Are You Ready for Some Lisa?

Of all the lessons Lisa Guerrero has learned in her career as a sports reporter, undoubtedly the most valuable is how to handle being a gorgeous woman in a locker room full of sweaty, half-naked pro ballplayers.

"Occasionally there would be whistles or comments in my direction or maybe a guy who wanted to show me, you know, what he was made of," says Lisa, who got up close and very personal with America's top athletes as the sideline reporter for ABC's Monday Night Football and, before that, as anchor babe on Fox Sports Network's Best Damn Sports show period. "So I would turn to my cameraman, who would switch on his lights and point the camera straight at him. It worked every time. That is the power of the media!"

Lisa made a name for herself not only by prettying up a profession famous for ugly blazers and hairpieces but also by landing sit-down interviews with athletes who normally hate talking to the press--Barry Bonds, Brett Favre, Terrell Owens and Kobe Bryant. And since 2004, when she was unceremoniously replaced on Monday Night after having been written off as eye candy by critics (or, as she calls them, "mean-spirited old white men who weren't in touch with the fans at home"), Lisa, now a correspondent for Court TV, has been aching to get back in the game of covering sports.

"I definitely miss it," says the California native, who spent the past year acting onstage and playing the role of baseball wife to her husband of two years, Scott Erickson, a major league pitcher. "We'll be home watching sports, and I'll have so many questions for the players, the managers, the fans," she says. "I miss the action. I miss the spray of champagne after a championship game."

That's nothing compared with how much we miss her. By combining a sports nut's brain for scoring strategies with, well, just look at her, Lisa became the fantasy girl of every guy who was ever busted for skipping out on a wedding to catch the playoff scores. Here at last was a woman who could look great in high heels and rattle off the starting quarterback of every team in the NFL, not to mention the coaches and maybe even the water boys.

Lisa likes meat and potatoes and beer and "isn't big on salads," she says, biting into a second slice at a pizza place near her Los Angeles home. (She's wearing a thin sweater, tight jeans and gold stilettos. Heads are turning.) She's a dog person and gets off on heavy metal. What's next? Does she love vacuuming in the nude? "Actually," she says, "when I'm home you'll usually find me lounging around wearing sweats and reading the sports page."

And that...ball...is...outta here!

Credit Lisa's father with getting her hooked on sports. "My mom died when I was eight," she says. "My dad raised my brother and me, and sports was always the major point of discussion." Her family held season tickets for the Chargers and followed the Lakers when the team was dominating with such players as Byron Scott and Magic Johnson. Soon enough. Lisa was fronting for the then--Los Angeles Rams as a cheerleader. She later worked for the Rams, Falcons and Patriots in front-office jobs as she figured out how to make a career in sports. "It wasn't as though the sports world was calling out for more women reporters," she says. "There was Phyllis George, but she was a former Miss America. The rest of the women were former athletes."

That explains the kooky advice Lisa got as she rose through the ranks from radio commentator to what a Los Angeles Times columnist once called the hardest-working person in sports. "When I started as a broadcaster, they all said, 'Cut your hair, don't wear lip gloss, don't smile too much, and never ever let them see your cleavage," says Lisa, whose voluminous tresses, halogen smile and mile-long legs (her mom was a flamenco dancer) are, when you meet her, cosmic payback for years spent staring at guys like Marv Albert. "I'm Latin," she says. "I like my hair long, I like to wear eyeliner, and I'm certainly not going to cover up my being blessed with good genetics."

Of course, she never needed to. The people Lisa interviewed dug her just as she was. How else to explain her sitting down twice with Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis when he wasn't talking to anyone else? Or making Dennis Rodman cry at a (text concluded on page 158) Lisa Guerrero (continued from page 68) press conference? Or scoring an interview with Brett Favre the day after his father died? Getting Barry Bonds to admit for the first time that he was taking supplements?

That combination of gumption and good looks got her the job at Monday Night Football. At the time, ABC wanted to freshen up the broadcast and take it beyond X's and O's. Says Lisa, "When I was hired, they told me they wanted the sideline reporter to cover lifestyle and entertainment." The trouble was, even before that season, critics had been barking that Monday Night Football was going soft, a rant that escalated when Lisa made a flub during her first appearance: She asked Washington quarterback patrick Ramsey what it was like to play against his former teammate Laveranues Coles, when they actually were current teammates. "I knew I'd misspoken and tried to retract it immediately," she says, rolling her eyes. "Let the record show it never happened again!"

What did happen was that MNF's ratings went up from the year before. Co-host Al Michaels called it the Lisa Guerrero Factor, but the heat was too much for the network. The suits upstairs got nervous "not just about my sex appeal," she says, "but about the element of entertainment I was bringing to the show, even though that's exactly what they hired me to do."

Speaking of entertainment, let the record also show that playboy asked Lisa to pose 20 years ago when she was a cheerleader. She said no, but what a difference a couple of decades makes. "I'm proud to say I'm 41 now and have never felt better or sexier," she says. "In your 20s you're just developing your sexuality. Now I know that sexiness comes from the inside, and for me it's about being confident in who I am."

It's also about opening new horizons, she says, which is why she picked Paris, a place she'd never visited, as the backdrop for her pictorial. "I'd always heard there was a relaxed attitude about sex and nudity there. After taking in the Champs-Elysées and the Moulin Rouge, I'd say it definitely lives up to the magic."

Back in L.A., Lisa is making magic of her own. She was recently cast as a lead in A Plumm Summer, a film based on a true story about a kidnapping involving the star of a local kids's TV show in Louisiana. She's also pitching a reality series with her husband about the crazy life of sports wives. Then there's her dream of having her own sports talk show. "Something that goes deeper than a seven-second update from the sidelines," she says with a wink.

What's really exciting her, though, is a book project that's an account of all the adrenaline-filled moments that led up to her posing for playboy. The book is in the draft stage, but like most things Lisa does, it is bound to be a showstopper. Hell, she had us at the title: Diary of a Naked Lady.

See more of Lisa at cyber.playboy.com.