Mary Carillo wasn’t supposed to be in the booth for the Milan-Cortina Opening Ceremonies Friday. She was supposed to be prepping some other Olympic segments, or reminiscing about her best Real Sports investigations, or scouting a mixed-doubles tennis tournament in Timbuktu, or whatever it is Mary Carillo does when she’s not in front of the camera.
Instead, she’ll be in the booth with Shaun White and Terry Gannon, watching the Parade of Nations and commenting on all those Mariah Carey melismas, gamely stepping in while original host Savannah Guthrie stays in the US. to attend to the tragic disappearance of her mom.
Who is Mary Carillo? If you’re a sports fan, you already know. But if you’re one of the millions who’s tuning in Friday just for the pageantry and don’t know your curling from your Kazakh mogul specialists, here’s the skinny on the Brooklyn-born, Florida-residing American treasure.
She’s mad sardonic. Tennis fans know Carillo for her wry comments, often delivered with a world-class deadpan, leaving only alert viewers to pick up the joke. Once when the Spanish tennis whiz Fernando Verdasco was playing in a Grand Slam match, the ball caught the tape and hung above the net, an event noted by partner John McEnroe. Carillo asked if that meant something was in the air tonight, Fernando. The only thing better than an ABBA reference is an ABBA reference you have to pay really close attention to get.
She’s a former pro tennis player. Many tennis commentators were great champions themselves. Carillo had a solid start, winning the mixed-doubles title at the French Open at just 20 (with McEnroe!). But she never cracked the Top 20 as a singles player, and after a host of injuries, retired at just 23. Fortunately for us, she was pretty good at her second career — she’s been a tennis commentator for nearly 45 years, and fans get visibly excited when they see she’ll be calling a match. Also, she was was a Real Sports correspondent for nearly the entirety of its 29-season run.
She provided the all-time best three minutes Olympics outside of the Miracle on Ice. At the 2004 Summer Games in Athens, Carillo was supposed to give a couple-minute tutorial on badminton, which had been added as a competition sport just a few Games before. She started out doing that, but then somehow, powered along by her own observational skills and suburban-mom frustration, turned it into a Shakespearean monologue about an entire neighborhood piling into her backyard to try to free a shuttlecock from a tree, with everything from javelins to Roller Blades tossed in its direction and very specific children’s names joining the action as they empty out her garage. And then the monologue just ended. We still didn’t know much about badminton. But we did know Carillo could give Spalding Gray a run for his money.
She lived in Milan for two years as a kid. Come on, that one just seems made up.
She has some pretty wild Olympics and other sports-broadcasting achievements on her resume.
She called skiing at all three 1990’s Winter Games, and luge at the 2002 Salt Lake Games with her now famous remark that the sport was basically a “bar bet gone bad.” She then hosted a whole daily figure skating show in Torino in 2006 with Scott Hamilton; somehow his effervescence and her even delivery worked together. She did the Closing Ceremonies in the Rio and Beijing Summer Games. (This is her 17th Olympics.) She won a Sports Emmy for her story on a father-son marathon team in which the son had cerebral palsy. She has called the Kitten Bowl and the Kitten Summer Games. She is going to say something incredible to Shaun White.
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