As Barry Bonds was chasing the all-time home run record in 2007, his relationship with ESPN was virtually nonexistent. He didn’t want to talk to the network, and the network thought he wouldn’t talk with it.

In a long line of firsts, Claire Smith changed that.

Smith — the first woman to cover a professional baseball team full time — introduced Bonds, whom she’d known since his rookie season, and anchor Erin Andrews. The two talked before the game in which Bonds would eventually break Hank Aaron’s record, and after the game, Andrews scored the coveted on-the-field interview that piped through AT&T Park in San Francisco.

Smith told the Journal-World scores of stories from a career that has spanned nearly four decades on Thursday before speaking at “The Power of Sport: A Conversation on Business, Race and Sports,” an annual event sponsored by the University of Kansas School of Business.

“It meant a lot,” Smith said on being asked to speak at the event. “I believe the difference between a job and a career is, a job you do because you need the money. A career weaves your dreams and aspirations into what you do to support yourself and earn a living.”

Before Smith spoke, University of Kansas professor Shawn Leigh Alexander spoke with panelists Darnell Valentine and Lafayette Norwood — a player and assistant coach, respectively, for KU basketball in the early 1980s — on race issues in the sport and their experiences growing up, working and playing in Wichita.

During her keynote address, Smith worked to interweave the stories of Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron with the struggles faced by athletes like Colin Kaepernick today. She also highlighted the need to add gender to the topics discussed over the course of the evening.

“Throughout my career, 36 years of covering or working for entities that cover Major League Baseball, I never had one problem that I ever saw, felt or sensed had to do with race,” she said during the event. “Time has not run out on being ignorant when it comes to being a sexist.”

The event was held in conjunction with a campuswide recognition of 50 years of women’s sports at KU. The field of sports in particular, Smith said, is still guilty of producing and contributing to gender stereotypes.

“What am I? I am a woman. One who works in a profession that still is attempting to find a big enough hammer to shatter still-standing glass ceilings and walls,” Smith said during the event. “And I cover sports institutions that are still noticeably male-dominated. Sports — like corporate America, like the entertainment industry, like journalism — sports are still guilty of keeping and producing too, too many dark and ugly secrets when it comes to gender.”

Although Smith was not the first woman to cover a professional baseball team, she was the first to do so on a full-time basis. This fact, she said, takes some of the pressure off of her in terms of being a trailblazer for female sports journalists.

“There were women, veterans, pioneers, if you will, before me,” she told the Journal-World. “It means a) I’m old, b) the fact that I’m still sort of doing what I’ve been doing since ’82 means that I’m really terrible at having fresh ideas. I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do than this.”

In a career that has covered the likes of Steve Garvey, Joe Morgan, Ken Griffey and his son and all but three World Series since 1982, Smith’s role as a journalist has stayed largely the same. She worked as a columnist for the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer and moved to ESPN as a coordinating news editor in 2007. Perhaps most notably, she was named the 68th — and first female — recipient of the J.G. Taylor Spink Award by the Baseball Writers Association of America in 2016.

But all the while, she said she’s simply worked to keep “honesty” in the game of baseball she loves so dearly.