She didn’t get to be a certified EGOT by resting on her laurels. Now adding TV executive to her expansive list of credentials, Whoopi Goldberg is launching the first global women’s sports channel—a dream sixteen years in the making.
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Goldberg made the announcement during a recent guest appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. “I’m launching the first global women’s sports channel, called AWSN (All Women’s Sports Network),” Goldberg explained. “It will be the home for live women’s sports from around the world. Everything from soccer, basketball, tennis, cricket, curling, you name it.
“If a woman is playing it, we’re showing it.”
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Goldberg went on to explain that the channel has already launched in “Asia, the Middle East, and India.” AWSN will launch in the US next week.
Goldberg described how her own childhood relationship to sports compelled her to create the channel to inspire the next generation of female athletes. “Ever since I was a little kid, I always wanted to play sports,” she explained. “My brother could play. He played baseball, he played softball, he played basketball, he played everything And they would say, ‘Oh, hi little girl.’
“It always pissed me off. So, for years, I’ve been talking to people and saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could go around the world, start getting young athletes in high school so that we can grow with them and grow up with them?’”
In recent years, trans and nonbinary athletes have faced mounting bigotry and vitriol over their inclusion in women’s sports, but Goldberg has long been a vocal advocate for the LGBTQ+ community. In 1987, she participated in the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, and thirty years later, she spoke up for trans rights at the GLAAD Media Awards.
Accepting an award for Strut, the reality show about transgender models which she executive produced, Goldberg thanked the Oxygen network for taking on a show that “scared the sh*t out of everybody else.”
“The reason it scared people,” she went on, “was because everyone had expectations about what ‘transgender’ meant, as opposed to saying ‘Oh, it’s just another person.’”
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