By Hannah Webb | News Editor
Holly Rowe has spent more than 30 years proving she belongs in sports.
She has stood on the sidelines of NCAA championships, the College World Series, the Women’s Final Four, Saturday Night Football, the WNBA and so many more. She has won a Sports Emmy for Outstanding Personality/Reporter in 2022, has covered some of the biggest moments in sports and has become one of the most respected sideline reporters in the industry.
She has also covered those games while battling Stage IV metastatic melanoma, traveling across the country and around the world with cancer because she loved her job enough to keep showing up.
So when Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian said “Texas fight, hook ‘em,” and ran away from a postgame interview with Rowe after No. 1 Texas’ 24-23 comeback win over No. 6 Ohio State, her exasperated reaction was hardly the story of the night. Sarkisian had already waited through halftime technical difficulties and ultimately declined the interview. ESPN’s Laura Rutledge acknowledged that ESPN owed Sarkisian an apology for the delay.
That context matters, but so does what happened next.
An AI-edited video circulated showing Sarkisian slapping Rowe. It was clearly fake, but it was also apparently funny enough to senior quarterback Arch Manning that he brought it up during his Monday press conference, laughing as he described the video to a room full of people who laughed alongside him.
Manning apologized Tuesday on social media.
“In my press conference yesterday, I made an insensitive comment about an AI video,” Manning wrote in an Instagram story. “There is nothing funny about it.”
Manning also said he knew his words and actions were hurtful, apologized specifically to Rowe and said he needed to be “more thoughtful going forward.” Rowe accepted his apology, writing, “Apology accepted. We move forward with respect and kindness for one another.”
That should be the end of Arch Manning’s mistake, but it should not be the end of the conversation.
Just weeks ago, Callaway released an advertisement for a new co-branded driver with Good Good. In the ad, a woman touches a golf club before Garrett Clark, a co-founder of Good Good, pushes her to the ground and says, “Do not touch my new drive.”
Maybe these moments are supposed to be jokes or maybe they are supposed to be harmless because everyone knows they are fake or scripted. But women in sports media do not get to experience that same harmlessness.
A 2021 report from the University of Central Florida found that women made up only about 14.4% of professional sports reporters across 100 nationwide outlets.
Women have spent decades fighting to be taken seriously in press conferences, locker rooms, broadcasts and newsrooms. We have made incredible progress. Women are some of the best professionals in the industry, and Rowe is one of them.
That is why this bothered me, and it should bother you too.
I am incredibly thankful for the opportunity I have had to cover sports. I love being on the other side of the microphone. I love asking questions and telling stories about the people who make sports matter. But I hate that women still have to navigate moments like this.
Holly Rowe is a journalist who has spent three decades earning the respect of the people sitting on the other side of her microphone, and she deserves better than becoming the punchline of a joke about being hit.
Manning made a mistake, apologized in a timely manner and Rowe accepted it.
But the lesson should be bigger than that, and it is not some new and profound concept. There is nothing funny about hitting a woman. It is not funny in an AI video, in an advertisement or a joke. And it’s certainly not funny when the woman on the other side has spent her life proving she deserves to be there.
