The Passion of Jo Ann Allen

Colorado Public Radio reporter and host Jo Ann Allen adores playing golf, but—as she found out during a police confrontation—it's not a fatal attraction.

 

Jo Ann Allen

Colorado Public Radio’s Jo Ann Allen doesn’t own a car but she’s a very good driver. That is, her tee shots fly so reliably straight that her playing partners have nicknamed her “Ms. Consistency.”

The news host/reporter certainly lives up to her moniker on a glorious Friday morning at Denver’s Willis Case Golf Course. She hits nine out of nine fairways—a record of perfection tainted only by two of those fairways coming on par 3s of 108 and 125 yards.

“I need to work on my power,” the veteran journalist says after popping her first shot of the day about 80 yards towards a green 384 yards away.

A longtime tennis player whose knees started rebelling, Allen went from casual to avid golfer about 10 years ago. She has an athletic setup but a swing that suggests the two-handed forehand of Monica Seles more than the one-piece takeaway of Annika Sörenstam. Or, as she acknowledges: “My instructor said part of my problem is that I swing like I’m hitting a tennis ball.”

She’s referring to a teaching pro with whom she’d taken one lesson. “He’s not officially my teacher yet,” she says. “He did some testing and measuring of my swing. He said, ‘Once you get your swing faster, we’ll start doing lessons.’ I don’t blame him. He wants to work with people he knows are serious, not somebody who doesn’t want to practice. I’m like, ‘Don’t worry, dude. I practice.’ I have no problem practicing. It’s something I enjoy.”

Allen, who lives near the University of Denver, enjoys practicing so much that at least twice a week she’ll head to Overland or Wellshire to hit a bucket of balls—or to the par-3 at Harvard Gulch to hone her short game. Cold weather clearly doesn’t deter the Mobile, Ala. native’s commitment to improving. “I like the water range at Wellshire when it freezes over,” she says. “The ball makes this odd whirring sound when it hits the ice and it just goes. I’m hitting 200-yard drives!”

Jo Ann Allen driving
Allen drives another ball straight down the middle (Photograph by E.J. Carr)

Twenty-four years of living in New York made Allen an apostle of public transportation, so she either takes RTD or Uber everywhere, often with a shoulder-strap carrier containing three or four clubs she needs to work on.

Last September 20, however, this ritual nearly got her shot. She planned on practicing after work, so she and her clubs rode the E line from DU. She got off at the Dry Creek stop and headed towards CPR’s Bridges Broadcast Center on South Alton Way.

She was cutting through a 7-11 parking lot when she heard someone shout, “Sir, drop the rifle!” Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Deputy Tom Finley, who had been in the convenience store, was responding to a report, based on a 911 call, from the Arapahoe County Dispatcher of a “black man, black in dress, carrying a rifle” in the area.

“I slowly turned, threw the golf clubs away from my body with my left hand, and held out my arms, and said, ‘They’re golf clubs. They’re golf clubs,’” she remembers.

Finley slowly approached her, and seeing the golf clubs, he took his hand off his gun and immediately apologized for challenging her. “When we get a call like this,” he said, “we have to respond.”

In light of recent encounters between African-Americans and law enforcement that had ended fatally, Allen and Finley went on-air a few weeks later to recount their story. Each commended the other’s handling of the situation, addressing the “what-ifs” that could have resulted in a tragedy.

“I totally understood why I was stopped,” she said. The carrying case “looks like a gun. I can totally see that.” For his part, Finley admitted to feeling nervous but not threatened, “because if you’re out of control yourself, you’re going to do more harm than good.”

Looking back on the situation, Allen says, “Luckily for me, the deputy was a pretty good mind in terms of being cool about it. I probably would have been dead today if it had been some cops running up on me in a car like they did to Tamir Rice in Cleveland because they don’t give you a chance to say anything.”

Allen wanted to talk to him on-air because, she says, “I knew it would be devastating for him if he had acted inappropriately, or even if he had needed to shoot for some weird reason. It would have probably ruined his life. I wanted to see how he was reacting. His humanity came through to me.”

She adds, “If I had seen someone—I don’t care what color they were—walking down the street with what looked like a gun, especially near a convenience store, I would have called 911.”

When the story appeared on-air and online, Allen says she had friends who “were pissed off. I said, ‘No, you’re getting it wrong. If I had been shot, then you can be pissed off. But this turned out fine, with a very fine police officer.”

During her police encounter, Allen says she immediately thought of her father, Willie B. Allen, who still lives in Mobile and celebrated his 102nd birthday in April. “I just couldn’t imagine him getting the news I’d been shot,” she says. “I’m the youngest of seven. The oldest, my sister, died many years ago. It would be devastating for him to lose his oldest and youngest daughters.”

