Shawn Fitzgerald '96
By Allen Lessels

ESPN feature producer Shawn Fitzgerald '96 watches intently and jots down a couple of notes as the video plays on the editing machine, telling the tale of once-promising professional boxer Bob Hazelton and what steroids did to his life.

Within hours, the story will air on SportsCenter as part of the program’s week-long series on steroids and their short and long-term effects on the body.

It’s a story brought to ESPN’s millions of viewers by Fitzgerald, who majored in English and played soccer and basketball for the Hawks.

The bulk of the piece is finished, but Fitzgerald has time to do a little fine-tuning. He hustles back to his office on the ESPN campus in Bristol, Conn. for a couple of tapes full of gym noises. He adds background sound here, tightens things up a little there.

This is stomach-churning stuff. Hazelton talks of fighting George Foreman and knowing he needed to get bigger. He tells of using steroids and graphically describes how the back of his calf split open. The camera pulls back to show Hazelton in his wheelchair, legless.

“The toughest part of the job is to make something special out of each feature,” Fitzgerald says. “We try to have something in each feature that makes people go, ‘Wow.’”

This approach to his work has helped Fitzgerald, 30, earn two Emmy awards as part of ESPN teams (on SportsCenter and Baseball Tonight). And coupled with his talent and eagerness to learn, it has helped him move up the company’s ranks since starting there within months of graduation.

“We have all these tools to tell stories,” says Glenn Jacobs, a coordinating producer at ESPN. “It’s not just words and not just pictures and not just music. It’s a combination of all those things. There are only 13 feature producers at ESPN in studio production and it’s a coveted title. Shawn has the potential to do just about anything he wants in this business.”

From the entry level job of production assistant, where he worked 6 p.m. to 3 a.m. and watched sporting events and cut highlight tapes, Fitzgerald became an associate producer. He worked on features and then with Baseball Tonight, where he attended four straight World Series.

At Saint Anselm, Fitzgerald played two years of soccer for coach Ed Cannon and then two years of basketball for Keith Dickson. Although his minutes were limited on a couple of very good basketball teams, he says, “It was a great experience, a great challenge for me. Nothing beats winning, whether you’re playing 35 minutes or three minutes.”

Now, he gets to campus when he can and plays in alumni golf tournaments and games. He stays up on Hawk athletics and has had Dickson and his team down to ESPN for a tour.

These days, he’s always looking for the next story. He produced a feature on Merrimack College hockey goalie Joe Exter, who nearly died from head injuries after an on-ice collision, and later returned to play professionally. He did another on baseball player Albert Pujols and his child, who has Down Syndrome.

For the steroid story, he was assigned to do a piece on the effects steroids have on a body. “We could have served the purpose with a bunch of doctors talking,” he says. “But I wanted to hear firsthand the tale of it.”

He researched and found Hazelton; set up interviews and camera crews at Hazelton’s home in Minnesota; tracked down old footage; and worked with a reporter on a script. The piece ran on ESPN numerous times and ABC News picked it up, too.

This spring, Fitzgerald accepted a new position with ESPN: Florida Bureau Producer. He’ll be working on PGA Golf Tournament coverage for SportsCenter and baseball coverage for the network, from his new office in Tampa.