Welcome to this League uncut in the rule.
Of twenty four hour NBA News.
This is you, Chris Haynes. It's time, work's time, it's some time. This League uncut is underway in on fire. This should be a good one.
Welcome in everyone to the latest edition of this League Uncut, A very special edition of this League Uncut. I have to say from the jump, Chris Haynes is not here for this recording. We are doing this on a Thursday afternoon. Later tonight, Chris will be on the sidelines in Sacramento. But don't worry because I am joined by Absolute NBA Broadcasting Royalty. In our midst we were colleagues together at ESPN for several years. We covered some Olympic basketball together
in Rio in twenty sixteen. But basketball fans, real hoopeeds. You know her as one of the faces of NBC's wonderful coverage of the NBA in the nineties, throughout the last dance glory days of the Chicago Bulls, and her basketball journey actually stretches much farther back than that, all the way back to the Red, White.
And Blue ABA. She's going to cover it all.
From the time that there were two professional basketball leagues in this country to the modern day. It is all found in her new long form podcast series, NBA DNA, produced by iHeart all Right, I have babbled on long enough. Let's just welcome her in, Hannah Storm. So great to be with you again after a long long time.
I know, Mark, it's so great because I follow you from Afar, but we haven't seen each other in person for a while. But it's awesome to be chatting with you again. We did have a lot of fun back in the day at ESPN covering some of the same events and you know, run it in all those same basketball circles.
Thanks for having me, except now I think this interaction might be the first where I am the one who has to ask the questions.
So I know, I hope I am to the task.
But look, I have to say first, congratulations on this podcast series, because you are doing something I hope to do someday. I would love to do a long form series that traces history. I love basketball history, and you're taking it even farther back than my experience because you know, I don't have any ABA stories to tell, so just share with us.
Like what was the genesis behind even doing.
This, well, for years, I have wanted to tell the story of the ABA. My dad was the fifth commissioner of the ABA, and he always used to tell us all these stories growing up. He'd well, we were at basketball games for as long as I can remember, when it wasn't a school night. And that's why I actually at a time when women were not sportscasters, it really was not a career option. I was determined to do
sports because I had grown up around it. I just associated sports with it was really fun, right, and I was super, super comfortable with it, and it's something that my dad and I always shared. And I was like a lot of the people that were involved in the ABA were getting older, and as I went on and covered the NBA and of course understood at a very visceral level everything in the NBA that's derivative of the old ABA, I just really wanted to tell that story.
And I've done a lot of documentaries, I've directed and so forth over the course of the last fifteen years. And so when I brought this story to the NBA, they said, can you just write us an essay about your life in basketball, not just the ABA, but everything that happened after that, and I said sure, so I like banged out this essay and they said this is really interesting and unusual and this could make a great podcast, and so I partnered with them. And it's it's twelve parts,
probably could be a lot more than that. So it's kind of like different, right because it's through my lens and the things that I did. So there are teams, like my first big full time job was Sean Hornet's right their first year in existence, So we talked to Rex Chapman and Del Curry like things that you don't necessarily expect, you know, I just did a dream Team episode, right. I came to NBC in ninety two to cover the Olympics. That was my first big assignment then, so really fun.
But going all the way back to my childhood and the ABA.
Yeah, and look, I don't want to ask you to give away a bunch of secrets from the podcast, because.
I correct, I want people.
To listen to the podcast.
But it's commissioners commissioner's daughter. I don't know that I've ever met a commissioner's dog. So and again, like I said, my my basketball fandom started right right like the season before the merger, so I I wish I had seen.
The ABA, but I genuinely only know what I've read.
And that's one thing in basketball, we've done such a poor job preserving history. And it's it really, you know, the seventies, like there's just so you know, I always complain that, you know, George Gervin and David Thompson had the incredible scoring duel at the end of the seventy seven seventy eight season, and there isn't one stitch of footage of that, so ABA, it's even harder to touch that history.
So just tell us what's.
Like to be, you know, in your formative years around the ABA all the time.
