Bridget Venturi met the “Big Hurt” after spring training last April, and the experience left her shaking her head. She may have felt differently had the “Hurt” been Frank Thomas of the White Sox, but Chicago’s celebrated first baseman was nowhere in sight when she got this bad news.
Venturi, 29, of Highland Park was gearing up for her second season as a pitcher/outfielder with the Colorado Silver Bullets, the first all-female professional minor league-level baseball team. But after eight weeks of spring training in Orlando, management decided to cut her from the team.
Venturi refused to be defeated. She doesn’t like to lose. Just take a look at her scorecard.
In 1990, Venturi came from behind to win the grand championship on TV’s “American Gladiators,” beating out the reigning champ (an Olympic heptathlete) by 1 point. She walked away with a new Chevy Blazer and $15,000 in prize money. Not bad but hardly the apex of her athletic career.
In 1994, she beat out 1,500 other hopefuls to earn a spot on the Bullets. The 24-member hardball team, sponsored by Coors Brewing Co. and managed by former Atlanta Braves pitcher Phil Niekro, barnstormed the country, playing exhibition games against minor league and semi-pro teams and making history along the way.
Although they won only 6 of 44 games during their inaugural season, Venturi and her teammates remained unflappable.
“Women can play women at anything,” Venturi said. “Trying to beat men at their own game is a challenge. That’s part of the attraction.”
Historically, Venturi had covered the softball infield as a shortstop. In retrospect, it may have been her “bold and brave willingness” to train as a pitcher that ultimately cost her that position, conceded the organization’s president, Bob Hope (not THE Bob Hope). “Considering there were no women pitchers before her, what she did took a great deal of fortitude and determination,” he said by phone from the team’s headquarters in Atlanta.
“There are a lot of women out there with good arms,” he said, noting that the team’s two national tryout tours attracted more than 3,000 athletes. “Bridget got into a competitive situation, and her mechanics weren’t quite as natural as some of the others. She was right on the cusp, . . . but the coaches had to make a decision.”
News of her release left the generally upbeat Venturi feeling numb. “I was sitting in my hotel room with my summer plans down the tubes, thinking, `What am I going to do now?’ ” Venturi recalled, this time from the comfort of her parents’ Highland Park home.
But as everyone knows, there’s no crying in baseball.
Venturi became determined to turn around her disappointment.
“I’d been doing marketing and sales work in the Silver Bullets’ front office over the winter, and I’d introduced some major sponsors to the team,” she reasoned. She knew that the Bullets had contracted with an independent cable network to have 20 of their 44 games televised in 1995. “I thought surely my insight into the game would be valuable.”
Venturi secured the name of Kevin Landy, the production director of Liberty Sports in Houston. His company was parent to the Women’s Sports and Entertainment Network (WSEN),the production arm responsible for televising the Bullets games.
Although the network had already signed on another of the released Bullets players as a color commentator, Venturi dogged Landy with her trademark perseverance until he penciled her in as a commentator too.
“When I was first introduced to her, I could feel her intensity,” Landy said by phone from Houston. “I was a little concerned because she had this `tough guy’ attitude, and I was worried how that might translate on air. I was floored when she got on the air, because she had this calmness about her that I wasn’t expecting.”
Without any broadcasting experience, Venturi supplied baseball commentary for eight televised games. But the acid test for her came during a game in Syracuse, N.Y., when Bullets player Stacey Sunny was hit in the face by a pitch. Venturi and another commentator scrambled to fill 15 minutes of dead air while medical personnel tended to the player.
“Bridget was able to reach back into her experience bag and bring something up and relate it to the situation and keep the situation fresh,” Landy said.
Pam Schaffrath, a friend and former teammate, suspected that Venturi would have preferred to watch the action from the playing field instead, but she rallied. “I know Bridget was thinking as an athlete, that even when you’re down, you’re not down,” Schaffrath said.
Behind Venturi’s engaging charm is a winning combination of intelligence, natural athleticism and Midwestern work ethic. A glance at all of her sports trophies and academic awards reaffirms the fact: Venturi is a goal-oriented overachiever.
Of course, it helps to have the support of family, and Venturi has that in abundance. During her first year of play, her mother canceled the family’s annual 4th of July picnic so they could all be in Denver’s Mile High Stadium that weekend, where Venturi took the mound in front of 33,000 spectators. “I got to pitch, and everyone was there,” Venturi said with lingering exhilaration.
Dominic and Dolly Venturi were traditional parents by today’s standards. He worked at his own general contracting firm while she stayed home to run the car pool. They plied their three girls and two boys with healthy doses of encouragement and moral values rooted in Catholicism.
Venturi grew up playing T-ball and Little League. While completing her primary education at Holy Cross in Deerfield, she also joined the Deerfield Youth Baseball Association (DYBA).
In 1982, Lee Gillis of Deerfield was managing the girls “18 and under” traveling team when he first coached Venturi. He described her as a standout player at a very tender age.
“I first saw Bridget play when she was 13,” Gillis explained, “and she always ranked first or second (on the team) even then.”
Gillis said Venturi has marketed herself amazingly well. According to him, “You can get a lot of people with ability, but if they don’t know what to do with it, they’re not that good. She knows what she wants, sets a goal and goes after it.”
Academically, Venturi was third in her class of 236 at Regina Dominican High School in Wilmette, where she participated in varsity softball, basketball, volleyball and tennis. Mike Small, Regina’s varsity basketball coach, said Venturi was a point guard on his team the year they finished third in the state. “She could read the defense and apply whatever we needed in order to score, and . . . she always had the offense under control,” he said.
Venturi had already won a basketball scholarship to the University of Illinois when her mother encouraged her to contact Ed Serdar, then the softball coach at the College of St. Francis in Joliet, whom Venturi had met the summer of her senior year at a fast-pitch softball tournament.
His last-minute intervention helped her land a four-year softball scholarship to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she graduated in 1989 with an engineering degree.
“She got the best of both worlds,” Serdar said.
Carol Hutchins, the women’s softball coach at Michigan, remembered Venturi as a team leader with great rapport. “When you meet her, she’s very charismatic,” Hutchins said, “and she was that way as an athlete. In my opinion, she hasn’t changed a lot.” She said Venturi went on to become an All-Big Ten rightfielder her senior year.
Somewhere along the line, Venturi became hooked on TV’s “Gladiators.” When the Chicago media reported tryouts for the show, she figured she could take on the babes with biceps too. She tested well, was invited out to Los Angeles, and the rest is history. Venturi invested her prize money wisely, earning an MBA from DePaul that same year.
Her success led to several sports marketing jobs, including an internship with Stedman Graham that led to work on the Walter Payton Celebrity Golf Tournament. She was a high school athletic scout for Ohio-based College Prospects of America until her brother informed her of the Bullets’ 12-city tryout tour in 1994.
Although the Bullets improved by only five games this year, Venturi said Coors has renewed their contract. She said the team is a great marketing tool that also gives women the opportunity to play professional sports.
What Venturi will do in the future remains to be seen. Schaffrath said she has the talent to return to the Bullets, and that’s certainly in Venturi’s head. She’s also pondering a broadcasting career. And the engineering degree?
It’s hanging on the wall for now.
