Hazel Mae, a TV sports broadcaster, and the Toronto Blue Jays sideline reporter for Sportsnet, at the Rogers Centre on May 4.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
There’s a bittersweet story that Hazel Mae tells about her parents, and though she’s shared it a few times now, sometimes it can still catch her off guard.
When she was just a toddler back in the Philippines, her father left to make his way to Toronto, to put down roots for the family. This being the early 1970s, he eased into mainstream Canadian society by watching Toronto Maple Leafs games. “It was a way for him to feel a part of the community,” Mae says, sitting in the Toronto Blue Jays’ dugout at Rogers Centre, several hours before an evening game. “It was a way for him to understand the language, and try to, you know, have a sense of belonging.”
These things are complicated, though. After his wife and kids joined him, Mae’s dad wanted them to fit in, “to learn English, to be as Canadian as we could,” and so she and her siblings didn’t learn to speak Filipino. Mae regrets that now, even if she understands his rationale. “At the time, he thought it was the right decision,” she says.
Helping his kids assimilate also meant sharing his love of the local teams with his wife and children. Even so, sports was not seen as an appropriate career path for Mae. Her father hoped she would pursue a profession: medicine, maybe. But higher education never held much allure for her. And even as she began to make a name for herself in sports broadcasting, she struggled to get out from under the weight of familial expectations.
Decades later, Mae had become a key part of Sportsnet’s Toronto Blue Jays coverage: filing stories from spring training, conducting longer interviews with players and coaches through the season, and serving as the network’s in-game reporter, bringing updates to audiences from field level. So, one day, she brought her parents to a game. This was maybe four or five years ago. “They’d never asked me for a ticket. Ever ever ever,” she recalls. “I got them front-row seats here, I thought it was the greatest thing to do. And then at the end, my mom said to me, ‘We don’t want to sit here anymore.’ I said, ‘Why, mom? They’re the best seats in the house!’” Her mother explained that she and her husband couldn’t watch their daughter in action, so what was the point?
Mae dabs at her eyes, looks off to where the grounds crew is prepping the field. “So, um, yeah,” she said, her voice catching. “I know that they’re proud of me.”
‘I was a female in a male-dominated world’
Mae, 51, doesn’t do a lot of these in-person interviews. “I just never thought that what I did really mattered. I think the people that I spoke to matter,” she says. “I’m nobody.” But she’s agreed to an hour-long encounter, and photos too, because May is Asian Heritage Month in Canada and “that’s a hook I can really get behind.” For years, as she was rising up the ranks, she didn’t want to talk about the things that made her different from other sportscasters, though she recognized why newspaper and magazine reporters thought she’d make a good story. “I was a female in a male-dominated world. I get it. But I always thought to myself, the more you interview me, the more you centre me out that it’s odd – the more it [remains] odd.
“I didn’t want it to be an oddity, I wanted to fit in.”
But now, in a Canadian media landscape that is finally evolving but still has some distance to go before it is fully representative of the diverse population it serves, Mae is growing more comfortable with what she can achieve by standing out.
A belief in hard work, inventiveness, and commitment
Watching Mae in action nowadays, you can sometimes feel that the notion of being back home, of representing her community, carries more weight than it used to.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
When a Globe reporter and photographer arrive, Mae is in the camera well beside the Toronto Blue Jays’ dugout, perched on a folding chair, her laptop and notepad all but covering a tiny rolling table that serves as her desk. Cables snake around her feet.
Over the course of the afternoon, as the players take the field for practice, she’ll snag time with some of them, and then buttonhole their coaches to probe the team’s recent struggles. She’s already trying to finesse a script for the pregame broadcast.
“I always have to make time to sit and really think,” she explains. “I’m not as blessed as some of my colleagues up there in the press box. They can be, like, 35 minutes from deadline, and I’m rewriting a sentence for 10 minutes and thinking, how am I ever going to get this done for the 11 o’clock show?” She laughs: a nervous, self-effacing chortle.
Whatever her challenges, she makes up for them with hard work, inventiveness and commitment. “I have always been the person that, even in high school, I’d study for a test two weeks in advance. To this day, if you’re meeting me for lunch at noon I’ll show up at 11:30.”
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In the fall of 2001, after spending years working a series of low-level industry jobs and building connections, she scored her first job on TV at the relatively advanced age of 31. She told a Globe reporter at the time that, in the weeks leading up to her debut, “I started listening to sports on the radio and watching television at the same time,” to train her brain to receive and process live instructions from the control room.
“What impresses me about her is the amount of work she does, the amount of preparation she does and the overall respect she has in the business, and particularly now in the baseball business. She works hard at it,” said Scott Moore, the former Sportsnet executive who hired her for that first TV job, as host of the morning highlights show, Sportscentral AM. He cast her, he said, because of her “unbelievable knowledge of sports,” and her poise, despite a lack of on-air experience.
Mae stayed in that role for three years, improving her on-air chops, before moving to Boston to be the host of an evening sportscast on the New England regional sports network NESN. She admits she was apprehensive, especially covering the Red Sox. “That was the last baseball team that accepted an African-American player,” she notes. “I knew that New England was not, you know, your diverse New York City. So, I would highlight my hair. I think at one point it looked, like, dreadfully, all blonde. I would make sure I contoured my nose as much as I could. I tried to look like them as much as I could, to fit in, because I wanted so desperately for them to judge me on what I said and how I worked, and not turn the television on, see me, and just kind of automatically dismiss me without even giving me a shot.”
