ESPN
When I was in college, I got a job in the athletic department where I was tasked with working in the control room and operating a camera at a wide variety of sporting events.
I had a much more intensive gig than the people who were tasked with manning the desk in the computer lab who could spend most of their shift studying while occasionally replacing the paper in the printer. With that said, I didn’t have to pay to get into games and got plenty of free meals I pilfered from the buffet set up for reporters in the press room.
There was barely any downtime during gameday and you had to stay on your toes from the moment the pregame festivities kicked off until fans started streaming out of their seats. There was a brief reprieve during commercial breaks, but if you were working the camera, you were normally tasked with getting some crowd shots and there was almost always someone creep on the crew who interpreted that order to mean they should scan the stands for attractive women.
However, an ESPN cameraman working the 2013 BCS National Champion Game received that explicit directive when they were told to locate Katherine Webb, the beauty queen who had represented Alabama at Miss USA the year before and was in attendance to support her boyfriend, AJ McCarron.
The camera operator successfully tracked her down and the viewing audience got the chance to be extremely jealous of McCarron dating when they cut to her during a break in the first quarter.
It was at this point where Brent Musburger was supposed to tell viewers at home about her connection to the Alabama quarterback, which he managed to do before he spent far too long extolling the virtues that made him all sorts of tingly.
Musburger had previously been a bit too complimentary during a 2005 broadcast where he shamelessly gushed over Jenn Sterger, who leveraged her newfound fame into an appearance in Playboy before pivoting to a career covering sports.
The broadcaster (who eventually apologized) managed to inadvertently propel another woman to stardom and Webb embraced her moment in the spotlight by pursuing a number of opportunities that came her way, including the chance to pose in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue the following year.
Webb—who would eventually thank Musburger for raising her profile—ended up marrying McCarron and decided to step back from public life and focus on being a mother to her two children.
However, she still provides regular updates to her 271,000 Instagram followers, who saw her reflect on her wild journey on Tuesday when she celebrated the 7th anniversary of the incident that put her on the map.
That’s how you flex.