"What is that thing on your neck?"
While Bean's eyes widen, her reaction has nothing to do with the sort of vanity that some believers in stereotypes might associate with her past as a Denver Broncos cheerleader. As the first woman to serve as lead sportscaster for a television network affiliate in the Mile High City, she's under intense scrutiny from peers as well as viewers — both those who are rooting for her to build on her groundbreaking success and Neanderthals convinced that incisive commentary about games involving balls requires the speaker to boast a pair of them. But even though she's focused on what she's about to say rather than how she looks, she also understands that no one will be listening to her if they're distracted by a thing on her neck.
At that point, Diesburg says, "Oh, it's just hair," eliciting a smile from Bean. She stuffs the wayward strands behind her headset's earpieces and gets on with the business of making Denver television history.
A sizable crew is on hand for the show, including two camera operators (Kevin Hartfield and Dave Wille), a sound technician (Dan Gervel), a director (Ben Pliska) and the episode's special guest, former Colorado Avalanche player turned Altitude Sports pundit Mark Rycroft, resplendent in a summer suit. There's also a restaurant full of patrons keeping a close eye on the set, even though most of them won't be able to hear Bean and Rycroft; putting their conversation through the speaker system would create a feedback loop.
No one is watching more closely than Joe and Sandy Bean, Romi's parents, who were born in South Africa, as was their daughter. Joe, 83, has fought some serious health battles over recent years; he's on oxygen and uses a cane to walk. But he and Sandy regularly attend the Monday taping before racing home to screen the show and learn what they missed.
The photo library on Sandy's phone is jammed with images of Romi, including shots of her accepting an award as Colorado Sportscaster of the Year from the National Sports Media Association — a plaudit bestowed upon her and co-recipient Conor McGahey of Altitude Sports Radio in January. But after scrolling through several shots, Sandy suddenly grows worried that Bean could object to her mentioning this achievement because it might seem like bragging.
"She's very modest," Sandy stresses.
Joe likens CBS Colorado's discovery of Bean to the Broncos drafting Georgia running back Terrell Davis in the sixth round, after which he blossomed into a Super Bowl Most Valuable Player and member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. "The way it happened makes it even more special," Joe contends.
Bean snagged top honors as the Colorado Sportscaster of the Year from the National Sports Media Association, presented by announcer Ian Eagle.
NSMA/Daniel Coston
"To be the lead sports anchor at her age is really impressive," says Vic Lombardi, the face of Altitude Sports, of 36-year-old Bean. "She's already moved mountains, more so than I ever did, and that's pretty cool to see."
Still, CBS Colorado news director Kristine Strain makes it clear that Bean earned every break she's received, emphasizing that "she works harder than anybody I know."
For Bean, this drive is fueled in part by perceptions, be they real or imagined.
"I think there were a lot of people who were wondering, 'Is this just a cheerleader who wants to be on TV?'" she says. "So not only being female, but being a cheerleader who wasn't trained in journalism really worked against me. I felt double pressure coming from where I came from and how I landed in that position. That's why I wanted to show everybody that I'm here to be taken seriously."
The Bean family relocated from South Africa to Colorado in 1988, when Romi was nearly two. "I didn't get the cool accent," she notes with a chuckle. But the reason for the move was no laughing matter, she adds: "It was because apartheid was still going on in South Africa. [My parents] didn't want to raise their kids in that culture; it wasn't a world they wanted us to grow up in."
Shifting continents required significant sacrifices. Joe, who has three kids from his first marriage (Warren, Graeme and Craig) and two with Sandy (Romi and Gregg, who are decades younger than their half-brothers), abandoned a call-service center he'd been running and started a new one, dubbed Alphapage, in Denver from scratch. Joe is now retired, but Alphapage is still going strong under Graeme, its CEO.
"Talk about the immigrant mentality," Bean says. "My work ethic came from my parents. Seeing them go through their struggles and build a life all over again taught me a lot about hard work and not taking anything for granted."
Joe's sports fandom went through changes, too. He followed rugby in South Africa, but upon coming to the States, he quickly switched his allegiance to American football and adopted the Broncos as his team. He's had season tickets since the 1990s and has remained loyal even through the bad times, of which there have been plenty of late. He gets frustrated when those around him boo the happenings on the gridiron and thinks they should put their anger in perspective. "What if they lived in San Diego or St. Louis?" he asks. "Those cities don't even have [NFL] teams anymore."
