Safe to say, not many professional tennis players foresee their career taking them to China to feed bamboo shoots to panda bears. But there\u2019s no athlete turned broadcaster quite like Mary Carillo.<\/p>\n
Born in 1957 and raised in Douglaston, Queens, Carillo knew from a young age that she would be an athlete.<\/p>\n
\u201cI always knew I was a jock,\u201d she says. \u201cHonestly, my first-ever memory was as a 4-year-old when my father threw me a red rubber ball and I didn\u2019t miss it. I caught it, and I just thought, I want to do this for the rest of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
A childhood spent playing all kinds of sports eventually transitioned into a career playing one: tennis. In 1977, she teamed up with her longtime friend \u2014 and future broadcast partner \u2014 John McEnroe to win the French Open mixed-doubles title, and she continued to play professionally through 1980, when knee problems forced her early retirement.<\/p>\n
However, knee problems couldn\u2019t keep Carillo away from the sport she loved. At the time she was competing professionally, she would write for tennis magazines and provide pickup commentary for the occasional match. A producer from USA Network, hearing Carillo\u2019s commentary during year-end championships at Madison Square Garden, invited her to commentate on the network\u2019s coverage of women\u2019s tennis.<\/p>\n
Soon thereafter, Carillo added men\u2019s tennis matches to her USA Network broadcast responsibilities and would go on to serve as a tennis analyst for a wide variety of networks: NBC, ESPN, CBS Sports, Turner Sports, Tennis Channel, HBO, PBS, and MSG Network.<\/p>\n
While Carillo\u2019s tennis analysis earned her accolades from the industry, her work at the Olympic Games made her a household name. Her Olympic career began during the 1992 Albertville Games, when CBS Sports assigned her to cover skiing, a sport she knew nothing about. It would be the first of many assignments where her can-do attitude and always-say-yes mantra resulted in insightful, candid, and entertaining commentary.<\/p>\n
\u201cI always said yes,\u201d says Carillo, of her early days as an Olympic commentator. \u201cSomebody would ask me, Have you ever covered skiing? Are you interested? And I would say, Absolutely! My attitude has always been yes, the answer is yes, until proven otherwise. I\u2019ve encouraged both my children to treat life the same way. If it\u2019s interesting, say yes. If you can\u2019t do it, they\u2019ll let you know.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carillo continued to cover skiing at the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer (1994) and Nagano (1998), adding bobsled, luge, and skeleton to her repertoire in Salt Lake City (2002). For the Summer Olympics in Atlanta (1996) and Sydney (2000), she served as a tennis analyst. With every Olympics, she took on additional hosting and reporting duties. However, it was at the 2008 Beijing Games that Carillo found her Olympic niche: as a feature correspondent. Dick Ebersol, then chairman of NBC Sports, sent her and her production team to China ahead of the Games to see what stories they could find. They returned with reports on young Chinese acrobats, a 14th century monastery, and \u2014 perhaps the highlight of the trip \u2014 pandas. \u201cFeeding pandas bamboo shoots was one of the great assignments of my life,\u201d she laughs.<\/p>\n
From that point on, Carillo\u2019s mission at every Olympic Games was to find stories that hadn\u2019t previously been told: stories about the host country and the host city, about the people who call places like Rio de Janeiro and PyeongChang home.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe has a great sense of adventure and a great sense of curiosity,\u201d says Bob Costas, who worked with Carillo on many Olympic Games. \u201cShe\u2019s up for anything. She\u2019s up for going to Siberia to find out how people actually live year-round in one of the coldest inhabited places in the world. Or she\u2019ll find the actual girl from Ipanema, who\u2019s now in her 70s, on the beaches in Rio, and she\u2019ll talk to her. She\u2019s good at serious stuff and quirky stuff. She has a good sense of humor. She can say something funny herself, but, if you get off a good line, she\u2019s the best audience. She throws her head back and laughs. She\u2019s always been wonderful to work with.\u201d<\/p>\n
In February, Carillo wrapped her 11th Olympic assignment with NBC, her 14th overall. She continues to serve as an analyst on NBC\u2019s tennis coverage as well as a correspondent for HBO\u2019s Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel<\/em>; a post she has held since 1997.<\/p>\n \u201cMary has always brought a unique skill set to the show, one that enables viewers to emotionally connect with her stories,\u201d says Gumbel. \u201cA superb listener, Mary\u2019s open and generous nature has often helped her illicit honest responses from normally reticent interview subjects. Although she can boast of an enviable record of athletic and journalistic success, she\u2019s been the definition of a team player.\u201d<\/p>\n Carillo\u2019s desire to see new places and meet new people is not just a professional calling but a personal passion, one she has passed along to her children, Rachel and Anthony. And, while tennis remains her first love, Carillo\u2019s innate curiosity for every sport and athlete she encounters has established her as one of the most beloved voices in the business.<\/p>\n \u201cIf there\u2019s one thing I have in my favor,\u201d she says, \u201cit\u2019s that I love sports. I love the athletic heart, and I\u2019m always curious about anything at all athletic or competitive. I want to know why it works, how it works, why did you choose that sport. I\u2019ve gotten very passionate about some sports just from covering them over the years and getting to know who these athletes are and how much they give to their sport. Their commitment, their dedication is, to me, very fascinating.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":899,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"tags":[45],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsbroadcastinghalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/inductees\/896"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsbroadcastinghalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/inductees"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsbroadcastinghalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/inductees"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsbroadcastinghalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsbroadcastinghalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsbroadcastinghalloffame.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}