Vintage Pinellas: TV’s Gayle Sierens

Her voice is a honeyed blend of old-Florida southern charm and steely sportswoman grit. It’s in a lower register and slightly raspy – her childhood nickname was “Froggy” – and for nearly four decades, it reverberated through Tampa Bay living rooms like a friend who came to visit, and tell you what was what, virtually every day of the week.

If any TV news personality could claim the title of “the voice of the bay” it would be Gayle Sierens, the two-time Emmy winning “hometown girl” who started out as a sports-loving tomboy and ended her broadcasting career as half of the highest-rated news anchor team in local history.

Tampa Catholic, Class of ’72

Sierens, who retired in 2015, spent all 38 years with WFLA-Channel 8, which is in itself something of a record. Tampa mayor Pam Iorio proclaimed Jan. 10, 2007 – her 30^th anniversary with the station – as “Gayle Sierens Day.”

Nationally, she’s known as the first woman to do play-by-play for an NFL game (in 1987, for NBC).

Regionally, she’s known as a public figure who was always willing to donate her name and time to many causes, and an influential and important advocate for issues like physical and mental health care.

At 71, she’s a happily retired wife, mom and grandmother. And still a Tampa resident.

No regrets. “I loved my life,” Sierens says. “I loved the people I worked with. Those first, fun days at the beginning, especially, those were so fun. When we were all just goofy and young and thinking we knew everything.

“We just thought we were the bomb. We thought we were the smartest people we ever knew. We just had a great time being together and being at the station.”

Sierens grew up in Tampa, where her family relocated (from Jacksonville) when she was 3. Armed with a degree in Communications from Florida State University, she applied at WFLA in 1977.

Late ’70s, WFLA.

The ink on her diploma hadn’t even dried when sports director Milt Spencer hired the fresh-faced redhead as a field reporter. She was 23 years old.

“I was very grateful for that,” she reflects. “I don’t think any of the other stations had been broad enough to say ‘OK, let’s get all these women to come in here and do sports stuff.’ I was just a sports person because my mom was such a sports person. And my grandma was such a sports person. So this was a life that was almost handed to me by my mom and my grandmother.”

In Tallahassee, Sierens had been the sports reporter for the campus TV station, and hosted a public affairs show called Break of Day, which required her to get up at 4:30 a.m., often as her roommates were just coming home from a night of partying.

“But it was the launching pad for me, to get in the business,” she says. “It gave me the opportunity to say ‘Listen, I know how to do some of this stuff. Not everything, but I know how to do some of the stuff that you’re doing.’”

She used that line on Milt Spencer, and was promptly added to the sports team, focusing on the fledgling Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the ’70s iteration of the Tampa Bay Rowdies.

Soon, a waggish sports writer at the Tampa Tribune called her “willowy and fragile.”

And so began the uphill climb. Sierens had to convince male coaches and players that she was professional, and that she was serious.

“But I always had to be nice about it. Like, I’m not walking in there with my hands on my hips saying ‘Listen, I’m a chick and I know what I’m doing.’ I just tried to be a little more comfortable about walking into that venue.

“Again, I put so much credit on how I was raised. Mom loved watching football. She loved sports. And I don’t think she played sports – way back, women weren’t playing a whole lot of sports.”

With Chicago White Sox manager Tony LaRussa, 1983. WFLA photo.

When Gayle was 6 her father, mechanic Maurice “Red” Sierens, was killed in a freak elevator accident. Betty Sierens remarried when her daughter was 14, and attending Tampa Catholic High School.

“I loved sports because my mother loved sports. So here we are, with my mother, Betty Jean, and my grandmother, Beaulah Mae, and they both loved sports. So we watched sports all the time on TV. What little sports there were back then.” Football and baseball, mostly.

She was on the Tampa Catholic swim team, and a cheerleader.

“Even was I was a little kid, I played sports, at any little kid place you could go. A little soccer, maybe, or a little basketball down at the Y. But nothing was big – I wasn’t thinking I’m going to be a great, fabulous sports … somebody who’s got that ‘oomph.’”

Oomph or no, the audience grew, and in 1981, Tampa Bay Metro magazine named her the Bay Area’s best sports reporter. New sports director Dick Crippen tapped her to anchor the 11 p.m. sportscast, and Sierens – who continued to research, report and edit her own stories – won her first Florida Emmy in 1984.

Although Tampa Magazine named her one of “The Area’s 50 Sexiest People” and put her on the cover, she was never terribly interested in cultivating an “image.”

“I didn’t go into locker rooms forever, I don’t think,” Sierens recalls. “Because they weren’t doing it, frankly. And if they were, I didn’t feel like I needed to do it that way. I felt like I could go to the PR guy and say ‘I would like to talk to him, him and him, could you send one of them out?’

“I did not want to go into a room seeing all these men with their towels around them, and perhaps even dropping towels. It just wasn’t my vibe, let’s just say.”

Although Tampa Magazine named her one of “The Area’s 50 Sexiest People” and put her on the cover, she was never terribly interested in cultivating an “image.” WFLA photo.

It was 1985 when she was summoned to the WFLA General Manager’s office. “They said ‘We like you, and we think our viewers like you … and maybe you don’t need to do sports any more.’ And I’m like ‘Oh, God – am I getting fired?’”

To her astonishment, she was offered a promotion, to be co-anchor with Bob Hite for the weekday afternoon and late night newscasts. In a TV newsroom, the anchor desk was the big enchilada.

“That was the turning point for me. I was perfectly content doing what I was doing. It was fun.”

Between 1983 and 1989, because of an FCC license issue, the station’s call letters were WXFL.

