She's hired?
Angela Ruggiero, the Panorama City native and former Simi Valley resident last seen helping the U.S. women's Olympic hockey team to a bronze medal at the Turin Olympics, expects to hear any day now from Donald Trump. Why?
Ruggiero is one of 12 Olympic athletes who agreed to a public online vote to see if they'd be picked as a contestant for the sixth season of "The Apprentice," which will be taped in Los Angeles for the first time. NBC announced the other day that the reality show won't air as scheduled this fall, but be pushed back to January, 2007, and air on Sunday nights (9 p.m.) following the network's Sunday Night Football telecasts.
The last posting on Ruggiero's Website in early May said the announcement should be coming "later this month." The voting was to have ended in late February, but no announcement was ever made about who won ... is there a fix?
Other Winter Olympic athletes in the mix are short track skater Allison Baver, freestyle skiiers Travis Cabral, Joe Pack and Speedy Peterson, speed skaters Chris Witty, Casey FitzRandolph and Chad Hedrick, bob sledder Todd Hays, snowboarders Danny Kass and Seth Wescott and skeleton's Katie Uhlaender.
Meanwhile, the 26-year-old Ruggiero told David Nielsen in a story he wrote for of the Scripps Howard News Service that one of her options is returning to Harvard to get her MBA, and possibly working toward playing in the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver.
"I'm taking it year by year now," said Ruggiero, who won gold at the 1998 Games and silver at the 2002 Games. "Obviously, I love hockey and it's something I have a passion for. There isn't much in terms of support when you graduate from a university as a women's hockey player. There's not much to do outside of moving to Canada to keep training. You have to train on your own, and support yourself. I've tried working fulltime and training fulltime and it's next to impossible.
"Right now I'm trying to figure out what the right fit would be so I can continue to have that dream to win another gold medal."
For more on Ruggiero's background as a ground-breaking Southern California hockey girl, track down her autobiography, "Breaking the Ice" (Drummond Publishing, 224 pages).
Comments
Hey...
I was just waiting for the "warm up" light dot to expand from the middle of the screen on my Admiral Console TV, when I happened across this BLOG.
I like your writing... but how come there are never any postings about the hidden media... UHF?
I think you media critics are so "inside baseball" that you are crowding out the well deserved coverage of this... the first true Entertainment Sport Program Network.
So... please... find a good pair of pliers, turn to channel 57... and write something.
Posted by: Pedro Morales | May 24, 2006 01:19 PM