Ann Liguori was only 3 when she decided what her life’s work would be. “I know a lot of people don’t know what they want to do when they’re 3 years old,” says Liguori. “But my earliest recollection is sitting in my highchair watching Ruth Lyons’ variety show [‘The 50-50 Club’], and I just remember this beautiful woman who was interviewing the most fascinating personalities who came into her studio. I was always so curious about learning about people.”
Liguori knew then that she would become a television host and interview people, too. That was in the 1960s, when Ruth Lyons’ show was broadcast in Liguori’s hometown of Cincinnati. By the late 1980s, Liguori had become a professional sportscaster—one of a few pioneering women in the male-dominated trade.
She soon created her own show, which started with founding her own production company, then knocking on doors on New York’s Madison Avenue to get sponsors. “For every one that said yes, 20 said, ‘What are you doing?’ They looked at me like I had three heads.”
Despite the challenges, “Sports Innerview With Ann Liguori” debuted in 1989 and aired on regional sports networks for the next 17 years. Her first interview was with Mickey Mantle.
“He was this small-town guy from Commerce, Oklahoma who came to New York City. Everything about New York was so grand to him,” she says. “Once his career started and he performed as one of the most talented players in baseball, he had the city in the palm of his hand.”
During that interview, she learned that he partied hard because he expected to die young. Mantle told her tearfully how his father and brother had died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma and that he expected the same fate. He died of liver cancer at the age of 63, several years after his interview with Liguori.
Ted Williams, Wilt Chamberlain, Billie Jean King, and Patty Berg are among the hundreds that Liguori has interviewed. She has covered the Olympics, the Masters, and other major events for networks including CBS, and hosted a call-in sports radio show on New York’s WFAN for 25 years. Her Golf Channel show, “Conversations with Ann Liguori,” had her playing golf with celebrities while interviewing them.
“Golf tells you a lot about people,” says Liguori. “You see the good, the bad, the ugly.” For example, country music star Vince Gill joked with her that a bad shot could cause a Dr. Jekyll–Mr. Hyde kind of transformation in him. “Golf tends to be very frustrating,” she says. “You think you got it one second, and the next second, you completely lose it and hit a terrible shot. Even the pros do that.”
Liguori says that of all the people she has interviewed, Alice Cooper surprised her the most. He played golf daily and was “addicted” to it, she says, and he told her it took the place of his alcohol addiction. He is known as the king of shock-rock, with guillotines, fake blood, and black makeup onstage. But offstage, she says, he’s a mild-tempered born-again Christian named Vincent Furnier: “He’s so unlike his onstage persona. He’s so sweet.”
For more than 30 years, Liguori has stood alongside sports greats and witnessed some of the most riveting moments in sports history—even as she’s had to use all her ingenuity and persistence to hold her ground in the competitive sportscasting field.
Her favorite interview question is, “What’s the key to your success?” Her own answer: “Hard work. You can’t coast at all. Just because you’ve been doing this for a long time doesn’t mean you can lay back a little bit. It’s constant hard work and passion for what you do.”
Historic Moments
Liguori recalls notable moments she has participated in, whether interviewing the athletes involved or announcing the events live. They include the controversial Olympic figure skating competition of Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan; the legendary chip shot by Tiger Woods at the 2005 Masters; and the horrifying 1998 crash and spectacular recovery of Austrian alpine skier Hermann Maier.In 1994, Harding’s ex-husband orchestrated an attack on Kerrigan two days before her Olympic trials. Harding was nevertheless allowed to compete against Kerrigan in that year’s Winter Olympics, in Lillehammer, Norway, and all eyes were on the two. When it was Harding’s turn to skate, there was a delay. Liguori remembers wondering what was going on. Did Harding lose her nerve?
“You just didn’t know what was going to happen,” Liguori remembers. “It looked like either athlete could have a mental breakdown because of the pressure at any given moment.” As it turned out, a broken lace had caused the delay. Liguori was CBS’s reporter in the so-called “kiss and cry zone,” where interviews took place after the skaters got off the ice.
“They came into this kiss and cry zone, and [Harding] had asthma and [Kerrigan] was crying. I got one of them crying into my microphone and I got the other one wheezing into my microphone,” Liguori says with a laugh. “I was at the highest-rated event in the history of sports back then, and looking forward to interviewing these two women who were the center of this huge controversy—and neither of them was even capable of talking to me afterward.”
