The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame is set to bestow its prestigious Curt Gowdy Media Awards on several accomplished reporters and on-air personalities Friday night in a ceremony from Uncasville, Conn. Two ESPN staffers are being honored – Holly Rowe and Marc Spears – both of whom have made lasting impacts in sports media and revolutionized modern basketball coverage. Additionally, CBS Sports will be recognized for its innovation in covering and facilitating the growth of college basketball.
Marc Spears is winning the award for excellence in print media for his work over the more than three decades he has been in the field. The early stages of his career were rooted in Denver, Colo. as a beat reporter at The Denver Post for its coverage of Denver Nuggets basketball. Before working in Denver, he worked at smaller outlets in Tulsa, Okla., Los Angeles, Calif. and Louisville, Ky.
After 17 years with The Denver Post, he made the transition to The Boston Globe to cover the Celtics before pivoting to serve as chairman of the sports task force for the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ). Spears reemerged in media in 2016 as a senior NBA writer for The Undefeated, which has since been renamed to Andscape. The company embarks in deep storytelling focused on conveying the intersections between sports, race and culture.
Spears inked a contract extension with ESPN in 2019, through which he began writing and creating content on a variety of additional ESPN platforms. He is one of the Association’s preeminent newsbreakers and widely viewed as a trusted source of information. Aside from hard news, Spears is dedicated to longform storytelling and has produced and written various features about niche areas of sports. Some of these projects include the music career of Damian Lillard, popular tattoo artist Steve Wiebe and a roundtable discussion about the stereotype of Black fathers raising future NBA players.
Reporter and play-by-play commentator Holly Rowe is receiving the award for excellence in electronic media and is one of ESPN’s most storied commentators. Before joining ESPN on a part-time basis in 1995, Rowe worked for different outlets in the Salt Lake City area and FOX Sports. Throughout her time with the network, she has unquestionably been a trailblazer for women looking to pursue careers in the industry.
Rowe has called play-by-play for softball, women’s college basketball and gymnastics among other sports, and also reports across various marquee properties – including Saturday Night Football on ABC. The Utah Jazz also reached a deal to add her to its broadcast team in 2021-22, returning Rowe to the city where her career began.
She inked a multi-year contract extension to remain with ESPN earlier this year, and was previously diagnosed with desmoplastic melanoma, a rare form of cancer that emanates from the nerves. The battles that she had to face inspired her to advocate for cancer research and prevention, leveraging her platform to try and make a difference in the world.
CBS Sports will be receiving the transformative media award for its coverage and subsequent growth of college basketball. Aside from covering the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament since 1982, the network presents various regular season games across conferences including the Big Ten, Big East and Mountain West. This year, the network is scheduled to air approximately 300 games on its linear channels and over-the-top (OTT) streaming service Paramount. The network partners with Warner Bros. Discovery Sports to televise the championship game to close out “March Madness” on CBS, TNT, TBS and TruTV.
