Olivia Munn's Scrappy Fox Sports Origin

Olivia Munn tells the origin story of how she ended up interning for Suzy Shuster at Fox Sports, and it starts with her driving cross-country from Oklahoma after getting rejected for the internship.

Munn had applied while in college at the University of Oklahoma and didn't get in. Someone told her to just show up in California and ask for a meeting. She got in her car, drove to Altadena, stayed with cousins, and called the internship coordinator. The pitch worked. She got the meeting. She got hired to log hockey tape.

There was a problem. She didn't know hockey. She tells Rich she couldn't find the puck, which prompts him to note that's why Fox invented the glowing puck. She clarifies, the tape didn't glow.

Part of the job was bringing coffee to on-air personalities. Suzy Shuster was one of them. Munn remembers her as very nice, and a coffee snob. She had to get the order right.

Munn then walks through how her sports-journalism ambition came together. The Sooners were in back-to-back title games with Josh Heupel at quarterback under Bob Stoops. ESPN GameDay was regularly on campus. She wanted to be a journalist but found news-station internships impossible to crack because every other female student wanted one. Sports was the opening. She landed work at Sooners Illustrated, the school paper, and a CBS affiliate internship.

Her goal was a hybrid she names without flinching: college football sideline reporter in the fall, General Hospital in the off-season. Melissa Stark was the inspiration on the sideline side. GH was the childhood obsession, she grew up in a military family in Tokyo, where AFN only carried Guiding Light and General Hospital. She even auditioned for GH and didn't get it.

Fox eventually sent her out with the NBA pre-draft summer league tour to do off-camera interviews. But when she moved to LA after graduating, the sports path stalled. A commercial agent introduction pulled her toward acting, which had always been the bigger dream. Her mother, a first-generation American immigrant, hadn't let her major in theater, so journalism was the compromise.

Once the journalism career didn't take, she went back to the original plan. Acting won.