Ro Brown, New Orleans’ first Black sports reporter, selected as Hall of Fame award recipient
30th August 2021 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
As a scrappy, ambitious college student at Loyola University in the late 1970s, Ro Brown wasn’t only introduced to the future of sports journalism, but he was also a very key part of the industry’s transition from a domain dominated by plodding dinosaurs into a fast-paced, frenetic and adaptable field with journalists willing to cover anything, anywhere, anytime.
But just as important as his role in the transformation of the way sports journalism is produced, Brown also changed the way local broadcast sports news looked. First as an intern at WDSU and then as WDSU’s – and the city’s – first Black sports anchor in the 1980s and beyond, Brown revolutionized the way New Orleans residents perceive, consume, share and appreciate sports journalists, and sports journalism.
For that reason, Brown will receive the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame’s Distinguished Service Award in Sports Journalism at the LSHOF’s annual induction ceremony on Aug. 28 in Natchitoches, La. With the honor, Brown will become the first African-American broadcast journalist to receive the DSA.
“It’s very nice and very humbling,” Brown said of the LSHOF honor. “I’m not accustomed to the attention. I never wanted to be the center of attention,”
Doug Mouton, a longtime sports director and anchor at WWL-TV and currently vice president of the Press Club of New Orleans, said Brown inspired him with his consistent professionalism and, most of all, his character and a relatability that elevated everyone around him.
“More than anything, Ro taught me how to be a pro,” Mouton said. “Ro was meticulously overprepared. He always knew his subject matter extremely well before he set out to do a story. But his greatest strength was his own character. Ro treated everyone, including an obnoxious intern like me, with respect and affection. He had a friendly, likeable demeanor that put everyone at ease. He got better stories because people enjoyed talking to him.”
Doug Ireland, chairman of the LSHOF and himself a 2021 recipient of the Hall’s Distinguished Service Award, said Brown became a household name in New Orleans because of his passion, inquisitiveness and approachable nature.
“Ro’s accomplishments as a journalist – and not just covering sports – established him as an iconic television figure in the greater New Orleans market for literally millions of viewers through the years,” Ireland said.
Brown’s professional career began in 1978, and it’s then when he started changing the game, so to speak, in more ways than one.
That first-hand role in the way local broadcast sports news was gathered, packaged and presented came courtesy of then-WDSU news anchor Warren Bell, the first African-American anchor in New Orleans history and, at the time, the shop steward for the local chapter of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists union.
Upon seeing Brown’s talent, eagerness and willingness to learn and grow as a sports reporter, Bell ensured the youngster a job by negotiating with station management to make sure the union’s contract included a clause requiring the position of minority reporter trainee. “I’ve always said out loud something a lot of people, especially white people, might cringe at, that I got my job because of Affirmative Action,” Brown said, “but I kept it because I was good.”
He certainly was.
Brown was introduced to the next big figure in his sports media career in the form of Ed Harding, a Boston native who arrived at New Orleans’ WDSU in the late 1970s as the station’s sports director.
While Harding would eventually become an extremely popular news anchor in his Beantown hometown, in New Orleans, he teamed up with Brown to create something entirely different – sports journalism based on and fashioned for the people of the city and its environs.
Because he wasn’t a Crescent City native, Harding decided to lean heavily on Brown, a native son of New Orleans who had graduated from John F. Kennedy High School (Class of ’69), attended Southern University at New Orleans, served four years as a medical corpsman in the Navy, then earned his bachelors in communications from Loyola.
As a result, the new WDSU sports director made Brown – who was working off-screen as a production assistant and as a utility player at the station – a lead reporter for the sports desk.
With his deep knowledge of the local scene and the personal connections that came with it, Brown hauled his camera into nooks and crannies that had never received coverage before – and had never been seen by most of the New Orleans TV news viewership.
“Everything was on the board,” Brown said of the philosophy. “We tried to shoot everything. We were at everything. Tulane, Dillard, Loyola …”
That increased diversification of subject matter and organically involved cultural diversity, both in camera and in living rooms. Brown, with Harding’s encouragement, introduced Black high schools and athletes into local sports coverage, and he gave exposure to smaller, less prominent facilities like John Curtis High School.
Brown’s audience-first philosophy and easy-going, charismatic interview and broadcasting style made him a household name, a process that only accelerated when he became WDSU’s sports anchor.