The stakes had been significantly raised. “When you’re doing sports, the worst thing you’re gonna tell someone is ‘Your favorite team just lost.’ And when you do real news, it’s a lot bigger. It’s a lot more important. It’s a lot more life-changing than just watching a few football games, or basketball games, or soccer or whatever.

“I say this jokingly: At the end of the day, we just read the teleprompter. But it’s really much, much bigger than that. Because before we go in and start reading that teleprompter, we’ve already talked about whose lives have been changed, or are being changed. And why it’s so important that we make sure we’re right about everything.

“That was my goal, to say ‘I’m doing my job the right way. I’m not screwing it up by saying stupid things.’ And I was still pretty young at that time – still in my 20s, and into my early 30s.”

Hite was a broadcast veteran who’d arrived at WFLA in 1977, just after Sierens. Along with prior anchor desk experience, he had the deep, steady, stentorian voice of a Walter Cronkite, just what TV news needs.

(Cronkite, in fact, was a family friend. Hite’s father, Bob Hite Sr., was a veteran CBS reporter and sometime anchor whose voice was heard every day in primetime as the “bumper announcer” for color programs. And more.)

Eventually, Sierens would win a second Emmy, for news reporting. In the beginning, though, she worried about creating chemistry with the more experienced Hite.

Gayle and Bob. WFLA photos.

“He was a very kind and funny guy,” Sierens recalls. “But he had the voice, and he had the background – his father was a rockstar in the business – so he had a history of living with that.”

Hite, who retired in 2007 and now lives in southwest Florida, is effusive in his praise for his longtime (22 years) co-anchor.

“She’s like a sister to me,” he reports. “I can crash at her house to this day, any day of the week, without even calling first.” Hite affectionately refers to her as “the all-American girl.”

They were, he believes, a perfectly matched on-air team. “I think I relied on Gayle a lot more than she relied on me. She was the mature member of the co-anchors.”

Never much of a spectator sports fan, Hite made the occasional faux pas during the newscast. “Once we were reading off a teleprompter,” he offers, “and at the end of one line was ‘LA.’ The beginning of the next line was ‘RAMS.’ And rarely did I ever go over the newscast beforehand, because frankly I’m just a great sight-reader. And if I’ve already read it, it’s not news to me!

“So I’m going ‘blah blah blah, LA RAMS.’ Whenever I would make a mistake like that – which was probably several times a week, not necessarily to do with sports – whenever our director heard me say something stupid he would immediately punch to a two-shot. And get Gayle’s doubletake. She’d say ‘Bobby … that’s ‘L.A. Rams.’

“I think that’s one of the reasons we were number one, because Gayle was the straight man. And I was the clown. We were kind of like the odd couple.”

In September 1987, Sierens married former Chicago Bears and New England Patriots linebacker Mike Martin, who lived in the bay area.

Two months later, at the invitation of Michael Wiseman, NBC’s Executive Director of Sports, Sierens flew to Missouri to call play-by-play for a game between the Seattle Seahawks and the Kansas City Chiefs. The first time a woman had performed the task for a regular-season game.

Making broadcast history Dec. 27, 1987. Screenshot.

“He thought I had a good voice,” Sierens chuckles. “And he was one of those guys who always liked to do something different. And the fact that he wanted to have a woman do play-by-play for an NFL football game was probably the most yummy thing he could come up with.”

She underwent extensive training for the gig and credits her network prep coach for making it (relatively) painless.

Still, “It was scary, also because I was pregnant when I was doing it. Just pregnant, like within a month. That made it hard.”

She’d had to get permission from WFLA to moonlight from her anchor job, and her generally positive reviews led to an offer from the network to continue.

But she and Mike were starting a family. And while it had been an adventure to dip her toe back into sportscasting, Gayle Sierens said no thank you.

She spent a week in South Korea in advance of the 1988 Olympics. Visited the Vatican and had an audience with the Pope. She met movie stars, presidents, pop singers and even Oprah Winfrey. Her Gayle Sierens Reports specials were frequent and popular.

Hosting Tampa’s Holiday Parade. WFLA photo.

Emceeing St. Petersburg’s All Children’s Hospital telethon. Photo: ACH.

Because of her ubiquitous presence on TV, she was a popular guest speaker at luncheons and fundraisers, and she rarely turned down an invitation to appear at, or host, a charity event.

Sierens likes to think she was easy to relate to, because she was always thinking about her audience. “I’m going into these people’s homes, and sometimes they’re going to get news that’s just so fun and joyous, stock market’s up and blah blah blah, but I’m also going to have to tell them that we’ve lost someone special in the world and in our lives. And this hurts.

“But I lost someone special in my life when I was young, so I knew how to handle that in a way that I think was given to me. Sadly, but was given to me.”

During the 11 o’clock broadcast on a Friday night in February, 1992, Sierens went into labor. She didn’t tell anyone, signed off as usual at 11:30, and drove herself home. The Martins’ third child, daughter Madison, was born at 5:30 the next morning.

That same year, her husband started his lucrative bakery business Mike’s Pies. Martin’s creations are currently sold in 45 states, Canada and Mexico.

In 2015, Gayle Sierens, veteran and pioneer, decided 38 years was enough. She switched off the TV for good.

No regrets. “My life could not be any better than it is right now,” she says. “I have the dream life. I have all three of my children nearby, my daughter lives the next street over and a block up from us. One of my sons, Luke, lives eight blocks from us and a block up. And my other son, Cam, he went rogue on us – they’re about a mile and a half from us.

“All of my children, all of my grandchildren, live here and live nearby. I’m chillin.’ My life is good – I take my dog for walks, I go golfing twice a week … or try to. I’m just trying to live the good life, and simple.

“A good, simple life. And so far, so good.”

WFLA photo.