CoSIDA E-Digest March 2013 • 1

Award-winning ESPN executive and
former SID Rosa Gatti Retiring
Original feature ran in Street & Smith’s
SportsBusiness Daily I SportsBusiness Journal
photos by Patrick E. McCarty
SEE ONLINE: Rosa Gatti: Trailblazer by John Ourand,
Staff Writer via ww.sportsbusinessdaily.com
FEATURE EXCERPT BELOW:
Rosa Gatti’s eyes filled with tears on a Tuesday
afternoon in January as she referenced the Newtown,
Conn., tragedy from just a month earlier.
Sitting in a conference room in ESPN’s Manhattan
offices, Gatti was talking about ESPN’s disaster relief
efforts and how she oversees when and where ESPN
offers help.
“Sorry, I’m getting teary eyed,” she said. “It’s interesting
that this is happening to me. But I think it’s because I’m
talking about it.”
More than four decades ago, when Gatti was starting
out in the business as one of the sports industry’s
pioneering female executives, those tears would have
made her self-conscious or would have been seen as a
sign of weakness.
But on the eve of her retirement from ESPN, when
Gatti tears up, it’s no big deal. She recognizes it as an
emotion, no different than anger. The longtime ESPN
executive officially is leaving ESPN this week after 33
years of helping the company move from the smallest of
channels to the biggest brand in sports. Her tears — and,
more importantly, her reaction to them — clearly show how
far Gatti has come since she started as one of the only
women working in the sports business.
Gatti, 62, recalled a time during ESPN’s early days
when executives — both male and female — would have
viewed the emotion differently. She recalled a meeting
with one ESPN executive when she felt so passionately
about a topic that her eyes began to well up. She doesn’t
remember the topic, but she’ll never forget the executive’s
response: “You don’t need to get emotional over it,” he
said.
“My emotions come out in different ways,” Gatti said.
“I didn’t cry. When I was upset about something my eyes
would get teary. I was emotional about it, just like a man
yelling or pounding his fist on the desk. I tried to enlighten
that it was stereotyping that only women got emotional. I’ve
seen many men get emotional.”
It sounds trite to say in 2013, but throughout her career
Gatti felt that she had to demonstrate that women could
work as hard and as diligently as men.
CoSIDA E-Digest March 2013 • 11
GATTI’S CoSIDA AWARDS
1987 • Jake Wade Award
2003 • Keith Jackson Eternal Flame Award
2009 • Trailblazer Award
Gatti was part of the first fully coeducational class at
Villanova. She was the first woman sports information
director at a major university. She was one of the first
women executives hired in Bristol. And her efforts in Bristol
have helped ESPN become one of the most diverse
companies in the sports industry.
“She embodies all the great qualities of the ESPN
culture,” said Steve Bornstein, an NFL executive who
served as ESPN’s president from 1990 to 1998. “She’s got
brains, ambition, integrity, tenacity. The fact that she was
the first woman in these different places — she was the
first woman SID, the only PR person for ESPN — it’s an
extraordinary reflection on her ability.”
It’s also a reflection of the number of barriers Gatti has
had to break down throughout her career.
The meme of Gatti as a trailblazer started before she
embarked on a career in sports. It started in 1968, the year
she graduated from high school in the Philadelphia area.
That also was the year Villanova started accepting
women as full-time students. Gatti’s father is a Villanova
alum, and she decided to follow his lead and attend the
Catholic school in suburban Philadelphia.