His enthusiasm was an enormous influence on Bean. "When I was really young, my dad brought me to my first Broncos game," she recalls. "I'd watch Broncos games with him every Sunday. I think that's really where my love for sports was born."
She participated in sports during her formative years as well, "but in high school, I got really heavy into dance," she says. "I was on the poms team at Cherry Creek, and then I tried out for the Broncos cheerleaders; they're called cheerleaders, but everyone's mostly a dancer. At the time, you could try out when you were eighteen, so I made it straight out of high school."
Bean's initial stint with the Broncos stretched from 2005 to 2010 — the same period she attended the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder — and the pay for raising spirits on the sidelines was modest. According to Bean, "It would probably work out to a part-time job. Maybe less. But you do it for the opportunities, not the money, and it gave me opportunities that I wouldn't have been able to experience anywhere else."
Just as important, Bean was able to collaborate with women who she feels deserve much more respect than they typically receive. "It was really a beyond-impressive group," she notes. "The hours you put in to be a cheerleader are significant. You have rehearsals several days a week, charity appearances, a junior cheerleader program, and you're rehearsing on your own along with balancing a full-time job or being a full-time student — and some of the women on the team are mothers, so they're raising children on top of everything else.
"There were a lot of very ambitious, very organized women with a lot of depth, and they had skill sets far beyond just wanting to be on the field," she continues. "That was the icing on the cake in a lot of ways. They're really high achievers and push you to continue striving to reach your goals."
After five years as a Broncos cheerleader and with her CU business degree complete, Bean pulled up stakes and headed to Los Angeles. "The reason was kind of silly," she concedes. "Growing up in Denver, I always had it in my head that after college, I'd live on one of the coasts."
Over the next several years, she says, "I had a series of odd jobs — like doing marketing at a rare coin company, which was actually fascinating. But mostly it was the proverbial trying-to-find-myself thing."
What Bean eventually found was that she missed her family and Colorado. So she returned to Denver and took a sales and marketing position at Alphapage, only to realize that it wasn't a great fit, either. "I just felt unfulfilled, making cold calls and finding out if people wanted an answering service. To be honest, I'm not good at sales. Really, I'm terrible at it. And that's when I had the idea of trying out for the Broncos cheerleading team again. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I thought that if I made the team again, it would fill my soul, because I love to dance."
After training for a year, Bean auditioned for the 2015 squad — and earned a spot again at what turned out to be a great time. Not only did she get to hang out with another splendid collection of women over the next two seasons (the most famous, Gabby Windey, went from being an ICU nurse to the star of The Bachelorette in 2022), but the Broncos, with Peyton Manning as quarterback, made it to the Super Bowl, allowing her to realize one of her father's fondest dreams.
"The Broncos were gracious enough to let all of us bring a companion, and I was able to bring my dad — the person who first made me fall in love with football," she enthuses. "To share it with him was a lifetime highlight, and something I'll forever be thankful to the Broncos for. I'll never forget it."
Neither will Joe — but he can't resist sharing one of the more awkward moments from Super Bowl week. "They put us in this tiny hotel room that only had a double bed," he recalls. "I had to go and tell them: 'But she's my daughter!'"
Along the way, Bean began laying the groundwork for her media career — with a little help from radio personality Andy Lindahl.
While other Broncos cheerleaders had made the team a second time, Bean believed her five-year gap was the longest ever — and Lindahl invited her to talk about it on his radio show, which aired evenings on KOA, the flagship of the local cluster of stations then owned by Clear Channel, now known as iHeart Radio. "She did an hour, and she told her story eloquently, she knew football, and she had a great voice," he says. "She was just a natural."
Afterward, Bean expressed interest in getting into broadcasting, and Lindahl volunteered to help, in part because of assists that he'd been given. "I was an intern at KOA in the fall of ’99, and Scott Hastings was the first one to cut me a break," he recalls. "Without people like Scott and Dave Logan and Ivan Sokalsky, who ended up going to ESPN, I wouldn't be anywhere."
During the Super Bowl 50 season, "Romi was almost like my intern," Lindahl goes on. "She'd do her full-time job, then go to cheerleader practice until 9:30 or 10, and then she'd stop by and we'd go into the studio and BS for twenty minutes, just so she could get used to talking. And she was so dedicated. There were times when I was tired and wanted to go home, but when she'd show up, I didn't want to say no to her, because she'd had a longer day than I had."
