lisa Guerrero Tells the Story of Getting Fired From Monday Night Football Over a Sexy Photo Shoot
To you Gen Zs, the name Lisa Guerrero might not resonate, unless you happen to be familiar with her current work on Inside Edition. But to members of my generation, who invented Rock 'n Roll, went to the moon, and brought the worldwide Communist menace to its knees (Note: We did none of those things), she was a big deal for quite a long time.
I'm old enough to remember when she was the head of the Patriots cheerleaders, and dated quarterback Hugh Millen, who was the last in a long line of franchise saviors (5-15 as a starter) before Bill Parcells came along and added Drew Bledsoe. She went on to do a ton of television, including the now semi-forgotten The Best Damn Sports Show Period. And remarkably had one line in Batman Returns, where her character seemed to suggest she's into aquatic polar bird sex (0:45 mark):
She also achieved the level of fame that only the most attractive female celebrities of the 2000s got to enjoy: A photo spread in one of the "Lad Magazines" of the era. Maxim and FHM were the biggies. Anyone who was anyone got to pose for a gallery of a dozen or so highly filtered, PG-13 glamor shots, wedged in among all the male-focused articles about "The Best New Cars of 2004" or "How to Cure a Feminist" and so on. The genre probably exists in some shadow form of its former glory. But for the most part is another cultural institution that was made obsolete by the internet.
All of which I bring up because in Guerrero's new autobiography, the still very hot 58-year-old talks about how posing in a softcore men's magazine cost her the most high profile job of her stellar career:
Source - Lisa Guerrero had heard the phrase time and time again: “You are the luckiest woman in sports.” But that couldn’t be further from the truth for the former “Monday Night Football” reporter.
In a new excerpt from her memoir, “Warrior: My Path to Being Brave,” [she] detailed how the lead-up to her 2003 debut went off the rails in the wake of a photo shoot.
“I’d done a photo shoot for ‘FHM.’ …This had been a strategic decision to promote my brand and raise my profile while I was at ‘Best Damn’ (‘The Best Damn Sports Show Period’). But when the media got wind of the photos of me clad in black-and-white lingerie, it reinforced their notion that I’d been hired on ‘Monday Night Football’ for all the wrong reasons.”
Guerrero alleged when the Disney execs found out about the shoot, “they were irate,” and claimed that she “wasn’t the image they wanted for their family-friendly broadcast.” Guerrero also felt the “Monday Night Football” executives “really didn’t know what they wanted [her] to be.”
“They feigned shock over the photo shoot … yet after hearing about it, the publicity department tried to negotiate for me to be on the ‘FHM’ cover,” she wrote.
We as a culture love to celebrate our pioneers. Those who rebel against the orthodoxy, who push back against the way things have always been done, fight through discrimination, shatter glass ceilings, and against all resistance, blaze trails for others to follow. And with good reason. That is the essence of what it is to be an American.
And so we should honor Lisa Guerrero. She made her way in her profession while having to confront perhaps the most pervasive and yet least talk about prejudice in our society: Discrimination against super attractive women. Particularly in sports broadcasting.
We've all witnessed it. A gorgeous woman stands before the camera, brings the mic to her chin and begins her report, and someone - as often female as not, I'm sorry to say - dismisses her before she's even said a word. Calling her all sorts of sexist names. Insisting she couldn't possibly know the subject matter. She's only there because she looks good on camera. Like somehow those two go hand in hand. It's sick and unfair. Stereotyping of the worst kind to imply, even insist, that beauty and knowledge are mutually exclusive. And in order to really find out what a head coach had to say going into the locker room at the half, we have to go to an Armen Keteyian or a Tony Siragusa. Because the task is too important to leave to someone who looks amazing in black-and-white lingerie.
It needs to be denounced in the strongest possible terms. While I believe things have gotten somewhat better since Guerrero, we still have a long way to go. And today, we all owe a debt of gratitude to her, for not giving up in the face of such anti-hottie bigotry. Whether you're a beautiful woman making your living covering sports, a sports fan, or simply a fan of justice, she deserves your thanks for making the world a better place. Warrior, indeed.