First of all, you are you are so right, which is why it's perfect for a podcast because we do have radio calls and such, including a very young Bob Costas who was the left college to call games for Saint Louis. But it's the stuff kind of of legend and lore because they didn't have a television contract, so
it's the stuff that people didn't see. It really is stories that were passed down and what it was was incredibly free wheeling basketball and the players could do a lot of things that were not allowed in the NBA, like dunking the basketball, which was also not allowed in college, or things that were not a part of the NBA. Believe it or not, three pointers were not a part
of the game. It was much more like the kind of basketball that you would see at Rutger Park or that you would see, you know, quote unquote street basketball. Very freewheeling, very entertaining, and the ABA didn't have money from a television contract, so they had to make the game itself entertaining. And they also brought in a lot of players who weren't eligible for the NBA for some reason.
My dad was one of the architects of the quote unquote hardship rule, which allowed players they did not have to.
Finish college to be able to go into the ABA. You know, I e.
Doctor J So really fun, very loose, very wild, very pushing the envelope from the halftime shows and cheerleaders and all of that was derivative of the ABA to the Red, white and Blue basketball. Just really free wheeling and you know, kind of renegade.
Honestly. I mean, they wanted to merge with the.
NBA at some point, and they wanted to prove that their players were as good as the NBA players, and they went after like all the NBA refs at the time, and they they battled them toe to toe for some players.
But I mean, it was just a bunch.
Of guys who were like, Hey, let's go for it and maybe maybe someday.
We'll get to merge with.
The with the NBA, and let's have a good time and entertain people in the process.
You know.
At ESPN, I got to work with Chris Ramsey, who son of the legendary doctor Jack Ramsey, and I was a Buffalo Braves so doctor Jack having coach in Buffalo, I used to always hit Chris up for stories. And Chris once told me that as a kid, when Doctor Jack was in Philadelphia, he had actually heard some trade discussion at the house, revealed it to his school friend and it actually got out from there. And this is
in the six lower Twitter or anything like that. So I have to ask you, was there any were there any ABA secrets you heard at home that you maybe shared that you weren't supposed to share. How good were you at secret keeping when you when you heard some of the league gossip.
I was a little kid for a lot of it.
But I'll tell you one thing that stuck with me, and that is what it is like when not only when you win, but how painful it is when you lose or when your.
Dad is run out of town. You know that happened.
If people are holding up signs and I tell you what, Mark, I have such an empathy slash appreciation slash understanding what it takes to run about football franchise or any franchise.
And we are so critical.
Of people and and sometimes even in the media, we like, you know, we this guy should be fired and blah blah blah blah blah.
I don't know.
I think it gave me a really well rounded view of the business. But one of the things that my dad always used to talk about was Operation Kingfish, which is always a secret operation that they had to try to lure Louel Cinder. Obviously later kareemail dul Jabbar try to lure him too, the AVA and so there is like this like secret document that my dad kept in his desk and it had everything that they were going to do and as legend, they did a psychological profile
of him. You know, they were going to go meet with Leuel Cinder. What is it going to take to get him to come to our league? You know what is what resonates with him and George Miken had a million dollars in a suitcase, but he left the meeting so convinced that Leuwell's was coming to the ABA that he never gave him the money. And then somebody from the NBA gave him a million dollars and he went there,
you know, stuff like that. But like my dad, so we had this document, this Operation Kingfish document which I've actually seen, which he kept in his desk. But you mentioned leaks, so somebody had gotten somebody was looking at the document. He knew somebody, somebody had kind of seen it or seen what was in it, right, so he changed the document.
He falsified the document to.
Say that secretly the ABA had already signed lou Al Sinder and so it got out through whatever that leak was that they had actually signed it, when of course they didn't. But like crazy story, like no, no, no, I was not the leak.
It was not me.
But like I do remember sitting at the kitchen table and like drawing up the pacers logo, Like how crazy is that? And it's still the same logo, and I remember, you know, all these guys would come over like Thanksgiving or.
Yeah, they had nowhere to go.
They were hanging out at the house, Christmas party, stuff like that. It was really fun. But it kind of normalized athletes for me. So I was never at any point in my career. I was never like starstruck really, you know, being around athletes. They just felt like you know, people that were at the house.
