Speaking at the Parry D. Sorensen Distinguished Lecture at Red Butte Garden on Friday night, University of Utah alum Holly Rowe recalled how $25 changed her life.
While at the U., Rowe was hired as a stringer for a Chicago radio station to get postgame sound from the Chicago Bulls locker room when they played the Utah Jazz.
For a total sum of $25 for the night’s work, Rowe interviewed Bulls stars, including Michael Jordan.
Though she cashed the check — “I did cash the check because I was super poor,” she said — Rowe saved the pay stub, which is framed in her office.
“I was getting paid to interview Michael Jordan,” Rowe said.
While Rowe now is cashing checks much bigger than that, her love for sports has never waned. She is seen on TV almost nightly as the top sideline reporter working ESPN’s marquee college football games, covering an array of women’s college sports and as a color commentator for the Utah Jazz.
But it all started in Bountiful.
The daughter of two parents who grew up on farms — something she says shaped her work ethic — Rowe loved sports from an early age and turned that passion into a career, getting her feet wet as an intern at KSL while attending the University of Utah.
Before she made it big with ESPN, Rowe “brought the big time” to wherever she was, starting with putting Utah women’s basketball on KALL radio shortly after graduating from the U. in 1991.
“... If I pay for the time, two hours of radio time, we can put the university women’s basketball games on the air. Now part of it was selfish. I wanted to be the announcer. It was an opportunity that I was creating for myself, but I went out and sold the advertising time, I got people to buy ads to be on there and we got the Utah women’s games on the radio. First time ever,” Rowe said.
“They’ve been on the radio ever since.”
Her experience at KSL and on KALL radio led to other opportunities, including with BYU’s Blue and White Sports Network, and she was hired full time by ESPN in 1998.
Rowe worked her way up from doing the Division III football national championship to interviewing people such as Nick Saban after national titles by treating every game as if it was the biggest of her life.
Rowe became known for hard work, enthusiasm, drive, knowledge and preparedness within ESPN, rising up the ladder. From college football to men’s and women’s college basketball, softball, gymnastics, volleyball and baseball, Rowe was versatile and could do it all for the Worldwide Leader. And she did, crisscrossing the country for a bevy of sports and racking up over 3 million frequent flier miles.
But in 2015, a cancer diagnosis threatened not just her livelihood, but her life.
After noticing a spot on her chest, Rowe went to a doctor and asked for it to be removed for cosmetic reasons. After doctors at the University of Utah ran a biopsy, it turned out to be a rare form of melanoma, which occurs in approximately 1 in 1 million people.
It spread to her armpit, then to her lungs.
“It nearly killed me,” Rowe said.
Two weeks before working the sidelines for Notre Dame at Texas, Rowe got the call from her doctor that the cancer had spread to her lungs, but there she was on the sidelines in Austin with a wig on, doing what she loved.
She had a touching moment with Nneka Ogwumike of the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks, who encouraged Rowe to go without the wig while she covered the Sparks’ annual cancer awareness game.
“That was really hard because I felt like it was the first time I looked sick. It was a vulnerable time for me, but I kept going and people were nice,” Rowe said.
The sports world rallied behind Rowe amid her battle with cancer, with Saban, the former Alabama head football coach, even sending her a box of apples that said “an apple a day will keep the doctor away.”
Through it all, Rowe kept going, kept reporting. It fueled her through chemotherapy and lung treatments.
“I kept going and I really felt like my love for sports and my love for my job helped save my life,” Rowe said.
Now, Rowe is healthy, though she gets scans every six months.
“I’m healthy, although it’s scary. Cancer is scary. You never know, so I’m still doing scans every six months and you still say prayers when you go in for your scan. You just don’t know what it’s going to show,” Rowe said.
Utah’s melanoma rate is the highest in the country, and Rowe is an advocate for melanoma screening.
“Because we live in Utah, we’re much more likely to get melanoma, so this is the point where I say, please, if you have anything suspicious, get checked,” Rowe said.
The women’s sports moment
Last year, Rowe sat down and evaluated what she wanted in her career. She had been go, go, go since the ‘80s, and felt “burned out.”
Her No. 1 priority was college football, which she called her “No. 1 true love.”
But right after that was her passion for women’s college sports. Rowe has been involved in women’s basketball from the start of her career and has seen the growth over time.
She asked to be taken off of men’s college basketball to focus solely on women’s basketball this season, and it couldn’t have come at a more perfect time.
Rowe was embedded with Iowa and Caitlin Clark for Clark’s record-breaking season, which saw her set the mark for the most career points in college basketball history.
“I just felt like my passion and my time and energy would be better suited for women’s basketball this year. Well, I was right,” Rowe said.
An average of 18.7 million viewers, peaking at 24 million, saw South Carolina defeat Iowa for the NCAA women’s basketball championship, and those millions of pairs of eyes saw Rowe as she reported from the sideline and interviewed Gamecocks head coach Dawn Staley postgame.
“This is just to say the women are having a moment or a movement,” Rowe said.
Just a few weeks later, Rowe was at the WNBA draft, interviewing Clark after she was selected by the Indiana Fever with the No. 1 pick, but also interviewing Utah’s Alissa Pili, who went eighth overall to the Minnesota Lynx.
“Two years ago I started paying attention to Alissa Pili when she transferred to Utah and I started seeing these numbers she was putting up and I was just like, this kid’s not getting enough attention,” Rowe said.
“So I came up here. I would do interviews with her; I put it on my social media. I would try to elevate Alissa Pili every chance I got.”
Making history with the Utah Jazz
In 2021, Rowe became the first woman color commentator in Utah Jazz history, joining Craig Bolerjack and Thurl Bailey on the mic for broadcasts.
But that historic moment was set up in New York City, of all places.
After the cancer diagnosis, where her doctor told her she needed to think about her time and how she was spending it — “That was his very pleasant way of saying, ‘We’re not sure how much you have left,’” Rowe said — she checked off a bucket-list item and moved to New York City.
One night in 2018, she was attending “To Kill a Mockingbird” on Broadway when two people recognized her.
“They said we work for this company called Qualtrics, and we’ve been trying to get in touch with your agent to come back to Utah and host a sit-down chat with Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner. We know you’re from Utah. We thought you’d be a good person to do this,” Rowe said.
The conference was in two days, but even though Rowe was struggling through chemo, she accepted and flew to Utah for the Qualtrics Experience Management Summit.
“The reason I say be flexible in your thinking (is) what if I had said no to those guys that came up to me to play in New York City? That was a weird moment, right? Well, it just so happens it was Ryan Smith, who has now hired me to be the commentator for the Utah Jazz,” Rowe said.
“I never thought I would get to be a color commentator. I don’t know if I deserve to be, but I’m trying really hard. I love it.”
You can catch Rowe on a TV near you, doing what she loves — telling the stories of the country’s best athletes.
“What I’ve learned,” she said, “is that if you work hard with great passion and you are very intentional about what you’re doing and what you’re putting your time and energy into, and you are flexible, you really never know what can happen in your life.”