Whoopi Built Her Own Sports Network

Whoopi Goldberg joins the show on the day of the 30th WNBA Draft, and the conversation quickly becomes a lesson in why she built her own women's sports network after nearly two decades of trying.

Rich opens by asking about Venus and Serena, and Whoopi flashes back to her first stretch on SportsCenter in the 1990s and early 2000s. When Serena started, the framing was, here comes the sister, can she be as good as Venus. The answer, obviously, yeah.

From there Whoopi walks the history. Althea Gibson was extraordinary and is rarely talked about today. Billie Jean King was all Whoopi knew as a kid and essentially created women's tennis as it exists now. The women who were visible back then were one-offs. Today, Whoopi says, we know where the women are.

She has been pitching an all-women's sports network for eighteen years. She raised the idea at ESPN years ago. The response was polite nodding. At every network she heard the same line, nobody wants to see women's sports. But Whoopi did. And if she wanted to, she figured others did too.

She then started traveling the world to see what was being covered elsewhere. About a year and a half ago, someone finally said, I will help you do that. The network, the All Women's Sports Network, partnered with the Jungle Network and now delivers coverage across wrestlers, tennis players, hockey players, roller derby, football, and sports most viewers have never heard of.

For women around the world, Whoopi explains, this is a way to be part of a group of women doing stuff without getting hassled. She references the old model where you essentially had to own an NBA team to be part of a WNBA team, and she was not exactly on that list.

The network delivers live coverage and original programming from FIBA, the WNBL, UEFA, and Athletes Unlimited. On the day the show airs, the WNBA Draft is hours away and the league is fresh off collective bargaining battles over pay and respect.

Rich notes that ESPN has been covering more softball, volleyball, and women's sports than ever. Whoopi pitches him directly on air. We should all be doing this together. She wants the All Women's Sports Network in bed with ESPN, and she is not supposed to be saying this, but if she does not say it, nobody will know she wants it.

The world is wide enough, she says, quoting Hamilton.

Whoopi closes by admitting she never had a jump shot. She was a runner. If you needed her to go in a straight line, she was great. Add a ball to the equation and things got complicated. But she could run her little tail off, which is exactly the energy she brought to building a network no one else would.