Well, that was the foundation for an absolutely incredible career. You have literally covered everything, and I saw it just came out today you're doing the Boston Marathon. Like I don't know what major event there is that you have not done, and like.
I have not done that one.
Speaking for myself, like, you know, the era of specialization really served me well because I'm like, you know, basketball, soccer, tennis, a little bit of hockey and that's it. Like you, but you've done like twenty sports. I remember running into you at the US Open.
You're doing tennis.
Yeah, But as you've said in many interviews, I know the broadcasting world was not exactly teeming with opportunities for women as you're making your way through the rank. So at what point did it become real to you, when did you see that this was actually possible.
I mean I always saw that it was possible.
I just couldn't get other people to see it the same way. And my dad always told me, he said, because I back in the day, I sent out hundreds of tapes and resumes and all of that, and you know, you just could get rejection letters in the mail.
I mean that was what you did.
It.
You're answering one ads, you're sending stuff out, and I was just getting, like, I mean, dozens and dozens and dozens of rejection letters and people saying, you know, you should just be a feature reporter or something like that. And my audience won't accept a woman, and my sports director doesn't want to work with a woman. And you know, nobody was very politically correct back then, so they just they just said it like it was. But my dad was like, you only need one yes, like you literally
only need one single person. So if you look at the odds that way, somebody, there's gonna be one person along the way. And I got my first full time job in Charlotte, and I kind of got hired as a gimmick because it was a new station and they were trying all these crazy things, and they were like, wow, what if we had a woman sportscaster. And I was like, I'm there, awesome, I'm want me to learn NASCAR.
Let's go.
And it was the first year of the Charlotte Hornets and that was a pretty cool year because the NBA came to town and I had covered in radio. You know, I'd covered the Rockets and stuff like that in Houston. I used to host the Rockets. I think when I got a job part time in Houston hosting the Rockets pregames and halftimes, and the same station carried the Astros and you know that being in the mid eighties, and those teams were really good. You know, they didn't win titles,
but they got close. I think then it became for me, like I would say, Houston days really solidified. And then when I got my first full time job in Charlotte, and I was only there like a year and a half, and then I got hired by CNN, and then that was was really you know, the big leap was doing late nights at CNN. And then at the time CNN was like a viable like it was it was ESPN versus CNN.
Like I became I mean that I first became aware of you. I was in college, and I mean yeah, every night, I mean every night late night like ESPN, you know ESPN and CNN, Like we lived for those shows.
I mean those shows.
Now now an amazing play happens in the NBA and it circulates literally within seconds to millions of social media. But for our generation, like ESPN and CNN at night are gonna have highlights from calves hornets. It was just it was unbetable, you know, it was it was It was such a game changer.
Man, And we did highlights from every single game every single night. And then, I mean obviously then NBC got so many properties. NBC got the Olympics, and they got they got the NBA, they had the NFL, and NBC need all of a sudden found itself like there was like a triple cast for the Olympics. Like we need talent, like we need it like it was nineteen ninety two, Like we have all this stuff going on. And Dick Eversall,
who ran NBC Sports was he didn't sleep. He never slept, so he watched late night television all the time.
Who was on late night?
I was on late night and so it was my husband Dan Hicks at the time obviously not my husband.
So Dick eversall saw me.
Like all the time and also saw Dan and he's a guy who always thought out of the box. And we separately got hired by NBC to do different things, and hilariously, secretly we were like dating. No one knew about it, and we both ended up going to NBC, which was pretty cool. But it really was the NBA on NBC where you know, everything came full circle. You
mentioned how different it was back then. We had five games on a weekend when things got really really busy, right the playoffs, we would do a doubleheader one day and a triple header the next day, and that was it.
That was the only place you'd go watch the NBA. And that was the Jordan years.
So this is literally the glory days of basketball.
And I was hosting.
I was either hosting games or Bob was hosting games, and if I wasn't, I was on the sidelines like for all the great moments, like all the great games, and it was just, yeah, talk about shit getting real.
