Second Helping
Thirty years after she kickstarted my self-worth, ESPN's Sandy Rosenbush lends me another hand—this time, on why it's so hard to ask for help.
I can’t remember at which moment I made the decision to leave New York in 1995.
It could have been the night I got halfway home from a Gristedes grocery, walking in a deluge of cold rain with no coat, hat, or umbrella, and realized I’d left two of my four bags behind. I dropped the other two bags and their jars of pasta sauce on the sidewalk right there on West End Avenue, cradled my face in my hands, and sobbed like a profoundly inelegant version of Holly Golightly looking for Cat.
Or it could have been the day I had the best experience of my brief stint at Sports Illustrated, where my chief responsibility as a 22-year-old reporter was to fact-check articles on behalf of their excellent writers and eat my weight in office bagels on Sunday mornings.
Future Hall-of-Famer Tony Gwynn had phoned my desk from the dugout hours before a Padres game to review the quotes that would appear in a Richard Hoffer profile. Gwynn, who died from cancer complications in 2014 at age 54, was the kindest athlete I’ve spoken with. He took his time on the phone, confirming Hoffer’s portrait of him with openness and detail, speaking far more about his mother and her pecan pie than himself. He was a surprisingly grounded superstar who recognized that the stability of playing in small-market San Diego, near the community he knew best, had empowered him to do what he wanted most. (In his case, post a .338 career average and leave baseball as one of the greatest hitters of all time.)
After I listened to Gwynn explain all of this, I wondered what I was doing working for a massive magazine in Manhattan. It had been a dream to land there; like many of my peers, I had grown up with my nose inside SI’s pages. But there I was, lonely, lost, overpaying for half of a living room on the Upper West Side, and silently asking a man who would retire with 15 All-Star nods and eight batting titles if I should catch the next cab to LaGuardia.
The truth is, choosing the job at SI over other opportunities, moving to New York without ever having visited it, and betting on myself over my parents’ objections were all the right decisions.
Leaving after six months was the right decision, too.
With time, you learn that every shaky step toward becoming who you are and discovering what you need is necessary. But if there is one regret I still have about New York—one regret I want my kids to heed—it’s the choice I didn’t make:
I didn’t ask for help when I needed it.
And help was right there, in the form of Sandy Rosenbush.
Rosenbush, a producer and editor for ESPN since 2008, was the first female president of the Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE) and the 2019 Red Smith Award recipient, given by APSE to a person who has made “major contributions to sports journalism.” Her talents have improved the newsrooms of the biggest publications in journalism, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and, from 1993-2006, the once-hallowed halls of Sports Illustrated, where she was senior editor and later assistant managing editor.
(When she left SI, Rosenbush was named a New York City Teaching Fellow, earned a master’s in education, and became a public school teacher for two years in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood.)
But the endeavor that has most extended her gifts throughout the profession is the Sports Journalism Institute, a college journalism program she co-founded in 1993 with The Athletic’s equally wise Leon Carter to help move more women and members of marginalized communities into newsrooms.
I met Rosenbush and Carter when I landed one of 15 spots in SJI’s 1994 class. Beyond preparing us for our summer internships—mine was at The Dallas Morning News—the program became part of every participant’s DNA. It was an instant family we knew we could trust long after we headed back to our respective campuses.
It fired the starter pistol on my 30-year marathon to self-worth. It demanded I get in the race.
If I had summoned the courage to knock on Rosenbush’s office door at SI in 1995, I don’t know if she would have advised me to stick it out a little longer or get started on my next chapter. Like my broken jars of pasta sauce, all those what-ifs have long since washed into NYC’s storm drains.
What matters now is understanding why I didn’t knock and what stops us from approaching others for support. Why do we struggle so much with needing help, and how can we improve at both asking for and giving the assistance we and others need?
This time, I knocked. And, of course, Rosenbush answered.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sandy, as I mentioned when I first reached out, what I love about doing this newsletter is that I get to go back and honor people like yourself, who have impacted me and guided me through challenges.
Well, I think it’s also really good because a lot of the things you’re looking at show that we really have the ability to get past some of the big hurdles in our lives, but often we don’t stop and think about it.
Some of that is because of how little time and how many responsibilities we have in our adult lives. But a lot of it, for me, has been mindset.
Yes—a lot of it is thinking, ‘I’d rather look forward than backward.’ But sometimes, if you don’t look backward to understand why you are where you are, it’s hard to move forward enough.
Right. And when I look back, I see that I missed an opportunity to ask for help when I needed it. It’s a problem that interests me; I don’t suffer from it as much these days, but I certainly did all the time when I was younger.
Yeah, me too.
What was that like for you? How did you manage it?
