If you are curious what it was like to be a female sports reporter in the earliest days of female sports reporters, let’s travel back to a sunny afternoon in the early 1970s, and there is Jeannie Morris holding a microphone to the mouth of baseball great Ted Williams as she interviews him.
At one point he interrupts in anger and screams to someone standing nearby, “What’s this shrimp female doing in my dugout anyway?”
Jeannie Morris, all 5 feet tall and 100 pounds, was there to stay, and of the thousands of faces that have flickered across our television sets over the past decades — giving us news and weather and sports — few have been as bold, talented, influential and smart as Morris.
She died Monday in her condominium in the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago. The cause of death was appendiceal cancer, for which she had been undergoing treatment for the last year. She was 85, having celebrated that birthday on Dec. 2, and was surrounded by Chicago friends, her four grown children and her ex-husband, Bears great Johnny Morris.
“My mom had a stack of accomplishments, but that she woke up every morning curious, grateful and spring-loaded to say, ‘Yes,’ is what inspired me the most,” said her daughter Holly, a filmmaker and author. “The levity and bravery she brought to the last weeks of her life was a master class in dignity.”
“Jeannie was an incredible trailblazer,” said her former WBBM-Ch. 2 colleague Pam Zekman. “She was a model not only for women seeking to break down barriers in sports but for those trying to convince media bosses that we could handle hard news. I marveled at her accomplishments in both print and television. She was smart, creative and had an engaging personality both on and off the air.”
A high school cheerleader in her native Redondo Beach, Calif., Jeannie Myers married Johnny Morris in 1960. They had known each other casually in college, at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the Bears drafted Johnny to play flanker in 1958. For the first years of their marriage, Jeannie stayed in California while her husband spent the season in Chicago. She joined him here in the fall of 1963.
She would have an impact on TV viewers and attract a large circle of friends. Documentary producer Sharon Barrett said: “She was such a force and never one to boast about an award or accomplishment. She chose work that was meaningful to her. The long conversations we would have always left me feeling that my brain just had a good zap of energy. She was passionate about so, so much.”
Jeannie and Johnny and their two young children, Dan and Debbie, lived in a two-room apartment in the New Lawrence Hotel in Uptown, where many other Bears couples resided. A 1963 football championship bonus of $6,000 enabled the family to move to the suburbs. There were two more children, Tim and Holly, and even before Johnny retired from the Bears, he began his TV sportscasting career. He might have been a newspaperman too, but in 1968, when an editor at the bygone Chicago American asked if he would write a column for the paper, he said, “No, I can’t. But my wife could.”
And so she did. It was called “Football Is a Woman’s Game” and appeared under the byline “Mrs. Johnny Morris” in the Sunday section called Today’s Women. Eventually, the column moved to the sports pages and later to the Chicago Daily News, where she could write about sports other than football. She then began contributing to the sportscasts her husband delivered on WMAQ-Ch. 5 after leaving football; wrote a best-selling sports biography, “Brian Piccolo: A Short Season,” and chronicled her family’s yearlong camping trip through Europe and Russia in “Adventures in the Blue Beast.”
The latter book was a serious risk. The family was living at the time in Palatine and life was hectic. After a rare family vacation in the Cayman Islands, Jeannie made a bold suggestion: “Why don’t we just do this for a year? Just travel around?”
Johnny was game, even though a local TV executive warned, “Do this and you two will never work in TV again.” The family packed up in 1973 and took off for a yearlong camping trip through Europe and Russia.
In 1975, the couple was lured to WBBM-Ch. 2, where she won Emmys by the shelfful as a producer, writer and on-camera presence, once telling a reporter self-effacingly, “There are so many that I’ve never stopped to count them.” Together, she and Johnny were the city’s No. 1 media couple.
But less than four months after a June 1983 newspaper headline proclaimed “Johnny and Jeannie Morris have a marriage that works,” the couple separated. Divorce came late in 1985. Given the couple’s high visibility, their marital difficulties transpired in relative peace and quiet. “I have been careful not to hurt him. Or the children,” she said.
She continued to work at WBBM alongside her ex-husband on football-related programming, including co-hosting with Johnny “The Mike Ditka Show,” the popular half-hour program that preceded Bears games. But in 1988 she had grown increasingly dissatisfied with her role, which basically involved standing in the audience and holding a microphone to the lips of idolatrous fans with generally softball questions.
“I no longer wanted to do the show,” she said. “The problem was not with the show but, again, with my role. I felt that it was insulting to women.” So she quit. “Of course, it’s scary, and I don’t know how I’ll feel,” she said. “It will be weird not to be firmly tied to the station. It’s been like a family … and now the family’s gone.
“But I made the choices. If you would have been able to tell me, when I first started out in this business, that I’d be sitting here, a 52-year-old woman wondering what I’m going to do next, I wouldn’t have done a thing differently. My four children are grown and healthy (youngest son Tim worked as a sports producer for Ch. 2), and that was the most important thing in my life.”
She then started to spread her creative wings. She produced “The Science of Sports” for Bill Kurtis Productions; “Science Held Hostage: RU486 and the Politics of Abortion,” for the Turner Broadcasting System; “The Search for Shangri-La” for the New Explorers series. She spent much of her time in Seattle, where she collaborated with daughter Holly on a successful television series titled “Adventure Divas,” which they described as “one part TV travel show and one part website that aims to unite adventure travel and everyday heroines … to explore intriguing cultures and extraordinary women.”
Also on her plate was a biography of Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, which she had been working on since Braun had defeated the “unbeatable” incumbent Alan Dixon in the Democratic senatorial primary. She asked to join the campaign trail as a reporter.
“Despite the fact that most of my career was spent covering sports, my most active interest was and always has been in politics, ever since my mother took me along with her when I was a child to work on the (unsuccessful 1950) Senate campaign of Helen Gahagan Douglas,” she said. “I think Carol had a powerful sense of destiny about the race. She was a sports fan and knew me from my work in that field, and also I think shared a feeling of us both being pioneers in what are considered men’s worlds. She said, ‘OK, let’s do it.’ “
But hampered by Moseley Braun’s later lack of cooperation and some highly publicized troubles, the book did not hit shelves until 2015. It was an incisive and honest 350-page book titled “Behind the Smile: A Story of Carol Moseley Braun’s Historic Senate Campaign.”
“The book had never left my consciousness and never really left my desk,” Morris told me then. “Of course, I observed Carol’s life over the years and was disappointed that when I’d Google her name, all I’d get was a lot of very negative stuff, without any depth. I thought that I needed to do this book, to help put things in perspective for historical reasons.”
The book is a thrilling read, featuring journal entries, ringside seat reportage and lengthy interviews with all the key players. It is a masterful, very personal and compelling narrative which addresses issues of racism and sexism with a wild cast of characters and events.
At the time, Morris told me, and she would be the one to know: “Politics is a harder game than football. And the injuries are just as permanent.”
She was, in person, charming and vivacious. And smart. She was also a thoughtful observer of the world around her, once telling me in 2006, “I ran into a guy recently who said his happiest memory was shivering through the Bears championship game in 1963 with his father. He was 10 years old. He said it was the most wonderful day he ever spent with his father. You could almost feel the love when he talked about it. Maybe football helps fathers teach their sons how to be tough guys. The great gift of all sports is that they offer lines of communication, not just between fathers and sons, but through entire communities.”
In addition to Holly, Morris is survived by sons Tim and Dan, daughter Debbie from a first marriage and seven grandchildren.