Yeah, that's when it got really really real.
And I would see all these people who knew my dad. I mean, it was just like unbelievable. It was just like I just felt so at home.
Because you've been now with the ESPN for more than fifteen years, so I'm guessing probably the longest stop of your career. But it is those NBC years have to be incredibly meaningful because it was, Yeah, it was such it was such a seminal time. Yeah, for the fans, for fans of the game, and I think people look back on NBC's coverage with huge funness.
Now there's just a lot of nostalgia about it.
Yeah, I mean, you know, you look back at obviously the Last Dance was incredibly successful because of Michael and the Bulls, but we were the network that documented all
of that. And then obviously for me kind of really being usedon kind of being my adopt at hometown and then the Rockets winning back to back titles was incredible, and I just think that obviously, when Magic and Bird came into the NBA, that took the NBA to one level, and then you know, Michael and I think you know the Dream Team Barcelona that was just that was just such a I mean there had never been anything like that.
There never will be again.
But when you look at the audience that watches the Olympics, right, because those are a lot of your non traditional sports fans, and you look at what the Olympics and the kind of ratings that those got back in the day, and so all those guys who would later go on to battle it out in all those years following, you know, because you had Stockton.
And Malone, and you had you Ing, and you had.
David Robinson, and you know, you had all those guys like on that.
Dream team too.
So I think that also just kind of like pushed it along.
Selfishly.
I have to ask you this because you worked with some real heavyweights at NBC, just legendary former players and coaches. But I mean, you know what I do for a living, so naturally my focus was the reporting of mister Vessi, who is a one kind character in this league and someone who has been a tremendous mentor to me. But just I gotta ask, give me a tail or two of Peter Vessi muckraking and causing some trouble with him.
I mean, his reporting was.
Okay, real Mark Peter Vessi is in the first three episodes of this series. You know, one of my first calls was Peter Vessi. Peter Vessi was so he was in love with my mother. He liked my dad, He covered my dad. But my mom was extremely She was, you know, so glamorous. She always you know, dressed to the nines for the game, She had her wigs, she was just you know, she was a beauty. And so Peter Vessi obviously never let me forget that my mother was really the reason why he talked to my father
all the time. But you know, I mean, Peter's so good in this series, Like he talks about coaching doctor j at Rucker Park, like the Rucker Park days, which are really cool, which everyone should know about. I mean, talk about legendary stuff that wasn't you know, isn't on video anywhere, right, And you know he was part of the you know, so Peter and and you know Bob Costas, I mean those guys who covered the ABA. I mean they would go out with the players afterwards. I mean,
this wasn't and they would. They're they're flying commercial, they're flying early flight, they're flying the cheapest flights possible, you know, and Peter talks about like sleeping in. You know, whatever clothes you were gonna wear on that plane the next day, that's what you went out with the night before because you were gonna have time. You know, you were never gonna go to bed, you were never gonna be able to change your clothes.
And he was a good time and we had a great time on NBC.
He called me Hannah. He never called me Hannah, hannaer And people just give me grief about it all the time. And then Peter always had these sly, sarcastic one liners that worked great in print, and then he would say them on the air and then we would all like laugh, but we knew the one liner was coming at the end of everything.
But I am telling you that guy scooped everybody. He scooped everybody on everything. He pissed so many people off. People were always mad him. I loved it. I love every time.
And he would give you this like sly little look in his eyes, like you're not gonna believe what I have, and then he would just boom drop this bomb on.
The air like whatever it was, and uh yeah.
And again it was the days of the Twitter.
There's not even no Internet, like you could break news on TV, like the Brian Hill, the magic, the magic gonna fire, Brian Hill.
Just like incredible all the time, all the time.
It couldn't happen. Now it just came.
He knew, he knew everybody and everything, and I don't, I don't know how. And he and we had this tiny teeny we need little green room at NBC.
And I mean we.
Were, like I said, we were on for tripleheaders, doubleheaders, pregames post.
I mean we were there for hours in there.
