The Fabulous Sports Babe

» see sportsbabe.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On 4 July 1994 ESPN Radio put a weekday show on the air out of Bristol, Connecticut, carried by twenty-nine stations. The network had only done weekends until then. The host was Nanci Donnellan, who had been handed the name the Fabulous Sports Babe in 1989 at a Tampa Bay station and taken it to Seattle, where KJR paid her $135,000 a year and the afternoon ratings went up fourfold.

She was the first woman to host a national sports talk show in the United States, which in 1994 was reported as a novelty and defended as one for years after. The format was not gentle: callers got insulted and so did athletes. The show ran on a single phone number, 1-800-SAY-BABE, which took roughly two hundred thousand calls a month, and about two hundred people a day made it to air.

I was ten years old when this went national and four years short of my first modem. American sports radio has no Turkish equivalent I can point at, and the games it argued about all day were games nobody around me was watching. What reaches you about a show like this, from where I was sitting, is only the part somebody wrote down later.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

The affiliate count went from twenty-nine in July 1994 to sixty-four by September. By February 1995 it was a hundred and eleven. At the start of 1996 it was past a hundred and seventy, heard in more than five hundred cities across the United States and Canada, and in some thirty-five countries beyond that.

In 1996 she published an autobiography with Neal Karlen, The Babe in Boyland, for a reported $225,000 from ReganBooks. It is the usual place a radio career turns. The book said things about the business that the business had been happy to pay her to say on air and much less happy to read in hardcover.

~ the cracks ~

Donnellan left ESPN in May 1997 for ABC Radio Networks with the book fallout behind the move. In September 1998 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and kept the show going through it. ABC ended it in August 1999 on softening ratings, and by the following month she was at the Sports Fan Radio Network, a smaller operation with less money behind it. That lasted a little over a year. They let her go in January 2001, in the days before Super Bowl XXXV, which is the worst week in the year to lose a sports radio job.

~ what the archive kept ~

sportsbabe.com first appears in the Wayback Machine on 5 December 1998: five and a half kilobytes of black background with a microphone-stand graphic and a link to something called the Global Babe Empire. It stayed about that size until 17 November 1999. The next time the crawler came through, on 10 May 2000, it was a different page entirely.

By 6 May 2001 the whole site was 639 bytes. The body held one object tag, a 690 by 500 Flash 4 movie named gonefishing.swf, on black, and nothing else. That movie does not play anywhere now, so the only readable copy of the page is a screenshot Steve Baldwin took for his Museum of E-Failure: a wooden sign reading GONE FISHING with tropical fish swimming past it, and underneath, dimmed to about a third, the live homepage it was covering.

You can still read what is under there. Live ONLINE 10-1 Eastern. 1-877-929-BABE. Email Da' Babe. Check Out The Hot New BabeGear. HEY!!!! It's Football Season. A farewell page that leaves the dead site legible behind it is doing something most farewell pages take care to avoid. Donnellan herself is fine, back on the air in Tampa by 2012 and in the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2018. The show is the thing that died, and its last word was a cartoon fish.

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