The sparks were quickly snuffed, but Stark, 27, is still feeling the heat. As Monday Night Football's youngest-ever commentator and part of ABC's revamped broadcasting team of Dennis Miller, Al Michaels, Dan Fouts and Eric Dickerson, "I get more comfortable with each game," she says. "But there's pressure. I feel stressed all week." Working as a correspondent for ESPN for four years gave her plenty of practice in the field, but moving to MNF, a prime-time monster that averages some 15 million viewers each week, was like a third-string quarterback being asked to start in the Super Bowl. "Everyone just said to remember that it's the same thing I was doing at ESPN. You can't think about how many more people are watching," says Stark. "But of course it crossed my mind: 'Am I ready for this?' "
Replacing veteran Lesley Visser, 47, who was the show's sideline reporter for two years, the much younger Stark was initially viewed by critics as eye candy for the mostly male Monday Night Football audience—a glorified cheerleader sans the tasseled boots. "Telegenic Darwinism can be cruel," remarked SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. But once the season started, she proved she knew more about pass protection than pom-poms. (A "sideline ace," The Boston Globe called her.) "I could not be happier with her," says MNF's executive producer Don Ohlmeyer, who hired Stark. "She's a hard worker, smart and indefatigable on a story. I've seen people doing this for 30, 40 years and they can't connect with an audience. She connects."
Stark's fiancé, Mike Lilley, certainly understands her appeal. After meeting her through a friend in July 1999, Lilley, 39, a bond trader for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in Manhattan, where the couple share an apartment, assumed "someone like Melissa would be dating someone else," he says. But the two were soon an item and were engaged 11 months later.
Too bad he rarely gets to see his girlfriend, whose MNF schedule has her hopping around the country until February. "I was forewarned," says Lilley. "From the beginning we've made a big effort to see each other as much as possible."
Trying hard was Stark's trademark as a girl growing up in Baltimore. "I've known since she was a kid that anything she tries to do, she gives 150 percent effort," says her mom, Polly, 57, a homemaker. "When she was 5, she got homework that was supposed to last for three months. She finished it the first night!"
A few years later she was tagging along with her father, Walter, 58, then an eye doctor whose patients included the Baltimore Colts. "I'd go down to the locker room with him," recalls Stark, the youngest of three children. "Bert Jones [the quarterback] taught me how to throw a football."
She plunged deeper into the world of sports at the University of Virginia, where, as a Spanish and foreign affairs major, she also covered UVA athletics for a local TV station. After graduating magna cum laude, Stark worked for Home Team Sports, a Maryland network, for a year before landing her reporting job in '96 at ESPN, where she started out hosting Scholastic Sports America.
Still in learning mode on Monday Night Football (so far "I'd give myself a B or a B-plus," she says), she is also concentrating on a second job: planning her Memorial Day wedding.
"Her mother said she's been planning this since she was 7," says Lilley, who, despite appreciating Stark's knack for color scheme and invitation ideas, was more impressed by Stark's not-so-girlie interests. "When we started going out," he says, "I called her up for a date and she said, 'How about I come over and we watch Monday Night Football?' I knew there was something unique about her."
Jennifer Wulff
Marianne V. Stochmal in New York City
- Contributors:
- Marianne V. Stochmal.
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