When Clear Channel honchos decided to launch Denver Sports 760 in early 2016, Lindahl was asked to jump from KOA to the new signal and pair with former Broncos great Ed McCaffrey, and he requested that Bean be hired as a board op, the person responsible for the technical details of the broadcast. The position was resolutely glamour-free, but it got Bean on the payroll. Over time, she went from contributing the occasional comment during discussions to serving as the show's producer and even sitting in for McCaffrey when he had to miss a show during his son Christian's last season at Stanford, when he was a finalist for the Heisman Trophy. Christian subsequently became an NFL star, currently with the San Francisco 49ers.
The elder McCaffrey remains a big admirer of Bean. "Romi is the best!" he exclaims. "I really enjoyed working with her and Andy on a little afternoon radio show she hosted early in her career. She had star power right from the start."
Lots of listeners agreed — including an executive at CBS Colorado.
Romi Bean broadcasting Xfinity Monday Live with Mark Rycroft at the ViewHouse Centennial.
Michael Roberts
"She was working as a producer at the time, and they would periodically put her on the air," Wieland says. "I was impressed by her depth of knowledge. She just really knew her stuff. And later, they would introduce her as a periodic guest on the show, and I thought every single time she came on, she was exceptionally good."
At the time, CBS Colorado didn't have a sports expert assigned to its morning show, and Wieland had been contemplating "the idea of someone coming in a couple of days a week to talk about the Broncos," he recalls. "So I reached out to Romi and asked, 'Have you ever done TV before?' She said, 'No, not really.' But I thought, let's give it a try. We didn't put her on TV right away; we did some practice run-throughs, and she was solid right away."
The periodic Broncos reports Bean delivered grew so popular that after football season was over, she was invited to intermittently deliver info on other sports. And in 2018, when the position of weekend sports anchor opened up, Wieland considered it a "no-brainer" to offer her the position.
The invitation was thrilling, but in the weeks after accepting it, Bean felt increasingly overwhelmed. "I didn't even know the right questions to ask in the locker room," she says. "One Nuggets game I covered was the third time they'd played the other team during the season, so I went up to a player and asked what was different this time. But he hadn't been on the team earlier in the season, and he said, 'I don't know. I just got here.' So everything was a disaster, a hot mess. That's when I realized how little I knew."
Anecdotes about Bean's allegedly rough start don't connect with Wieland, who says she was very good from the first show and improved at a rapid rate. But Bean, who admits to being her own harshest critic, was certain that everyone around her was aghast. "I think all the guys in the sports office were probably thinking, 'Oh, my gosh, what have we been stuck with here?' But I took that as a challenge. I told myself, I'm going to figure this out or I'm going to be gone in a month. And slowly but surely, I learned."
As months on camera turned into years, Bean could feel herself improving. But it wasn't until the Colorado Avalanche's triumphant quest for the Stanley Cup last year that she was able to fully give herself credit. "I really only saw the bad in what I was doing up until that point," she reveals. "So that was the first time when I stopped and looked back and said, 'Wow, there's no way I could be covering a championship run like this when I started. And I'm doing it. I'm telling stories and doing it well.' That was a turning point.""I told myself, I'm going to figure this out or I'm going to be gone in a month. And slowly but surely, I learned."
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Then another door opened. Jim Benemann, who'd co-anchored CBS Colorado's evening newscasts since 2003, announced his plan to retire. To fill his shoes, Wieland and current news director Strain chose sports anchor Spencer. That raised the question of who was going to take over for Spencer, and they eventually settled on Bean — but not because of her gender, Strain insists. "Any time you're trying to make a decision like that, you want to make sure it's someone viewers will connect with," she explains. "We looked at talent all over the country, but in the end, we felt it was a much better choice to put someone in who viewers knew and liked and respected."
Indeed, Wieland thinks Bean had already silenced many of her doubters. When the two of them would attend events shortly after her arrival at the station, he remembers dudes trying to "mansplain" sports to her. But now he sees males come up to her in public and ask her opinions because they know she's more informed than they are. Some online trollage lingers, but Strain maintains that she's received no negative feedback from viewers in a flood of positive responses.