In 2005, she covered the Masters for WFAN. The station asked her for an update at the very moment that Tiger Woods stepped up to make his famous shot on the 16th hole. It was his final round and he had a single-stroke advantage, but it looked like he was set to lose it. The ball was some 50 feet from the hole, on the edge of the rough, and everyone was sure it would take more than one stroke to sink it.
He hit the ball and it sailed forward, then turned about 90 degrees, rolled down the slope, and headed for the hole. It reached the very edge of the cup and tottered there suspensefully. Finally, it fell in. “That has to be the most iconic shot in the history of golf, and I was there announcing it,” Liguori says.
At the 1998 Winter Olympics, skier Hermann Maier—“The Herminator”—flew off the course, broke through the side netting, and bounced head over heels down the mountain. As loud and dismayed voices filled the broadcast area, Liguori was sure he had been killed or seriously injured. Then silence; Maier had finally landed and lay motionless. Moments later, he got up and walked away unscathed.
At a press conference later, a reporter asked him to describe his fall. Liguori puts on an Austrian accent (think Arnold Schwarzenegger) as she recalls his response: “‘I flew 30 feet in the air. It was a good flight, but it wasn’t as good as Lufthansa.’”
Radio Personality
Some sports radio hosts hang up on callers with opposing opinions. “I would let people speak,” Liguori says. “I think we have to be respectful of other people’s opinions. We have the freedom of speech, and I think that’s a very important freedom.”
Some of her regular callers became radio personalities themselves, and were an important part of her show—“Hey Liguori, What’s the Story?”—which had a late-night Friday slot on WFAN. “People who stay up all night are interesting,” she observes. One regular caller was a prison guard on the night shift; others included Doris from Rego Park, Queens and “Short Al” from Brooklyn. They would persist for hours to get through the jammed lines.
Passion and compassion are key to Liguori’s approach to her work and life; her mentor, Margo VerKruzen, helped teach her that. VerKruzen was her mother’s friend and a sports director at Towson University, in Maryland, and Liguori and her brother spent summers at her home and attended a youth sports camp at Towson. “She had passion for life,” Liguori says of VerKruzen. “She was a member of the African violet club. She was a member of the cycling club. She was a member of the horseback-riding club. She just loved life and being active.”
Liguori is similarly active and passionate about life. She swims, runs, bikes, and does yoga daily. She has dedicated herself to philanthropy, particularly cancer research. When she was in college, her father died of stomach cancer and her brother died of leukemia at the age of 22. In 2008, she founded the Ann Liguori Foundation to raise funds for research, and each year she hosts the foundation’s Charity Golf Classic in the Hamptons, in Long Island, New York.
Liguori learned much from her mother. “All the people I’ve interviewed in my life—and she’s the most inspirational to me. She taught me patience. She taught me compassion. She taught me diplomacy. She taught me honesty and integrity. She never talked ill of anybody. She was just such a positive person.”
Her mother died in March 2021 at the age of 95. Even at the end of her life, with her health failing, she stayed positive. Liguori says it was a pleasure to be with her as she and her siblings took turns caring for her.
Never Throw in the Towel
Liguori’s obstacles to success were different, but she inherited her mother’s tenacity. One of her breakthroughs was landing a meeting, through a friend, with the CEO of Volvo when she was seeking sponsors to start up “Sports Innerview.”A marketing director was present at the meeting, and Liguori could tell he wasn’t impressed with her. As soon as he left the room to get lunch, Liguori saw her chance and pitched her show to the CEO.
“Within five minutes, I sold him the concept. He loved it,” she says. He was into tennis, so she told him she would get interviews with John McEnroe and other tennis stars. “I didn’t know how I was going to do that, but I knew I could if I tried.” She made good on all her promises. “I’ve booked every guest for my show personally for my whole career,” she adds.
“There were so many days when I thought, ‘I should really go back to Cleveland and try to get a show on local television,’” Liguori says. That would have been easier, but she aimed higher.
At times, it’s been a lot of pressure. Live broadcasting can be unforgiving. But “‘Pressure is a privilege,’” Liguori says, quoting former No. 1 women’s tennis player Billie Jean King. Indeed, it’s in moments of great pressure that one makes the greatest accomplishments.
“You have to take a deep breath and just enjoy it, and think about how fortunate and blessed you are to be in those positions where there is a lot of pressure,” says Liguori.
