When Jack Campbell lay motionless on the turf at the start of the fourth quarter of Sunday’s Lions-Vikings game, Erin Andrews inherited the unwelcome responsibility of updating Fox’s national audience on his condition, despite knowing little more than the viewers she was informing.
Andrews revisited those moments on the latest episode of Calm Down with Erin and Charissa, the podcast she co-hosts with Charissa Thompson, and recounted how scenes like Campbell’s dredge up painful memories of times she has ridden in an ambulance with her own husband, she explained, and they demand extraordinary care on air, since the player’s family is often among those hanging on her every word.
Campbell was hurt after lowering his head into a tackle, and the 26-year-old linebacker, a former first-round pick out of Iowa, was taken to a local hospital for evaluation. The Lions said Monday that preliminary indications were positive, but declined to share specifics out of respect for Campbell and his family.
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Andrews understands the dread those moments inflict on a player’s family because she has endured them herself. Her husband, former NHL center Jarret Stoll, suffered several serious injuries during his playing days, and Andrews said she has accompanied him in the back of an ambulance on multiple occasions.
“I get really emotional about this stuff because I’ve been in an ambulance a couple of times with my husband (former NHL center Jarret Stoll), and it’s just really hard,” Andrews said.
Andrews said one of Stoll’s former teammates, someone who had suffered a severe injury of his own and happens to be a devoted Lions fan, texted her while she was still on the sideline asking how bad it was. She had no answer to give him, because she knew nothing beyond what everyone watching at home could see.
“It’s just tough because I go to his family, his wife, his kid,” Andrews continued. “Like I said, I’ve jumped in an ambulance before. It’s the sh*tty part of the game. It’s the real part of the game.”
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Andrews mentioned that she traded texts with Fox colleague Jay Glazer after the game, and Glazer reminded her that injuries like Campbell’s are an unavoidable consequence of a sport built on violent, bone-jarring hits. Covering those injuries, Andrews explained, leaves sideline reporters in an awkward bind. Their job demands that they deliver accurate information to a national audience in real time, but in a moment like Sunday’s, the last thing they want is to pester team officials for details while trainers are still tending to the player, or to say something on air that later proves to be wrong.
“That’s also the hard part of what we do is having to report on it,” Andrews said. “You don’t want to misspeak. You just want to handle it with as much grace and let the trainers do their gigs. I felt bad even asking PR, like, ‘Do you have an update?'”
Andrews was hardly alone in wrestling with that discomfort, as longtime Lions beat reporter Justin Rogers publicly apologized on Monday for slipping a football question into Dan Campbell’s press conference, conceding it could have waited until the coach’s Wednesday availability.
The post Erin Andrews opens up on the difficulty of reporting Jack Campbell’s injury: ‘You don’t want to misspeak’ appeared first on Awful Announcing.
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