I have spent a giant, huge portion of my life with him. He was in there, you know, Spider Sally, Tom tomar Ziah Thomas, Quinn Buckner. I mean we had all sorts of guys sort of in and out of there as analysts, you know, doctor J. I mean all sorts of people. And the one constant was Peter VESSI. He was always there, always scooping, causing trouble man, big trouble.
So what is the secret though, to doing like fifteen other sports on top of basketball?
Oh, I don't. I guess work in somewhere that has all those sports. I don't know. I'm a big homework person.
People always kind of tease me or if they don't know me that well, Like I'm like, I drilled down on everything.
So for me, I just figure, you know what I think as.
A woman, I came in and I was like, I can learn this stuff. And NASCAR really taught me that, you know what I mean, Like Witch to Charlotte through, You're you're gonna do NASCAR specials, You're going to cover NASCAR full time. I barely knew, like I didn't know anything about it, but I was like, if you study hard enough and you ask questions, you can learn it, you know what I mean, if you're willing to put in the work.
And so I guess I've all that way about basically.
Every sport, every event I've ever done, and that's just kind of how I approach it. And then you know, if I study really hard enough and I ask enough questions and all of that, and once I get there, I feel comfortable and then I can relax and cover it. But you know what sports is. You and I are smart, but you know what, it's not brain surgery. It's really not, and it's not Sports isn't really like some secret language that only certain people can speak.
But what it is, though, is it is something that everyone cares about so deferent yes, so much more than almost anything else in life.
And that's what gets people angry.
It's sports and music. It's I think music, right.
It's like most team owners, you know, I think when they come into the sports world from the business world. You they might have made bazillions of dollars in business, but they never work. They're never in the spotlight like they are owning sports teams and that, you know.
I mean, some handle it better than others, and some I've never out of my group phone they didn't like and maybe they should back off.
A little bit.
But yeah, being a team owner, sometimes I just sit there and I hear the salaries, and you know, I was just like kind of listening about, you know, sort of what was happening with the Timberwolves, and I was just like, man to like write those checks, Like wow, I don't know, you have to be like a certain certain kind of person to just write those checks and take so much grief and also lose a lot, because
you lose a lot more than you win. You know, you could go through your whole career and not get that championship and not get the success that you want, and you got to be okay with that, because that's just the reality.
I'm sure you're sought quite a bit, sought out by young women who want to do some of the things in the business that you've been able to do. I mean, it's probably not easy to just generally say what is your best advice? But what kinds of things do you say?
You know, that's something I struggle with. I have, you know, a lot of young people who ask me for advice, and that business has changed so much and so much so many of them, you know, there's just so much less media, there's so fewer places to go than there were when when we were trying to get started. So like, if I ask you to maybe give us some words of encouragement to the aspiring youth of today, what are some of the things you tell students who seek you out for advice.
I mean, I do think there's in some ways more opportunities, like you don't just have to like I had to go to, you know, a radio station to start off right, or you know, I couldn't get a job in TV, you know, and so I started off in.
Radio my first two jobs.
But I do think like there are more opportunities obviously with all the expanding media and and I think we've seen it and how successful people can be in different areas like you know that do monetize like a YouTube, you know, and there is still a ton of radio, and there's satellite radio, and there's podcasts here we are yay you and me, and thank God for that, and
you know, there are opportunities out there. I would say, you know, I always tell people that there's no substitute for hard work, and that's very very boring answer, it is very very true. I do think the thing that plagues young people today is I think rejection is so much a part of their lives because they put themselves out on social media and Instagram and things like that, where people can be really cruel, and I think that, you know, I think you have.
To be okay with rejection.
I think you have to be okay with the fact that you're going to get a lot more knows than you are. Yes is, but you still have to put yourself out there. And I do think that people are little bit afraid young people at times to take risks and put themselves out there and taking risks and doing things that might not be exactly what you want, but it might be a path to getting there. And being
open minded about it is really huge. I mean, if I didn't put myself out there and take risks like I never would have called NFL games for four years at Amazon, Like that just wouldn't have happened, you know, something that seemed terrifying but was an opportunity, and I was like, Okay, I'm going to do this. You know, sometimes it's hard to take a leap of faith like that and or believe in yourself or believe that you can do it.