Jo Ann Allen and Tom FInley
Allen and Arapahoe Sheriff’s Deputy Tom Finley in the CPR studio discussing the provocative “rifle.” (Photograph by Hart Van Denburg/Courtesy Colorado Public Radio)

Allen grew up in a tight-knit Catholic family in Mobile. She studied classical piano, sang in chorus and enjoyed all sports, but as a fifth-grader “for some reason I had an interest in golf,” she says. “This was the Sixties. Back then, for a black family… ‘Golf? Really? Where’s the country club we’re going to take you to learn?’”

A priest in her parish heard of her interest, and took her out for her first lesson using his 7-iron. “But then my mom thought it wasn’t appropriate for a priest to be taking a little girl alone to a golf course. She forbade me from going again, so the priest loaned me the 7-iron. It just stood in my bedroom for a while. I’d swing with it. Eventually I gave it back to the priest. But I always wanted to get back into golf.”

After attending Mobile’s Bishop Toolen High School, at the “strong—and I mean strong” suggestion of her parents, she enrolled in Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, a tiny liberal arts school in the Dominican Catholic tradition.

“It wasn’t as Catholic as you’d expect,” Allen laughs now. “I mean, we even smoked in class. Can you imagine that?”

Edgewood didn’t have a journalism department, so the aspiring newspaperwoman took those classes at the University of Wisconsin. After graduation, for two years she covered media for The Capital Times. At the conclusion of one interview with Wisconsin Public Radio’s new GM Jack Mitchell, he asked if he could ask her a question.

“I figured he wanted to know when the story was running,” she remembers. Instead, “He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Will you come work for me?’”

She loved print, but also remembered a soliloquy she’d given during a college drama class, after which her teacher from the back of a darkened theater said, “You should do something with that voice.”

Allen in-studio
Allen in-studio at CPR’s Bridges Broadcast Center (Photograph by Hart Van Denburg/Colorado Public Radio)

So she took the radio job. Four years later, she left for New York, where she would spend 18 of her 24 years there at WNYC. She also taught at Long Island University in Brooklyn and calls Lincoln Center her happy place. Puccini’s Turandot is her top opera, and her favorite aria is “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix” from Saint-Saën’s Samson et Dalila—particularly as performed by the Latvian mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca.

During those days she got back into golf, playing mostly at Pelham Bay Golf Course in the Bronx, where she came the closest she has ever come to acing a hole.

“I thought it was in, I was so excited,” she says. “I drove the cart up to the green, looking at it the whole way, and tried getting out of the cart before it stopped. I caught my spike, fell and shredded my knee on the gravel path. I tore my meniscus, but I didn’t feel a thing, because the ball was on the edge of the cup, and I wanted to make that birdie putt. This tells you how much I enjoy this sport!”

Jo Ann Allen sinks putt
Allen after sinking a par putt on the eighth hole at Willis Case. (Photograph by E.J. Carr)

Two years at KPBS radio in San Diego bought her another two years of writing screenplays, one of which “Never Speak My Name” was a finalist in the prestigious One-in-Ten Screenplay Contest. When the money got tight, she tried selling insurance, but soon found herself applying for—and getting—a job doing “Morning Edition” at WHYY in Philadelphia. After four years, she burned out on the early shift and returned to writing screenplays. By 2015, she’d arrived in Denver as part of a CPR staff expansion.

Allen’s work golf buddies include “Engineer Judy Banstra, Arts Reporter Corey Jones, General Assignment Reporter Sam Brasch and General Assignment Reporter/Weekend Host Vic Vella.” And yes, she uses their titles before their names.

“I always tell people, if you’re super-serious about golf, I don’t want to play with you. I just like being outside. The sunshine. The camaraderie. People in Denver are nice, but they’re super-nice on the golf course compared to what I’ve experienced in New York or even in California, where folks are just not that patient or willing to cut you some slack when you’re a below-average player like me.”

Her favorite playing partner lives in Sierra Vista, Arizona—her brother Fred, a retired U.S. Army sergeant. “We’ve always been competitive, so we keep score, but we don’t bet or anything like that,” he says. “I try to give her tips about not lifting her head and following through. I noticed a lot of improvement in her game when we played last year.”

By the eighth hole at Willis Case, Allen has found her groove. Thanks to some deft shotmaking with her hybrid, she’s on the green of the 260- yard par 4 in three, with a ten-foot right-to-left breaker for par. I’m away, and after going to school on my putt, she drains hers and lets out a well-earned whoop.

Allen’s clearly pumped to play and improve. With more shoulder turn and swing speed, she’ll soon be launching her shots onto the green in fewer strokes. She’s already made one potentially shot-saving change in her practice routine. She no longer draws her clubs from a holster.

 

Jon Rizzi is the editor of Colorado AvidGolfer. To hear the interview with Jo Ann Allen and Officer Tom Finley, visit cpr.org. This story appears in the June 2017 issue of the magazine.

 

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