Most people working in sports know the routine: You say you have a job in sports, and someone immediately peppers you with trivia questions. If you don’t know the Packers’ 1997 eighth-round draft pick or Cecil Cooper’s batting average from 1982, it somehow means you aren’t any good at what you do.
These days, Jessie Garcia can turn the tables on people who think they have claim on sports minutiae. She can throw out the name of Alvin Kraenzlein, or maybe George Poage. Don’t know about Ralph Metcalfe? And you call yourself a sports fan?
Garcia, a Madison native and longtime Milwaukee sportscaster, collects stories from these athletes and dozens more in her new book, Going for Wisconsin Gold (Wisconsin Historical Society Press). It’s a collection of 24 profiles of Olympians with state ties — some are natives, some went to college here, some were best known here as pros.
The 24 are but a fraction of the approximately 430 Olympians Garcia’s research turned up with state connections from 1900 to 2014. From there, another 173 are listed in the book as medalists. But for Garcia, lists are not the point — in the same way statistics and trivia were never the point of her sports reporting.
“I really wanted the book to be story-driven, feature-driven,” Garcia says. “I wanted to answer the question ‘Who are these people?’ and show that Olympians are human beings and have much more to say than, ‘You can do it! Go for it!’”
For Garcia, the book — her third — brings her full circle to the writing life she always wanted. This summer, she left her job as a sportscaster at WTMJ in Milwaukee to become a full-time journalism lecturer at UW-Milwaukee. She had been at the station since 1994, after working for two years at WISC in Madison.
“Twenty-four years on the air is a long time,” she says. “I still love sports and follow them, but I’m ready to branch out.”
It wasn’t just a long run for Garcia; it was a groundbreaking one for state television.
She wasn’t the first woman to report a TV sports story, but she was the first to anchor a sports broadcast. She also hosted the Packers coaches’ shows — first Mike Holmgren, then Mike McCarthy. Her first book was titled My Life with the Green and Gold.
“I still get, ‘Aren’t you that Packers girl?’ Even to this day,” Garcia says.
Garcia, who graduated from Madison East in 1988, wasn’t much of an athlete but found she loved telling their stories. After attending Boston University, she returned to Madison and landed a job at WISC. Complaints came in, including one from someone who didn’t want “a chick” delivering the sports news.
While she is best known for her work with the Packers, Garcia covered every sport — and their Olympians: gymnast Paul Hamm of Waukesha; speedskaters Dan Jansen of West Allis, Chris Witty of West Allis, and Casey FitzRandolph of Verona; and swimmer Garrett Weber-Gale of Stevens Point.
In Going for Wisconsin Gold, Garcia doesn’t concentrate solely on the modern era. She also unearthed fascinating stories of Olympians from more than a century ago.
Alvin Kraenzlein, a native of Milwaukee, won four individual gold medals in track and field in 1900 and was an innovator. He and his coach pioneered the techniques of using a crouching stance at the start and clearing the hurdles in stride instead of stopping and jumping over them.
“I just did a double-take as I learned about him, thinking, ‘He invented the hurdling technique? How did I not know this? Why don’t other people know this?’” says Garcia, who crashed into and fell over the first hurdle she tried in high school.
She also learned about La Crosse native George Poage, the first black medalist, who took bronze in two hurdling events in 1904, and Ralph Metcalfe, an African American Marquette athlete who joined with legendary Jesse Owens to make up the formidable U.S. track squad that threw a kink into Hitler’s vision of white supremacy at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Promoting her book during the Olympics will keep Garcia busy, as will her new teaching position. Instead of heading off with the green-and-gold, she will learn what it’s like to spend weekends and holidays with her husband, Paul Marble, and two teenage sons.
She’s also looking forward to having time to write more than what she could fit into a one- to three-minute sports story on the air — and time to bring what she has learned into the classroom. The end result of her work might be a little different, she says, but fundamentally not that much will change.
“I love sports, I love telling stories,” she says. “I think I was born to be a writer. I never wanted to be anything else, ever.”