You can learn it.
And I would just say, you know, to try to get comfortable with the fact that not everybody's going to like you.
They're not going to see your vision.
But if you see it, that's enough, you know, and that's okay, and just man keep at it.
When you say radio you started off as.
A heavy metal DJ, really, yeah, That's where I got my name. So I had done I had actually had a really nice television reel coming out of college. But again, no nobody was hiring a girl. They just weren't doing it, and they just weren't going to do it, you know. And again I got told over and over you know, my audience doesn't want this, like this isn't happening, you know,
do something different, blah blah blah. But I had done, you know, a good amount of work at Notre Dame, and through the four years they had done a ton.
Of internships and stuff. So I was like. My dad was like, hey, Hannah li In, it's my middle name.
There's a lot more radio stations in the country than TV stations.
And I was like, you're right, dad, And.
So I there were a couple of publications back then, broadcasting magazine and radio and records, and they both had one ads, and so I started, I went, I just made a radio tape, just made a tape. And I had done some radio and college. I had DJed and I had a sports radio talk show at our local Notre Dame station. So I was like, all right, So I did sports tape and I did a DJ tape, just made one up, started sending those out.
I got two job offers.
One was for a station in somewhere into San Angelo, Texas, and the other one was for a heavy metal rock station of Corpus Christy will come on, I mean rock was going to be a lot more fun, So I.
Was like going down to Corpus Christy.
They changed my aim. My name is Hannah Storn. They changed it to Hannah Storm and it was stormed by the c C one oh one headbanger era. I played like Quiet Riot, like Motley Crue, Hagar, Shaun Eyrinson and Strieve, you know, scorpions, like back to back to back Death Leopard, Quiet Riot.
You get the idea, can we get some of that audio in this podcast?
I believe it is going to make its way in because that story is there in the podcast.
So yes, because I mean, you know, so every one of our.
Podcast episodes has what's called a cold open, so it kind of opens with something like a story or whatever. So my first one is the story of me and Charles and incident that happened when I was at NBC and he's we're really good friends now I remember, you know that incident. The second one is about the movie like Mike, and the third one.
Is the story of like DJ Days and you know, like all of that. So it's really fun.
We're not going to do the Charles story here. Let's save that.
Yeah, yea, yeah, no, that's okay.
It's awesome, and but but yeah, but but you know, my voice was a lot higher.
And like now that i'm they have some old clips and stuff.
I like my voice is like I guess your voice gets lower as you get older.
Charles sounds way different years later than he did.
Yeah.
Yeah, he his voice was very high. And I guess maybe we all I guess I guess.
Mark.
I'm sure if you listened to your voice like back in the day, the octaves would be higher. I think that's one of the things that gets like more mellow and beautiful, you know, with.
Age, is your voice.
But but yeah, that was me.
I was like headbangerri era man. I loved it.
And then and then I got my first job in Houston doing morning and afternoon drive sports, but I was still spinning records on the weekends, and that was at ninety seven Rock, which was a legendary Houston rock station Kick Ass Rock and Roll KSRR Houston.
So you know, we've mentioned your dad many times here, and as you said, you know, Mike Storen, former commissioner of the ABA, your last name is actually Storin. But so basically what you're saying is the station just said you are now hannahs Storm and you had to roll with it.
Well, they said, first of all, Storin does not translate like storin like they're like, But then, nobody was named Hannah at the time. There were literally no Hannahs. And I was named after my mom and my grandma. Now it's super popular. So they said, we would like you to be Anna Storm, and I was like, oh, okay.
I'll change one of my names.
But I'm like, I don't want to like completely lose myself and be Anna Storm, Like can I be Hannah?
Can you? And they're like, oh, okay, whatever.
And so you know when you have a baby and they have all the baby names in there and they say, well, this person has that name, right, like this celebrity has that name. For a long time, I was like the only Hannah. It was like the next to baby Hannah. It was like Hannah Storm sportscaster because it just wasn't like a nobody was named Hannah. Now we've got all these great especially like all these girls in the NCAA tournament there were tons of Hannahs, but especially Hannah Hadagah my favorite.