Strain and Wieland say they only realized in retrospect that Bean would be the first lead female sports anchor in Denver, but they see her elevation as significant. "I think it's sad for it to be 2023 and we're still having to have a conversation about a woman finally being able to take that role," Strain acknowledges.
Still, progress for women in sports television has been damnably slow. Since 1975, when former Miss America Phyllis George was named the co-host of CBS's NFL Today, women have all too often been placed in limited, and limiting, roles: sideline reporter, for instance, or facilitator on panel shows in which they're required to ask men for their takes but are allowed to give few of their own. Only recently has ESPN provided smart, incisive talents such as Doris Burke, Ramona Shelburne and Monica McNutt with significant showcases — and airtime parity with men is nowhere close to being accomplished.
With Bean joining news co-anchor Karen Leigh and forecaster Lauren Whitney on CBS Colorado's evening newscasts, three of the outlet's top four stars are women — another first for television in this market. For his part, Spencer couldn't be happier. "I'm surrounded by really strong, intelligent women," he says. "I don't know that there are many stations around the country with that kind of setup."
He hopes Bean's role could lead to other needed changes: "This is another step to more barriers being broken down the road."
The road ahead for the medium could be bumpy, as Lombardi knows all too well. Before signing with Altitude Sports, he was CBS Colorado's lead sports anchor, and Bean identifies him as a role model. "If I could ever be spoken of in the same way as Vic is, that would be a career goal for me," she says. But Lombardi admits that "I have no idea what TV is going to look like fifteen or twenty years from now. Who knows if there are going to be A.I.-generated sportscasters then? Every young person who gets into this, I tell them, 'Make sure you've got something else you can fall back on, because this is an uncertain business.'"
If anyone can overcome the odds, though, Lombardi thinks it's Bean. "Romi understands the work it takes to get better," he says. "Some people have this aura of if they're on TV, they're good enough. But no one's ever good enough. You've got to get better, and getting better means doing your homework and learning how to fail — and afterward, being able to say, 'Okay, I can build off of that.' She's the embodiment of learning on the job and doing it the right way."
McCaffrey echoes these observations: "She is, of course, very talented, but more importantly, she's diligent about her preparation. I have no doubt that the best is yet to come."
The show at the ViewHouse comes during what's basically a dead zone in Denver sports. The Avalanche's season ended with an early-round playoffs loss, Broncos training camp hasn't started yet, and the Nuggets are off, too, albeit still aglow from the glory of an NBA championship that only took 47 years to nab. That leaves the Colorado Rockies, who are, in a word, dreadful. As a result, Bean leads a sports segment for the 6 p.m. newscast that she delivers prior to Xfinity Monday Live not with a recap of the Rockies' loss to the San Francisco Giants the day before, but by contextualizing the shoulder injury suffered during the game by Kyle Freeland, the fourth Colorado starting pitcher to be seriously hurt since the misbegotten season got underway.
The program that follows is free-flowing and organic, with a casual, conversational structure and a cheerful lack of pretense. Midway through, Bean hands Rycroft a white-board paddle with the words "fact" and "fiction" blocked out on opposite sides for a segment in which he'll judge whether statements she floats have a reasonable chance of actually happening. But she warns him to be careful with it, since the writing was done with a dry-erase marker and will rub off on his pants.
Rycroft rolls with the feature, and everything else. He's done the show before, and his rapport with Bean is naturally funny, as when she refers to his hair as "lettuce" when encouraging him to grow a mullet as a token of good luck for the next Avs campaign.
During commercial breaks, the two continue chatting about sports, and the discussion about the acquisition of Ryan Johansen from the Nashville Predators and the boost the team will receive from the return of Josh Manson, who was injured much of last season, is at least as interesting as what's actually broadcast, even though only folks wearing headsets can hear it.
In another off-air moment, Rycroft tells Bean, "I just want to say you're doing an amazing job. Everybody's talking about it."
Predictably, Bean deflects the remark with a joke, replying, "Well, everybody makes mistakes." But a moment later, she sincerely thanks Rycroft for the compliment.
She's trying to cut herself more slack these days. Bean keeps a daily gratitude journal, and a frequent entry in a section about what would make for a great day is, "I need to feel more confident."
"I'm doing better at that," she says. "Some days are harder than others. But I'm getting better all the time."
