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Fall 2004

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Great Sport

What Curse?

–Ben Barnhart




	Sharon Pannozzo '82 waits for her championship ring as media relations director for the Chicago Cubs

THE CHICAGO CUBS AND THE Boston Red Sox have much in common. Both teams play in venerable, quirky ballparks in the heart of their home cities. Wrigley Field has those renowned ivy-covered walls; Fenway has the Green Monster. Both teams have showered their fans with decades of heartbreak and disappointment—neither has won a World Series since the early years of the last century.

As both teams appeared headed for league championships last year and baseball fans across the country began dreaming of a Cubs—Red Sox series, Sharon Pannozzo ’82 began to get nervous. Not because of the long hours and late nights she would face as the Cubs’ media relations director, or the responsibility of representing a World Series team, but because of the avalanche of ticket requests the Lee, Mass., native anticipated from family and friends.

“That would’ve been a nightmare,” she says half-jokingly from a modest, air-conditioned conference room at Wrigley Field. In the end, cursed fate disappointed both teams for another year, and Pannozzo was off the hook.

If misery loves company, then Boston’s and Chicago’s storied baseball teams are made for each other. The Red Sox have not won a World Series since 1918; the Cubs last won in 1908. Some fans say the teams are cursed, but Pannozzo—who has worked for both clubs—doesn’t believe in curses. Like any die-hard fan, she is optimistic about her team’s future.

“We had a good year,” she says of the ultimately disappointing 2003 season that ended when the team lost three straight games and the league championship to the Florida Marlins. “We’re in a tough division with St. Louis and Houston, the Reds, and even the Brewers who are playing well this year. But I think we’re in a good position, especially when we get some guys back from injuries,” she adds, referring to pitching ace Kerry Wood and home-run hitter Sammy Sosa both of whom missed much of the early season. “And this year,” she says, “we’re likely to break a record with three million visitors.”

Pannozzo is a Major League Baseball anomaly. She is one of only two female media relations directors ever, and has by far the longest tenure in that position. She joined the Cubs as a public relations assistant in November 1982 after the Tribune Company purchased the club from the Wrigley family and cleaned the administrative house on what Pannozzo calls “Black Monday.” Fresh out of UMass Amherst with a sport management degree, she was an intern for the Red Sox under Dick Bresciani ’60, now the team’s vice president for public affairs, when she heard about the opening on the Cubs staff through a friend.

“I hopped on a bus to Chicago as soon as I could,” she says, “and I wasn’t leaving without that job.”

Pannozzo was promoted to media relations director in 1990 and says that after nearly 22 years in the Cubs system, she has fully become a midwesterner and a true Cubbie.

“The Cubs is a great organization and this really is a great place to come to work every day,” she says, surrounded by framed black-and-white photographs of past Cubs stars like Ernie Banks, Ron Santo and Dave Sutter.

Of course, her job isn’t all fun and baseball. Keeping the media happy is never easy, though Pannozzo insists that the Chicago press is less ornery than Boston’s. Pannozzo or one of her few staff members always travels with the club. On game day she usually arrives at the office around 9 a.m. and is on duty until an hour after the game—sometimes as late as 11 p.m.

On a balmy, late-spring night in Chicago, with the Cubs facing archrival St. Louis Cardinals before a packed house, Pannozzo takes her seat in the front row of the press box and keeps the media informed by barking stats, official scoring and updates into an intercom system that appears to be as old as Wrigley Field itself.

When a power outage in Wrigleyville shuts down television coverage of the game and leaves the huge monitors in each corner of the press box blank, Pannozzo calmly informs the scrambling media of the glitch and occasionally offers updates until power is restored.

“That’s ruled E-7,” Pannozzo later monotones into the speaker when left fielder Moises Alou makes a fielding error in the eighth inning. “E-7.” But by now the Cubs hold a 7-3 lead, and many in the press corps have already filed stories and departed Wrigley Field. Pannozzo’s workday will last another hour while she submits the game’s final stats before heading home. Tomorrow she’ll do it all again when the two teams meet for game three in the four-game series.

If this daily grind wears on Pannozzo, it doesn’t show. She is perched in the press box high above home plate with a beautiful view toward Lake Michigan, leafing through the day’s sports pages while keeping an eye on the game unfolding below.

“I tell people I’m waiting for my championship ring,” Pannozzo says, smiling broadly, of her stay in Chicago. It may be a long wait but, like a true Cubs fan, she believes.

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