But yeah, so that was it Anna Storm, but Hannah Storm. So that's how I got I.
Have a TV name, and people always joke like you should do weather.
It's amazing that it just like they just tell you and that's the way it is.
And oh, I mean I've been told like die your hair blonde, you know, wear dress, don't wear you know, pants, wear hair long, don't wear dangly earrings. Do you know?
Like listen, I.
Mean I came up, you know, back in the day when you know, like I said, a lot of people said and a lot of things that you know, they probably wouldn't say today. But yes, I have been told many, many, many things about you know everything.
Well, look, in our short time together, you've told several great stories. And if you enjoyed this, you can listen to the NBA DNA podcast series, twelve episodes worth of stories like this from Hannah Storm, who has been around professional basketball since the seventies, all the way back to.
The ABA, a league that I sadly did not get to experience firsthand.
But now I'm going to listen to this podcast and yeah, try to learn about it. And like you said, you know, you've got Bob Costas on there, You've got Peter Vessi on there. These guys are champions of the Doctor j They all are champions of ABA history and it's you.
No.
I am always going.
To urge listeners please learn the league did not start with Michael Jordan. Please go back in time and learn some of these lessons and let me let me just say, this is my chance to say thank you to you. I don't know if you remember this, but for me in Rio, I was doing both TV and writing, and so it was it was constant. I mean, the days were really really long, and I am the worst morning person ever. The sports centers you were hosting were always in the morning, and I'm up late at night covering
games and writing. But I remember that mister Woodtalka, our producer, said hey, you know, Hannah, Hannah really needs Hannah really wants you to join her for this morning segment.
So when once I heard that, then sleep.
Was sleep was off the table because that was that was a very high sorry, that was a very high compliment to hear that you did insisting that I should join you.
So thank you.
I did.
Well.
You were amazing, and you know, we really kind of.
Smushed a lot of our Olympic programming into like these special hours, so you know, it was really important to.
Have you there, and I mean you were like a one man band. Man. I don't know how you did it.
I do not know how you did it because you were you were everything. Like you were like one person covering an entire Olympic basketball.
Series and that was it. That was a really.
Special I remember, like you know, interviewing coach k and some of the players leading up to that. That was a really cool It was a cool team.
It was a really interesting experience. Well, we'll talk about Rio another time on our next podcast.
Let's definitely do it again.
Seriously, congratulations on this, Thank you this podcast. And let me also say, you know, you recently revealed your battle with breast cancer, and I can't even imagine what that was like for you to do. You're a public person, so I mean it must make it twenty five times harder. And I really just wanted to send you all the best wishes. And you have a zillion fans out there who love you, and I just again wanted to send you all.
The best wishes and.
You're the best. Don't don't feeling great.
Don't have a don't have a elegant way to say it, but just.
You know, what there. You know, the thing is there. You don't have to have an elegant way to say it.
Like what you said was incredible, and people are like, I don't know what to say, and I'm like, say anything, say anything, just same thinking of you whatever, whatever you want to say. Like just what you said was beautiful and perfect and it wasn't easy, but I want I just want people to get out there and you know, get tested, like get their mammograms, do what you're supposed
to do. And for guys, you know, if there's a woman, a person that you love in your family, you know, obviously men have a history of breast cancer too.
You know they have to be very careful.
But you know, just make sure whoever that person is in your life, support them however you can, and make sure they're getting tested because it really really does save lives.
Everybody, listen to Hannah Storm on matters of life and basketball. All right, that is going to do it for this edition of This League Uncut. Like I told you from the jump, Chris Haynes missed out the legendary with us here. Everybody, you know what to do, follow the show, rate the show, review the show, and listen to Hannah Storm's NBA DNA, a twelve part podcast series produced by iHeart Chris and I'll be back together with you very soon.
Thanks for listening everyone, and that'll do it for us.
See you next time.
This league un Cutters and iHeartRadio production Chris Hanes and Mark Stein