Brown said even today, in retirement and more than 20 years after leaving WDSU, average folks – folks who were able to see their kids’ high school teams on TV because of Brown’s approach to the job, folks who weren’t even really sports fans but watched him on WDSU every night because of his magnetic personality – approach him on the street or in restaurants to thank him and applaud him for his achievements.
But it wasn’t just how Brown and his colleagues at WDSU transformed the way sports news was gathered and presented. As a trailblazing journalist of color, Brown brought diversity to the crowds of reporters in post-game press conferences and daily editorial meetings. However, he was also subjected to the type of stereotyping and pigeonholing that faced and blocked the careers of many now-white, non-male aspiring journalists. And he experienced it in a massively paradoxical way that inverted the popular image of Black sports reporters.
Brown was challenged not simply because he was Black, but because he was Black and not a jock.
Brown said many people, both in newsrooms and in the public, expect Black sports journalists to have had successful athletic careers themselves, as if being an all-county linebacker or All-American point guard was the primary, and sometimes only, qualification that African-American sports reporters were supposed to have.
“The one question Black males who are candidates for jobs are asked is, ‘Did you play, and if you didn’t play, how can you know [about sports],’” Brown said. “They don’t ask white males that, or white females or Black females.”
To illustrate such illogical sports stereotypes, he referred to a pair of well-known white males who parlayed simply lifelong passion and knowledge to become nationally and internationally famous as sports reporters despite minimal athletic success of their own.
“I played on the same team as Bob Costas and Howard Cosell,” Brown said. “When I was growing up I had the copies of Sports Illustrated, I had all the baseball cards, I went to all the sporting events, I read the newspaper every day, I looked at the box scores, all the normal stuff that [sports enthusiasts] do. I did all of that, too.”
Looking back, and looking forward, Brown continues to see such stereotypes and biases at play in the world of sports journalism, and in the presentation of sports news in general. But he’s also witnessed how sports journalism, in every medium, has radically changed.
Since he launched his own career, Brown has seen broadcast sports journalism go from four minutes of airtime on three local TV stations five nights a week to a 24-7 news cycle, thanks to ESPN and eventually including other around-the-clock sports networks.
Then came the advent of the Internet, and with it an ever-widening scope of sports media and a constantly increasing diversification on many levels – from the ethnic and gender demographics of sports journalists themselves to the prevalence of sports news niche markets to the varied styles of and approaches to gathering and disseminating sports news.
Brown himself is testament to the ways sports media has become a multi-platform, multi-source industry in which, more and more, aspiring young journalists must be multi-talented and adaptable.
After leaving WDSU in 1999, Brown embarked on a second career in community and media relations, a role that kept him active in the community and in communication with the general public, but in a new way.
He first became director of community relations for the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation, then worked as a guiding figure in Event Producers, a private firm that created sports content for use by sports teams, community organizations and other entities.
For his final stop, Brown became assistant athletic director for communications at the University of New Orleans, a gig that included voicing and calling Privateer baseball and basketball games and other UNO sporting events.
Over those decades, Brown has contributed to the local sports scene in myriad other ways, including radio shows, TV spots and in the pages of The Louisiana Weekly. Along the way, he’s received a slew of local, regional and national awards, including, in 2012, the Sam Lacy Pioneer Award, given by the National Association of Black Journalists in honor of Lacy, the longtime sports editor at the Baltimore Afro-American who became a leading figure in the push to desegregate American sports.
Brown is also an astute local sports historian, sporting a deep knowledge of New Orleans’ Negro Baseball League teams and players and the city’s once-thriving Black sandlot football scene.
All told, Brown has been a massive influence on journalism and journalists, especially journalists of color. However, said the LSHOF’s Ireland, Brown isn’t just a great African-American journalist. He’s a great journalist, period.
“Ro didn’t allow himself to be dissuaded at the outset of his career because nobody who looked like him was doing what he wanted to do,” Ireland added. “The fact that he pressed forward and earned the opportunities he did was great inspiration not only to aspiring journalists of color, but to all minorities who weren’t on an even playing field – women, and people from all cultures, who saw this remarkable man and consummate professional doing his job so well.”
“I never felt pressure [as a Black sports journalist],” Brown said. “I felt I had to do the best that I could for people before me who did it and who could have done it a lot better than me, and I did it for the people at home who were proud to see me up there and wanted me to do well.”
This article was originally published in the August 30, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
