Part 2: Laura Rutledge Is Back Home At 'The Place That Built Me'
- Buddy Martin
- Aug 30, 2024
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 31, 2024
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." Eleanor Roosevelt. Laura's favorite advice.
By BUDDY MARTIN
GatorBait Media Columnist
She “scrounged” the Internet, looking for her next level opportunity without much success. It was not her time–yet.
At 25, when she was getting really concerned, the ESPN Network grew up around Laura Rutledge. One day she got a call to meet some ESPN bigwigs at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport which lifted her dampened spirits.
“That’s when we found out the SEC Network was launching. I'm sending incessant emails to anybody with an ESPN email address that I could find online,” she recalled. “I mean, I was like, scrounging the Internet for somebody to send my resume reel to. And they wouldn't call me back. Wouldn't call me back. I'd given up. That was a real low point. I was 25 and I'm thinking, ‘God, you know, like I can't get anybody at the national, regional level to give me any attention.’
“I knew I was pretty good at that point. I had a pretty good resume’ reel. There were many things that needed to be worked on, but I thought, ‘You know, for my age I've got a pretty good amount of stuff here.’
“So finally they gave me a call back and they said, ‘We'll do an interview with you in the Atlanta airport. You have to come at exactly this time, we're doing a layover in the Atlanta airport, and we're going to come out of security, interview you, and then go back through and get our connecting flight’. And I'm like, ‘Oh my God. Like, are these people taking me seriously? This doesn't seem, you know, very serious!’ So whatever. I roll up to the Atlanta airport, I think I bombed the interview.”
At this point, fresh off a baseball gig as an onpfield and feature reporter for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and then the San Diego Padres, Laura now had a partner. She married Josh Rutledge of the Boston Red Sox. They met at a tailgate in Tuscaloosa for the Alabama-LSU game in 2011. (They have two children -- Reese, who is already a baby star known for her football picks, and young Jack, who has yet to negotiate his ESPN contract. They live in west Hartford, Conn.)
She had started freelancing at CNN International, hosting a show called World Sport, “And it was all about like cricket. You couldn't call soccer, you had to call it football. But I'm like 'what am I doing?' Nobody knows this, but CNN actually offered me a position and I almost took it, in their sports department. And I would kind of freelance on HLN, too.
“And then I decided at that point I should go ahead and keep trying to put my eggs in the SEC network basket. And thank God they called me and they said, ‘Okay, well, we'll hire you. You're going to do a 12-event contract, which was like nothing. And I had a good job in mainstream with Fox Sports.
“And I'll never forget going to my husband. We had just gotten married and I said, ‘Hey, I know you thought I was making this, but what do you think about this?’ And he's probably like, ‘Oh golly, you know, this girl, I marry her thinking she's bringing in some cash and turns out she's not.’”
It was really a crucial turning point in the career of Laura Rutledge, ballet dancer, young wife and future TV star.
“I did sort of take a leap of faith. I took the uncomfortable turn there. And if you're a fan of Robert Frost, I was kind of taking 'The Road Less Traveled,' because it didn't make sense. I had everything mainstream with Fox. I even had the opportunity at CNN, and here I am saying, ‘I'm going to throw all that away for a big risk,’ because it was obvious that ESPN was sort of having me on a trial period.
“But I tell this story because that first year at SEC network, I was on the 12 events. I did 68 events on a 12-event deal. I told them anything and everything. I'll do it. So it was like gymnastics, softball, college baseball. I mean, everything that they had, every event they had, I said, ‘I'm going to, I'm going to show you that you made the right decision here.’ But it wasn't that easy because then the next year, they were kind of like, ‘Uh, maybe we'll have her back. Maybe we won't.’ They ended up, you know, having me back, but I kind of did the same thing. I felt like I was spinning my wheels. And then fast forward to enter Paul Finebaum.”
Finebaum says he’d never heard of Laura Rutledge until she was booked by then-producer John Hayes. Right off they had good chemistry. Even though polar opposites physically, they had the right mixture of silly and serious, somewhat sympatico on weird stuff. They made you laugh. And they would wind up appearing on SEC Nation Saturdays.
“We tried her and she was amazing,” Finebaum told me about bringing her on the Paul Finebaum Show. “Simply blew us away. And that was the beginning.”
