So for me, that sisterhood was crucial to me at a time when I needed it - at a time when I didn't know how to wear makeup or how to talk to boys or any of those normal typical things girls learn from their mom. And to this day, I don't have a daughter. The reason I spend a lot of time in my book writing about the cheerleading experience, as a cheerleader and entertainment director, was that I didn't have a mother. Through the rest of your career, do you feel like you ever found acceptance? As a cheerleader, you felt like an insider. I know you felt like an outsider when you were in high school. Throughout the book, you said sports is where you found your belonging. So I felt definitely when I was 29 that was the time that I kind of came into my own as a Guerrero, which means "warrior." Part of the reason I took her last name was to honor her, to bond with her, to be part of this legacy of this heritage of Chilean women that I'm really proud to be a part of, going back to her mother and grandparents. She was a dancer, she was very beautiful, and her life was cut short. She was an actress and she starred in all of the church plays and she sang. I felt like I was going to fulfill my destiny and hers. I always felt like she didn't get to fulfill her destiny. When I turned 30, I was so excited, I felt like I had somehow ducked this dark cloud, and then I was able to live the rest of my life. As a child, when you see a parent die like that, you think, "Well, that's probably when I'm gonna die." How I viewed my life up until then was that I had a sell-by date, that I was gonna die by the time I was my mom's age. Was there a connection between pursuing this new direction and living to an age your mom didn't? You would have been around the same age she was at the time of her death when you made the career switch from cheerleading to sports broadcasting. The 50th anniversary of your mom's death is coming up. I connected with my father through the language of sports, which became the platform for me for the next several decades. Sports filled me with this sense of opportunity and this sense of camaraderie. So I think my first real sports moment was not just going to a game to see a specific player or a specific team, it was more of the potential of being this athlete that I wanted to be. We could see the stadium lights from our house and I was convinced that was my destiny. Instead, he said, "Well, you better practice." He taught me how to throw a perfect spiral. I remember him taking me to Chargers games and thinking that someday I was going to grow up to be the Chargers' quarterback. We've lived in San Diego and our house overlooked Jack Murphy Stadium, which became Qualcomm Stadium. My dad raised me, and he was a huge sports fan. Guerrero: When I was 8 and my mom was 29, she died of cancer. TheScore: Your childhood played a major role in the career path you chose. This has been edited for length and clarity. Guerrero spoke to theScore about dusting off those old VHS tapes of her on-air debacle and how she feels about discovering her second act. She documented the process of coming to terms with her tenure on MNF and her comeback from that in a memoir titled, " Warrior: My Path to Being Brave." Nearly 20 years later, she's ready to face the turmoil of that fateful NFL season. After her firing, she would never return to sports journalism.īut Guerrero did push forward, reinventing herself as a determined investigative reporter responsible for uncovering scams and solving the murder of a 2-year-old child. The shame of enduring a career flop on a massive stage sent Guerrero into a tailspin. But, before the cameras even started rolling, Guerrero began to see signs of a toxic work environment - one where her confidence quickly eroded. Nabbing a role on what was football's most revered weekly broadcast is usually considered a career pinnacle. It was the defining moment of a season that, for Guerrero, had been a sequence of disappointments. The flub - referring to a Washington athlete as a former teammate rather than a current one - added fuel to the fire of her detractors and by the season's end played a role in changing her employment status with ABC - from current to former. Lisa Guerrero's infamously short stint as Monday Night Football's sideline reporter in 2003 came down to the difference between two words: former and current.
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