Mae won over local fans, helped in part by exquisite timing: She arrived in the late summer of 2004, just as the Sox were on their first World Series-winning run in 86 years. And if she was worried about racism, well, the local media treated her no differently than any other woman in broadcasting. That is to say, they covered her dating life and appearance. The Boston Herald story (by a female reporter) that ran after she left described her as a “NESN vixen” and a “sports chick,” and noted that she had, after arriving from Toronto, “morphed from a dowdy-dressed outsider to a sexy local superstar.”
In late 2008, Mae moved to the startup MLB Network as one of its first employees, relocating to New York to develop and play host to shows for the league-owned baseball channel. Days after the network launched in early 2009, she married the ballplayer Kevin Barker, whom she had met when he was with the Jays. At their wedding reception in Toronto, Moore approached the head table and pitched Mae on returning to Sportsnet. She turned him down, but two years later, as she and Barker talked seriously about having kids, she figured it was time to go home. Her parents were there, and a family support network, and a standing job offer.
She spent a couple of years as the host of Sportsnet’s early afternoon TV sportscast before moving over to cover the Jays for the network. Barker, too, found a professional home in Toronto. He is currently a co-host of an afternoon show on Sportsnet radio. They had a son in late 2012. “I always tell people I would have loved to have more than one, but I forgot to get pregnant,” she quips. “I was so focused on my career, and I turn around, all of a sudden I’m 40 and I’m thinking, what happened?”
Watching Mae in action nowadays, you can sometimes feel that the notion of being back home, of representing her community, carries more weight than it used to. She recently did a studio interview with the Jays’ Toronto-born ace reliever, Jordan Romano, asking him about the responsibility that comes with performing in front of a hometown crowd; the exchange felt significant.
In a dugout chat with The Globe, Romano said there was a kinship with Mae. They trade fist bumps when he emerges from the tunnel into the dugout. He recalled that, when he and his brother were growing up, they would watch her anchor the morning highlights show. “Honestly, that was a cool part of me getting here, getting to meet her. She’s awesome. I’m not the best at interviews sometimes. She’ll always kind of guide me through it. She’ll never ask me questions that she’d know would be very tough for me to answer.”
Partly, of course, that’s because Mae works for a sister organization of the Jays; both are owned by Rogers Sports & Media, which is also the domestic rights holder for the team broadcasts. She recognizes her job lies somewhere between journalism and marketing. Still, she tries to remain as objective as possible.
“My job is different than a beat reporter,” she says. “You have to understand, when you own a [media sports] property, with that comes different access and responsibility.
“I’m there to report on what I hear, see, what someone tells me, but also I think part of our job as the host broadcaster is to help promote the team.” Still, there’s an analogy she uses with the players. “I tell them, if you’re going to go rob a bank, I have to tell people you robbed a bank. The only difference is, I may not tell people that I think you deserve 15-to-life.”
Her colleague Jamie Campbell thinks Mae has an admirable old-fashioned quality. “Baseball has become a sport that has moved in a direction towards statistics and advanced analytics. Sometimes people who cover the game can lose their way in that respect, and try and cloud a broadcast a little too much with numbers,” he said, standing near the dugout, watching Bo Bichette snag a series of rapid-fire ground balls.
“Hazel’s got a warmth to her that I think endears her to all the age groups that watch these broadcasts. All of them. And that’s not an easy thing,” he said. “She understands that sometimes a really good story, a good tale, and being personable with a player is far more important than presenting a bunch of mathematical equations that prove they’re either playing well or not playing well. That’s her gift.”
Moore, who is no longer her boss, believes she still has room to grow. “I think she has way more potential to continue to improve and do bigger things,” he said.
That may not even be in baseball. As the interview winds down, Mae reveals she’d love to get into home flipping and renovations. “I watch HGTV as much as I watch MLB and the NFL Network. I feel like, in another life, I did home renos. My husband teases me all the time and says, ‘Just because you watch HGTV doesn’t mean you can pick up a hammer and go renovate.’”
Some years ago she launched a line of dresses in her name, though that venture is on hold because of the pandemic. So why not extend her design and business savvy into home renos?
“I want to do a little bit of everything. I want to host a travel show. Just – gosh, you only live once.”
And barriers are falling. Mae recalls that when she was first trying to break into sports broadcasting, there were no role models. “I thought I could get on television,” she says, but “the Asian women on TV did news and weather.”
Now, she says, “I meet so many young girls, and parents of young kids that say, ‘You know, she’s the next Hazel Mae’ – which always gets me when someone says that. ‘My daughter wants to be you.’ I thought to myself, my gosh, if I could take away any of that hardship and that heartache [I felt in] the beginning, from this little girl that I’ve met – you know, it was all worthwhile.
“It strikes me now, because of the popularity of the ball club, of social media, of just women in sports in general, I am now keenly aware that what I say, how I act” carries more weight, she says. “It strikes me that these young girls – or young boys – will turn the TV on, and think that it’s normal to see someone like me on television. So, yeah, I feel a little bit more responsibility. But it’s taken me a long time to get there. "