I had to get to the point where I didn’t feel like asking for help meant that I was saying I couldn’t do something, that it was more that I really wasn’t sure what the best way to proceed was. That it wasn’t anything lacking in me; I wasn’t stupid because I didn’t know the best way to handle something.
But even now, my tendency is to keep my mouth shut unless I’m completely lost.
Why do we do that?
A lot of it is just the old imposter syndrome. And I think more women than men feel it. There are so many instances where people assume you’re not up to the same level as the guys are. And we just think, ‘Well, I don’t want to give them any extra fodder for that.’
Is there an example like that from your career?
I probably operated that way most of the time. And sometimes, too—I don’t really know if trust is the right word here—but you are given a reason not to trust people with your questions. A couple of times in my life, it’s happened where some job came up, and the person you thought cared about helping you continue to grow and move ahead turns around and gives it to some guy who’s his friend. Then you’re like, ‘Well, I should learn by now.’
Do you think those disappointments leave us wary of seeming vulnerable in even the smallest of ways down the line, no matter whom we might want to ask for help?
Yeah, I really do. And there is just so much institutional racism and sexism, particularly in sports, that even people who have good intentions overall don’t recognize it in themselves, that they are putting more stock in somebody who is male than female. That is not to say that everybody who is female is better than everybody who is male. But quite the opposite tends to be assumed in sports, for sure.
One of my favorite personal examples of that was being told by a sports writer for The Daily Tar Heel that I had “stolen their writing awards” in college.
Ha! That’s too funny. And looking back, it is funny. But I’m sure it wasn’t funny at the time. You were probably angry.
That’s just it: I wish anger had been my response. If anything, I was dumbstruck. It was hard for me to own anything that I achieved back then—and easy for someone to tell me I didn’t. That has a lot to do with the messages I heard growing up, but I had to work hard not to feel small in those situations.
And I don’t think that it’s all your mindset—again, I hate to generalize, but I do think that a lot of times it’s just presumed by men as well as by the people who are overall running sports departments, newspapers, etc., that everybody who’s in sports and running it should look like them.
That creates an extra layer of proving yourself. Every woman and every person from a marginalized community knows that, which makes asking questions more difficult.
Right, for sure. For sure.
When you do find someone you feel comfortable approaching for help, does it matter how you do the asking?
I don’t think it matters. I think that part matters more to you, the person doing the asking. Most people feel flattered when you ask them for help, as opposed to you worrying that they will think you are stupid. In fact, they’re thinking, ‘She thinks I’m so smart!’ Whether they are male or female, they’re quite flattered.
That’s a really good point—that many people want to help because it makes them feel valued, too. And maybe it increases their sense of connection, which I think we are all lacking. Unfortunately, there’s this curling in of everybody’s resources because we are never offline.
Right. People are afraid you might use too much of their time.
And you are afraid to be the person who does. I always apologize for taking someone’s time—even if they’ve agreed to share it.
Yeah, and some of this struggle with asking for help may be more common with people who have had either a falling out with family members or a family member whose illness has removed them from their lives. I think we may end up doubting ourselves more. My mom had Alzheimer’s at a very early onset, at age 59. I was working at the Clearwater (Fla.) paper when I got a call that she had walked away from her house in her underwear to her brother’s place two miles away.
So, I don’t know if not having your mom—for whatever reason—to be someone you lean on and talk to and all that, I don’t know how much that undercuts your own belief in yourself.
That makes so much sense to me. I’ve never heard anyone connect that so specifically. It would help explain why I was drawn to journalism: It gave me an excuse to ask wise people questions.
That makes sense to me, too.
You are always questioning what you can do and whether you can trust what you know.
Right, exactly. Forget the unreliable narrator in a book. Are you a reliable narrator of your own story?
Oof. That’s one I could spend a lot of time considering. What if you do get a snarky or unexpected response from someone when you ask them for help? What’s your advice for getting past that?
You have to try at least to remind yourself that it is who they are that caused them to respond that way. It’s not about who you are or what you said. When you’re just asking a question, that’s no reason for somebody to be all up in your grill about it.
The flip side of that is, when we’re asked for help, what should we remember in our responses?
To me, it seems most important to know what you can’t know. You can’t know how this person has arrived at the challenge they’re facing. You probably don’t have all the history or all the knowledge you need. You can’t set yourself up to save people, to blow in and fix it all. You just have to be there for the person if you can. ♣
IN TWO WEEKS: On July 31, Sports Illustrated columnist Pat Forde discusses the collision of family, sports, and partisanship.
THIS SATURDAY: My first Intrepid Post newsletter for paid subscribers. In “Heirlooms,” I fight the ghosts that have silenced me.