Gayle Gardner isn't sure she wants to make a career out of play-by-play. She'll wait until Tuesday night to decide.
"I certainly never sat in front of a TV set like Marv Albert did when he was a child, holding a hair brush and talking into it and calling a game," she said."I had a sense as a child that I somehow wanted to be at these games, but I couldn't quite figure out how. Obviously, I wasn't going to be a player, but the concept of calling a game was not one that I thought of."
As far as she can tell, Gardner will become the first woman ever to call televised play-by-play on a major league game Tuesday night shen she fills in for Charlie Jones on the local Colorado broadcast of a Rockies-Reds game in Cincinnati.
Gardner has been with NBC since 1988 and, before that, with ESPN. But she never called play-by-play, unless you count Jan. 1, 1992 when she and Paul Maguire had to fill in the blanks from the studio during a blackout at the Orange Bowl.
"We didn't even have any rosters and we were using a Japanese feed that we couldn't see in the studio," Gardner said. "It wasn't really play-by-play.
"It would be like if Dick Enberg was doing the game and it suddenly became the Citrus Bowl," she said. "He wouldn't have known whether he was coming or going."