Andrea Joyce is having too much fun to retire

At the 2004 Summer Olympics Andrea Joyce, a fixture on CBS Sports and now NBC Sports, turned 50. Men could age on TV. Women did not have that luxury. “I guess this is it for me,” she told Dick Ebersol, then the chairman of NBC Sports and the Olympics.

But Ebersol didn’t care about her age.

Neither did viewers. Joyce, who is now 69, has been a recurring character in America’s sporting life since joining CBS Sports back when the first George Bush was president. Some of the reporting highlights: tennis and figure skating, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, not to mention those 35-plus years of Olympics coverage.

She will report on diving for the Summer Olympics in Paris in July and early August before returning to Paris to anchor NBC’s coverage of the Paralympic Games at the end of August and early September. For good measure, she recently released a children’s book on women gymnasts and last year was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame.

It’s a hell of a run to her 70th birthday, which lands between those events. “Everybody keeps saying, ‘What are you gonna do?’ And I said, ‘I think I’m getting my birthday present,’” she says. “I get to go to Paris twice. I get to do something I’ve never done before, which is host a Paralympics on site. It’s humbling and exciting. After all these years to be able to have that feeling, it feels like such a gift.”

This time the end is near. Really. Joyce’s logic is to “keep going until they tell me I’m not going.” The tap on the shoulder has not arrived. “Now, that being said, how long do I want to keep doing it?” she says. “I don’t know how much longer.”

Her husband of 38 years, the legendary TV journalist Harry Smith, ended his run with NBC News this spring. After living most of her adult life on the go, nurturing a career and a family, she says that having Smith at home so much more was “a little bit of a roller coaster” the first month.

Joyce talked with Next Avenue about her career then, now and what’s next. The interview has been edited for space and clarity.

Q: You working with Lacey Henderson [the 2016 track and field Paralympian] makes me think: When you were coming up, did you have a woman who had been in sports or news to shepherd you along?

A: God, no. I mean, Lesley Visser and I sort of came up about the same time. But we rarely worked together because we did the same job, basically. So we would see each other at the seminars. And we were very good friends. The only women who had really done sports broadcasting on that level was, like, Phyllis George.

But the men that I worked with at CBS were absolutely incredible. [CBS Sports executive director] Ted Shaker, at every turn he’d say, “OK, I want you to do this.” And I’d say, “I can’t do that. I don’t know how to do that.” And he said, “No, you can do it. I know you can do it.” He was just so helpful; he was reinforcing.

Even going back further than that, the first job I had in sports in Dallas, the guys I worked with, there was no way they were going to let me fail. And had it not been for them, I could have never done it. I was so incredibly lucky because the guys in the sports department said, “We’re not going to let you fail. We’re going to teach you how to edit highlights. We’re going teach you how to write copy over highlights.” I had never done anything like that. That was a shepherding process, for sure.

Q: How does it feel to be in that position now?

A: Oh, it’s amazing. We have this group of friends in front of the camera, behind the camera. It’s Lesley Visser, it’s Mary Carillo, me, Suzanne Smith, who is the only female director who directs NFL games, Catherine Newman, and Marcy Kempner, who’s another director. We all met at CBS over 30 years ago. And we’ve stayed friends. We’re a posse.

We call it Girls Night Out: Sometimes we just have our little core group, but whenever we’re meeting up on my roof, when we know everybody’s in town, we invite the young kids, we invite the interns. Because it is all about making sure that we lift them up and help them any way we can. You all figure out a way to get to where you’re gonna go. But if you can, if there’s somebody there to help push you up one rung on the ladder, it’s great. Why not, right?

Q: Why do you think you’ve been able to last this long?

A: It’s never, ever, ever been about me. [Harry and I] were always the same in that sense: you’re there as a vehicle to pass on information and to tell a story. It’s not about you. And a lot of times, I think what ends up happening to people in this business, you get starstruck. You start to look up. Why is that person getting that job? Why is that person doing that? Why am I not doing that? How come I’m not this? How come I’m not that?

It wasn’t that I lacked ambition, but I was always so happy with whatever I was given. Because I think that ambition can get in the way if you think that you want to be X, Y and Z as opposed to, I just want to tell stories; I just want to interview people.

I was the weekend anchorwoman in Detroit, and then Denver calls and offers me the big weekday anchor job. So, I leave home again and move to Denver. And it didn’t work out. They ended up giving it to somebody else. I saw my career flash before my eyes. As I was focused on this thing that I wanted, what became unattainable, I almost lost my career completely.

I walk into every assignment with a great attitude. I’m really happy to be there and I am excited to see what might unfold. It’s not drudgery for me. It’s not a grind. It’s never old. It’s never felt like work. So I think that’s a lot of it — and a lot of it is not trying to reach for other stuff all the time.

Q: Is there anything you and Harry want to do now that you’re both relatively still?

A: We definitely want to travel. We’re exploring all kinds of things. Like, do we want to live in New York for the rest of our lives? Do we want to downsize? Everything is out on the table as a possibility. I think that next winter we will take at least a month, get in the car with the dog and drive south and see if there is someplace in the Carolinas that we might want to go and spend the winter.

We’re sort of just opening it up and exploring all of that right now, which is actually fun. And it’s a little bit scary. We’ve been in our apartment for 35 years, living in New York. We expanded it and we expanded the family, but we’ve been in the same place and had the same little getaway house for 30 years. I think once we get past the fall, once Harry has finished [teaching] this course (at his alma mater, Central College, in Pella, Iowa) he’ll come back and then we will kind of figure it out from there.

Harry and I have never taken a trip that was longer than 10 days, believe it or not, other than to do the Olympics. I have this fantasy of getting in a car in Sicily and driving all around the island and taking three weeks. We don’t know if we can even figure out how to do that. We always get very antsy. So it’d be fun to see if we can change how we approach things, too, in this new phase of our lives. We’ve never had that. It wasn’t that anything was pulling us back. We just always felt like we had to get back. So, maybe, we’ll get past that. That would be fun. That would be really fun.