Lisa Guerrero, who is often called “the luckiest woman in sports,” gave insight into how the lead-up to her 2003 debut as 'Monday Night Football' reporter went off the rails following a lingerie photoshoot. Guerrero spoke candidly about the struggle she endured during her trying season on the broadcast in a new excerpt from her memoir 'Warrior: My Path to Being Brave'.
“I’d done a photoshoot for ‘FHM,’ a men’s lifestyle magazine which was scheduled to run at the beginning of the football season,” the 58-year-old shared in an excerpt published on Wednesday, January 25, by Sports Illustrated. “This had been a strategic decision to promote my brand and raise my profile while I was at ‘Best Damn’ (‘The Best Damn Sports Show Period’). But when the media got wind of the photos of me clad in black-and-white lingerie, it reinforced their notion that I’d been hired on ‘Monday Night Football’ for all the wrong reasons.”
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Guerrero alleged that when the Disney executives got to know about the shoot, “they were irate,” and claimed that she “wasn’t the image they wanted for their family-friendly broadcast.” Guerrero also added the “Monday Night Football” executives “really didn’t know what they wanted [her] to be.” She further wrote, “They feigned shock over the photoshoot … yet after hearing about it, the publicity department tried to negotiate for me to be on the ‘FHM’ cover." Guerrero goes on to claim that promotional photos for “Monday Night Football” had been modified to feature a glimpse of her past.
“I posed in a powder-blue blazer next to Al [Michaels] and John [Madden]. Yet the photos that made the cut, including on a Times Square billboard, weren’t from that official ABC photoshoot. Instead, without my permission, they superimposed a photo — in which I wore a gold-sequined tube top and a come-hither look — that was taken from a modeling gig I had done years earlier,” she stated.
Guerrero further shared with the outlet about the time when she was let go for one season from the “Monday Night Football” team. During that season, she suffered a miscarriage while also being exposed to consistent attacks over the internet. “People who knew what was going on with [my boss] Freddie [Gaudelli] and who read how I was being treated in the media already looked at me with such pity,” Guerrero said in an excerpt published by People on January 18.
In response to the alleged assessment of how Gaudelli treated Guerrero, he told the New York Post: “I always tried to be Lisa’s biggest advocate, starting from the moment that I hired her. Her memory of that season and mine are quite different. This is the first time I’m learning of her pregnancy, and I’m sorry that she struggled through that difficult time without the full support of the team surrounding her. I unequivocally disagree with Lisa’s account of the nature of my interactions with her. That’s not how I recall our time together during her tenure at MNF, and it makes me very sad.”