I was impressed enough to fire off several emails of encouragement to Finebaum. The next thing I know, Laura was doing an hour every Monday and Tuesday on her own time, at her own expense, driving over to Charlotte from Atlanta. Once again, Laura The Vacuum Cleaner was absorbing every bit of knowledge from the sage veteran Finebaum.
It toughened up the ballerina/beauty queen and network execs began to notice. And eventually she was picked to co-host NFL Live -- but first had to prove she could hold her own in the sometimes Unfriendly Confines.
To his credit, when some of his hard-core followers made disparaging remarks about her gender, Finebaum did not try to be a knight in shining armor, saving a damsel in distress. There were some challenges, but Paul knew she had to learn to “fight my own battles” as in boot camp. To this day Rutledge is very grateful because “this can be a rough business for a woman.”
“He's been one of the great building blocks of my career, and he knows that,” Laura said of Finebaum.. “I tell him that all the time, and we just have a hoot of a time. I mean, he's such a funny person. He kills me. I'll look over there at him when we're doing the show, and I'll see that little glimmer in his eye and I'm thinking, ‘Oh, he's cooking something up.’ I can't wait to see what it is, you know, and he'll look at me sometimes when he's off camera like, ‘You know, come to me.’ I'm like, ‘Don't worry, Paul, I got you.’ I will always go to him because he's the best.
“Paul will always be, I think, one of the preeminent voices, names, personalities in college football. And I think all of us will look back and remember that, no matter how you feel about him. Right now, he's got some haters. We'll look back and be thankful that we were around for the heyday of his career.”
Just as Steve Russell and Brenden Martin and others had suspected, there were always going to be big things in store for Laura Rutledge.
I asked Rutledge to tell folks in the condensed review of her journey, including the challenges -- how she seemingly showed up at the Swamp one day to become a star on ESPN. She said:
"I have no idea how I did that. I'm still trying to figure out what I'm even doing. When when I got there as a freshman, I had been a serious ballet dancer. So I was really focused on that. And I was still taking some classes in ballet, and I needed to pay for the classes. So I got a job at the on campus radio station, and there just so happened to only be one opening. It was in sports. I said, 'I'll take it.' I didn't know what I was doing, I was a disaster. I needed to get all the reps I could.
"Thank God a lovely group at Gator Country gave me an opportunity. Buddy, of course, spearheading that with Brenden as well, and that was really where it all started. I had a niche in college football recruiting, which was a little rare at that time for a female, and I think that allowed me to sort of have a platform that would have been a little bit different. And really that was the launching pad for me. I used that to continue on.
"I started off with Fox Sports. That was kind of my first job out of college, did baseball coverage, and then when the SEC network launched in 2014, I started there. And ever since, I've just been trying to kind of get the next opportunity at ESPN. Lots of hard work, lots of sacrifice. But it would have never been possible if not for my time in Gainesville.:
GatorBaitMedia.com senior columnist Franz Beard recalled how incessantly she was asking “anything and everything” at GatorCountry about how to do her job better.
Russell noticed her platinum work ethic right off. “Someone who really wanted to learn and would readily put in the work to be better. She asked questions, too, and was a quick learner and was a totally wonderful person to be around. Just a great person.”
Brenden Martin said "she kept hanging around," especially after he converted his garage in Gainesville to a makeshift streaming studio. "She just kept getting better and she would NEVER turn down an assignment."
She was on her way with The Golden Ticket. Fast forward to the last week in July, 2024.
As Laura prepared for SEC Nation this week, she began to feel the good vibes.
“Woo! I'm excited. We have so many fun things planned for this SEC Nation show. I will be at Plaza of the Americas. And as usual, we're out there from 9 a.m. to noon. We start with Marty and McGee, and then SEC nation comes on. And, you know, it's an exciting time, I think, to be a Florida fan.
“I realize there are great expectations heading into this season. There's a ton of pressure on this game, certainly probably for both teams. But feels like the pressure's a little bit more on Florida, especially knowing that they host this game. They have a huge opportunity to kick this season off with a bang.
“And I think Graham Mertz and company is up to the task. I'm hoping the defense is better. It seems like they will be. And hey, you know, it can only go up from where they were last year. So, I feel I feel excited to see what they're going to look like.
"But, you know, just so special for me to come back to Gainesville and to see Florida fans that want to stop by and really anybody to share stories, just to have some fellowship in a place that I truly love and, and really, a place that built me.”
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